Ned Irons:
My senior exit essay is about the resegregation of public schools and neighborhood schools. There's been a proposal in Charlotte for, not necessarily in neighborhood schools, but for Charlotte to be divided up into a certain number of quadrants, and within your quadrant being able to select the school that you go to. My paper isn't directly towards that, but it's more of an issue of there's a big outcry for neighborhood schools in Charlotte. It kind of worried me because I thought I've been to predominantly white schools in Charlotte, and I've been to predominantly black schools in Charlotte, and predominantly white schools generally have more of an advantage in educational resources.

So I looked into it. I found that if Charlotte was to go directly to neighborhood schools that nine schools would be out of racial balance which is between twenty-five and fifty percent black population. Seven of those schools would have over, I think, sixty percent white population, three of those having over eighty or something. And then two schools would have over eighty percent black population. What I really found was that in terms of economic backing to have neighborhood schools provides an inequitable situation for kids that would go to predominantly black neighborhood schools and kids that would go to predominantly white neighborhood schools, in terms of their opportunity to receive an education. Of course, that all goes back to Brown vs Board of Education where basically it was found that separated schools don't work. You can't have white schools and black schools because of equity of opportunity for education. Basically my thesis is that neighborhood schools are unconstitutional.

- Ned Irons, West Charlotte High School, Class of 1999

Interview with Ned Irons by Pamela Grundy, March 16, 1999, Interview K-0170, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Full text of interview.