Word: briarcrest
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This month Briarcrest will win an even more significant victory: it will be fully accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, important recognition that most institutions receive only after an arduous application process that usually consumes four or five years. What Briarcrest lacks, however, is blacks. All of its 1,432 students and 69 faculty and staff members are white...
Many of the new private schools, like Briarcrest, insist that they have "open" admissions and are segregated only because no blacks have applied. But they concede that white hostility to desegregation accounts for much of their growth. "We've got parents who are running from problems," says Wayne Allen, a Baptist minister who is chairman of the Briarcrest board of trustees. "Anyone who says different is not telling the truth...
Private-academy tuition ranges from $200 to $2,000 a year and provides a wide range of educational quality. In rural areas most of the schools are housed in church basements, barns and abandoned warehouses; few have certified teachers. In cities, a handful, such as Briarcrest, have facilities and faculties that are the envy of public school administrators...
Loosening Standards. What they all have in common is strict, paddle-wielding discipline (a Briarcrest assistant principal paddles half a dozen students each month) and a "back-to-basics" approach to teaching, often laced with a strong dose of fundamentalist Christianity. Charlotte's Queen City Christian Academy (enrollment: 50) was founded by parents who objected to sex education courses in the public schools. Other Southern parents say they are enrolling their children in academies because they are as upset by a loosening of academic standards and a lack of discipline in the public schools as they are about race...
Even if the private academies open their doors to blacks, few black families have the money to afford them or the inclination to send their children to schools where they are not wanted. As one 17-year-old student at Briarcrest put it, "I left the public schools to get away from blacks. If they came here, I don't think they would be welcome...