ABSTRACT
During the 1980-81 school year, the Medgar Evers’ School had 454 students in kindergarten through the fourth grade, and ten prekindergarten classes with approximately 15 in each. Almost half of the kindergarten through fourth students, 239 children, were enrolled in either the kindergarten or “adjusted kindergarten”. Teachers at Evers in 1981 related their highly structured teaching approach and/or the use of firm discipline, including paddling, to their understanding of the socialization that their students have experienced outside of school. Parents expressed their concern over the closing of another Black school. The city had already established a plan to close ten elementary schools as a way of dealing both with disproportionate racial population of some of its schools, and the underutilization of facilities caused by declining school enrollments. The lack of teacher involvement in the Parent Room demonstrates a significant change in the role of the teacher at Evers from what it had been in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
