Mayor Continues Social Battle With NAACP, School Board Chairman

Continuing, Mayor Tom Tomzak took his social activism a step further by calling out School Board Chairman Jarvis Bailey and lambasting cliques that he says are fine with the status quo.

Tomzak's speech Tuesday night during the City Council meeting went on for almost 20 minutes. At times he rambled through thoughts, while also coming across as genuinely upset about a social gap that he deals with regularly as a local doctor. Last week's arrest of a mother for marijuana possession while her 3-week-old baby was in the house was the impetus for Tomzak to bring up the subject again, while also challenging Bailey to "once and for all justify the cost of that central office" for the school system.

Below is a transcript of Tomzak's speech (The transcript may not include every word because at times it was difficult to hear every word the mayor said):

For years I have been working trying to form coalitions, trying to seek cooperation from the faith-based community, school-based communities and the department of social services and I have been unsuccessful, and I readily admit that a part of this lack of success was due to my inability to provide the proper leadership. However, recent events have really taught me and solidified my thinking that the barriers of social injustice of children of poverty in this city is due to a real small group of political activists. I have tried to approach the subject of adolescent pregnancy.

Before I go into that, 50-percent of our children in the school are on the school lunch program. I brought this up and asked the question and when you ask questions to the school system you get answers like "the teachers don't get paid for overtime" or "they have to buy classroom goods" and all this stuff, which doesn't seem to be fair. But the answer to the 50 percent of children in the school lunch program was 'these children need a warm meal,' and it was an answer from the heart, and I appreciate that, but the question why is it 50 percent in this city? Some of these children in poverty are due to a real true organic problem— a sickness in the household, some are due to credible bad luck, some are due to the current economy, but when I checked back when the unemployment rate was 1 percent here, the school lunch program was 45 percent of the children. So, we have all these children living in poverty in the city and over the years I have tried to identify the causes of bad decisions and irresponsibility. So, I approached the subject of adolescent pregnancy, and the initial response was that abstinence doesn't work, without even taking time to study that it was a holistic approach to young, emotionally impoverished girls. And now the school board central office and apparently the Fredericksburg Education Association has washed their hands of this because they do not get pregnant in school, and that's true.

I tried to do something through the department of social services by trying to get a letter to the school board so that we could talk about the issue of real responsibility, and the Department of Social Services Board, not the administration, determined we don't want to stick our necks out. So, meantime, we have more children going into situations of poverty based on bad decisions and irresponsibility, this little 3-week-old baby, now I do hope that mother turns her life around, but if she doesn't, what about that kid? And this happens over and over again, and nobody seems to take responsibility for it, and I hear the schools can't do everything, well I agree with that, but that's where the kids are and that's where 33 cents of every tax dollar goes.

So, being frustrated, I actually did two things. The first was the Martin Luther King statement that I made about how it would be nice if the NAACP in 2012 would step up to the plate and talk about the social injustices done to the children in this community by male irresponsibility. Secondly, I had the pleasure of attending a school board meeting, which some of you have heard about, and Dr. Melton is planning two more parenting programs, one is on study habits, which is good, but then one for African American parenting. Now, I talked to a lot of friends who are African Americans about their children and I said 'what's different?' and they said, 'No, they are the same obnoxious kids that everyone has.'

 So, I was puzzled by that, so I asked the chairman of the school board Jarvis Bailey, 'what about teaching African American parents how to teach?' and he said 'why not African Americans?'

That was the answer to the mayor of Fredericksburg from the school board chairman who is committing the assets. Then the Martin Luther King Day thing, I got some responses from that. One was from the president of the Spotsylvania NAACP in an oped piece, and he said, and it was a very nice article, that it wasn't that the NAACP isn't concerned of social injustice. Well, 50 percent of kids on the school lunch program in poverty is a social injustice in 2012, but it's his program. Then he made the point that the NAACP is not political, and i said 'that's fine, it's Spotsylvania and that's the way it goes.' Then there was the reaction from the Fredericksburg NAACP and I could best characterize some of the statements as "sad," but what was even not so much sad as pathetic is the reaction of political activists in the city who did not understand what that statement was all about and how inappropriate  that statement was.

So, I determined that after all these years of trying to reverse social injustice resulting from male irresponsibility and bad decisions from adolescence, that there is a political clique, if you will, that actually I think has a vested political and I think a vested financial interest in the political status quo. If anybody is alarmed by these words, I recommend they Google the word "therapeutic alienation" and read a book on how to win the race. This was written some time ago, but I am going to find the cost of family fragmentation and male irresponsibility and it is going to be published.

I've come from this issue as a humanity person, I am worried about the health, but we have real financial interest of the millions of dollars that it is going to take to sustain this irresponsible behavior. No. 1 that means our grandkids are going to be paying for it and No. 2, those tax dollars are drying up, but the end isn't drying up unless we start doing something about it. So, we are not going to do anything at all unless we develop a coalition of people who really care and aren't afraid to stand up to a political clique, and I am not afraid to stand up to a political clique because all they can do is call me names, but the children of this community are more of a concern to me than political egos.  I challenged school chairman Jarvis Bailey No. 1, justify the African American special program for parenting ... but the other thing is why in this dang age and in the demographics of this community do we have a program for African American parenting but not for the parenting of women for all ethnicities. And the answer from the central office was 'we don't know anyone who is qualified to give this' and well I am sure they don't in the central office, but in my work there are a lot of qualified people who can do this and there are a lot of women out there who need help on how to raise daughters in an environment where the role models that men go by too often because of family fragmentation and male irresponsibility are of athletes, movie stars and musicians, and what a group of role models.

So, they want to protect their children, they want to strengthen their children, they want to work on their self esteem, so I hope three other council members would verbally back me up to Chairman Bailey and ask him to please put the parenting of women—and those mothers who don't need the additional studies don't have to go there. This is not an indictment of single woman; single women can raise children very well. But the statistics of 70 percent of children coming from certain homes end up in poverty is what we have to start dealing with, not individual egos. That little 3-week-old that was removed by child protective services, I hope everything turns around, but there are all sorts of children out there and they are protected by a reactionary political philosophy that, No. 1, you can't do anything about the woman who was victimizing that child because she was a woman, and then if that child happens to be black, then there is another reason you can't interfere with that because there are two minorities that are standing in the way.

I also challenge Chairman Bailey to once and for all publicly justify the cost of the central office of nearly a million dollars. The City Council beats up every budget time on the city staff. We want to get consultants in to make sure the city is running efficiently and all that, and there is nothing wrong with that, yet 33-percent of our budget goes to the schools and maybe it should be 35 percent or 40 percent,  I don't know, but I have never seen any justification from a very, very closed system. You ask the school board member why the central office is so expensive and the answer is 'because teachers have to buy supplies.' Well, that's the answer; I know it doesn't make sense. They don't answer the question. The cost of that central office has never been justified, the number of positions has never been justified. So, when we meet with the school board this year, I would ask Chairman Bailey No. 1 to try and develop some sensitivity to poor women in this city and No. 2 justify the cost of that central office, and I would be glad to make a motion that we would pay for an efficiency study of that school system. And we would need that long before we would need to spend $75,000 to study the workings of the lean and mean city administration. So, again, 50-percent of the kids of this city live in poverty. It is a very expensive proposition, it is not sustainable, the citizens of these children and the citizens of Fredericksburg need some sort of place where this can be discussed. It is not the school system, it is not the department of social services— and those are two natural places I would think. So, we are going to ignore it or we are going to have to get some leadership from the business community or the City Council on this issue.