Asbury Park Press from Asbury Park, New Jersey • AA2

2AA SUNDAY, MAY 27, 2018 ASBURY PARK PRESS YOUR VIEWS OUR VIEW Opinion After years of doing nothing to ad- dress New de facto school segre- gation, a coalition of civil rights groups is forcing the hand by taking it to court. The lawsuit comes at a time when segregation in New Jersey's schools is actually more prevalent today than it was 15 years ago. nothing short of disgraceful that New Jersey, with its richly diverse pop- ulation, has the sixth-most-segregated schools for blacks and seventh-most segregated schools for Latinos in the na- tion. In response to the lawsuit, a spokes- man for Gov. Phil Murphy said the gover- nor supports the goals of the litigation.

That goal is to stop assigning students, including those attending charter schools, solely on the basis of municipal boundaries. The question is whether Murphy and the Legislature have the will to alter the status quo, or whether they will instead choose to let things play out in the courts. We hope it's the former. The lawsuit contends that segregation harms all students, includ- ing white students, by creating homoge- neous learning and social environ- ments." It says that black and Latino stu- dents who attend racially and socioeco- nomically diverse schools are more likely to achieve higher test scores and grades and to graduate from high school and college. The lawsuit suggests three remedies: 1 Interdistrict desegregation plans that allow black and Latino students to choose to attend schools outside their district of residency.

2 Interdistrict enrollment in themed magnet schools, which often focus on specialized areas of learning. 3 controlled in which students would rank their pre- ferred schools and a coordinating entity would assign them based on their pref- erences and the larger goal of achieving diverse classrooms. All three make sense, which is not to say that the path to achieving them will be easy. One other possibility for desegregat- ing schools not cited in the lawsuit is in- tegration through school consolidation. A legislative task force working on ways to reform New tax structure is likely to include some form of consolida- tion as one of its recommendations.

That could help. Although school segregation is pro- hibited in New Jersey, nearly half of black and Latino students attend schools that are more than 90 percent non-white. A November study by the UCLA Civil Rights Project found that more than 25 percent of the black students attended schools where less than 1 percent of students were white, and the number of Hispanic students who attended segregated schools had doubled since 1989. Ryan Haygood, president of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, said his wife has never had a white student in more than 20 years as a teacher in three Newark public schools. The lawsuit says segregation in New schools is a result of residential segregation, having school districts be largely contiguous with municipal boundaries and state laws assigning stu- dents to schools based on residency.

segregation in New Jer- sey the of decades of exclusionary zoning by suburban mu- nicipalities throughout New Jersey and the high correlation between race and socioeconomic the lawsuit states. in the lawsuit, which in- clude Latino Action Network, the NAACP New Jersey State Conference, the Latino Coalition, Urban League of Essex County, the United Methodist Church of Greater New Jersey, have ex- pressed that the lawsuit will succeed, citing a number of legal prece- dents challenging de facto segregation. Murphy and the Legislature shouldn't wait for the lawsuit to order the state to act. They should take long-overdue steps to do the right thing and address the is- sue themselves. Reverse NJ school resegregation Linda Smith (the former Linda Brown) stands in front of the Sumner School in Topeka, Kansas, on May 8, 1964.

The refusal of the public school to admit Brown in 1951, then age 9, because she is black led to the Brown v. Board of Education court case. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled the but clause. She died in March at age 76.

AP Tell us what you think E-mail us: Write to us: Letters to the editor, Asbury Park Press, 3600 Highway 66,, Neptune, NJ 07754 Call us: Randy Bergmann, editorial page editor, 732-643-4034. Kristi- na Cowart, letters inquiries, 732- 643-4206. Letters must include full name and address and phone number for verification. Please keep let- ters to 250 words maximum. (Ex- ceptions to length will be made at discretion.) All letters are subject to editing or rejection.

Letters to the editors and other opinion pieces submitted to the Press may be published or distrib- uted in print, electronic or other forms. Enforce New law on license plates, or scrap it Apparently, I receive the memo. Maybe you did. As I drive these days I help but see three, four, maybe even cars driving by with no front New Jersey license plate in the span of 10 min- utes. No, they from Delaware or Pennsylvania.

a New Jersey plate on the back. The must have said it is no longer required. At the very least, based on all the cars I see now, you can safely say the police are not enforcing it. They have way too much on their to worry about your plates. Too bad, be- cause it could add a lot of revenue to any town who needs it.

Call it license plate envy or some- thing. You see it in all the nice car com- mercials. They show no front plate, and face it, the cars look much better without it. But the cars I see without them are not all new. older model trucks and economy cars too.

Not just the expensive luxury models. But call me old fashioned. I follow the law. And I think that anyone who is driv- ing without a plate must feel the law apply to them. It would be an easy one to if the state wanted to.

Raise the penalty for and repeat vio- lations. Or get rid of it altogether. Tom Jones Toms River Legal pot in New Jersey would hurt Shore tourism As mayor of Point Pleasant Beach, I am writing in response to Mike recent report on marijuana tourism in Colorado, marijuana legalization: Colorado tourism exploded with legal weed. Is NJ tourism According to Davis, of the cannabis industry have long dreamed of making New Jersey the East Coast ver- sion of The article goes on to describe a pot den called iBake Denver, where tourists can walk in and get high for as little as $3 a visit. Tourism is one of New big- gest industries, generating $38.7 billion of state gross domestic product in 2017 and accounting for $45.4 billion in eco- nomic impact.

Known as a family- friendly destination with world-class beaches, do we really want out-of-town tourists coming to New Jersey to get high? Families vacationing at the Jersey shore deserve to smell the scent of weed wafting down the boardwalk when walking with their kids. And we have to worry about out-of- town tourists getting high at a facility like iBake and then driving under the ence of marijuana on our roadways. For all of the reasons listed above and many more, Point Pleasant Beach cials in December passed an ordinance to ban the sale of marijuana in our town. And many other municipalities through- out the state including Gov. Phil Mur- hometown of Middletown are following our lead to preserve the char- acter of their communities and protect their families.

With 130 miles of the best beaches on the East Coast, New Jersey need marijuana shops and pot dens littering our coast. Make no mistake: the Jersey Shore will a loss in tourism if rec- reational marijuana is legalized and commercialized. Stephen Reid Mayor, Point Pleasant Beach cited in Constitution akin to National Guard I agree with the May 24 letter Amendment reali- I also note that appears elsewhere in the U.S. Constitution. I doubt the founding fathers felt compelled to address a topical concern given the status of our very young na- armed forces.

Call it another interpretation if you like, but I help think means what is now the National Guard of the United States. So right of the people to keep and bear for that purpose I can fully understand and support. John C. Fraraccio Brick proposed gag rule on abortions must be stopped I join with more than 200 members of Congress and 100 national health-care organizations and all health- care doctors who are protesting the Trump plan for a wom- health care gag rule. The move would revive a policy implemented by Ronald Reagan in 1988, which barred reproductive health organizations that received feder- al grants from providing or even discuss- ing abortion with patients.

Women of all ages and cir- cumstances need access to complete health care. Trump must not prevent any options to maintain the best care for health. If a president can gag doctors and clinics, he is preventing the options of the best medical care. Therefore the gag would remove a right to health care which might save her life. The gag rule would prevent her basic rights as a female human.

Act now to preserve health-care for women. Contact your member of Con- gress now to stop this terrible plan to gag us. Liz Spellman Dean Red Bank ing a trip to Trenton to explain what in fact was good medical judgment. At the same time, the federal gov- ernment began a program of payment to physicians and hospitals based upon patient satisfaction with their care (HCAHPS). One of the domains measured was well was your pain Poor performance in this domain led to reductions in total Medicare payments to the hospital of up to 2.5 percent.

As a result, opioids were sometimes overprescribed. Added to this burden on physicians was the advent of social media, where an drug seeker could anon- ymously ruin a or hospi- reputation on the internet, often with no recourse available to the ma- ligned physician to respond. This year, the federal government has removed pain control as a domain after recog- The May 24 letter AMA deserve most of the blame for opioid cannot go unchallenged. While there is evidence that some physicians misused their license to become ped- dlers of addiction, there is a govern- mental role that was instrumental in causing the problem and which is be- ing repeated. In the early 1980s, New Jersey de- cided that was the vital and that every patient the right to be pain Drug-seeking pa- tients could demand narcotics from their physician far in excess of their ac- tual need, and when denied, wrote to the Board of Medical Examiners com- plaining about their cian who refused to ade- quately their The board would then write to the physician de- manding an explanation, often requir- nizing it was the poster child for the of unintended Now, deep into this ongoing trage- dy, Gov.

Phil Murphy wants to make recreational marijuana legal. Ask the county prosecutor how many drug abusers started with marijuana as a gateway drug. He answer be- cause it is currently politically incor- rect. Read the the recent articles in peer-reviewed medical journals re- garding the of marijuana on the developing brain. It is not an we should desire for our youth.

The move to legalize a drug in order to gain tax revenue is another legisla- tive intrusion, making a uninformed medical decision which will end badly. We need greater availability of mental health resources to treat this scourge, not more blame or more drugs. Dr. Theodore Zaleski Brick Government policies mostly to blame for opioid epidemic.