In January, the story of Ohio mom, Kelley Williams-Bolar.
Bolar was arrested for “records falsification,” tried, convicted, and
sentenced to nine days in prison for sending her two daughters to school
in a more affluent district outside of Akron where she resided. In
July, in a move that defies reason, a parole board denied her request
for clemency. Their decision amounted to an especial form of cruel and
unusual punishment because prior to her conviction, Ms. Williams-Bolar
had returned to college to complete required coursework to become a
teacher for special needs children. With a felony conviction on her
record, funding for college and a teaching job would be impossible to
obtain. Ohio Governor John Kasich disagreed with the parole board and granted Williams-Bolar clemency earlier this week.
The result is that her felony convictions have been reduced to
misdemeanors, and she will be able to pursue her education and her
dreams of becoming an educator. The violence, humiliation, an undue
hardship that she has had to endure at the hands of our mostly flawed
criminal justice system is not lost on us. Indeed these narratives of
bad Black mothering coupled with a belief in Black criminality continue
to endanger the life chances of Black people, particularly women and
children. We need a new conversation about public education in this
country, one that pivots upon a fundamental restructuring of the ways
schools are funded. Property ownership has long been used to
disfranchise Black folk, and now property taxes have become another way
to structurally discriminate against the poor, who are
disproportionately Black and Brown. This must change. For while Ms.
Williams-Bolar has now been given “a second chance,” according to Kasich
<and he gets the serious side eye for the condescending and
sanctimonious language>, her daughters have been forced to return to
subpar Akron schools. Williams-Bolar’s reprieve, then, is a small
victory and certainly worthy of celebration, but the battle for equal
education and opportunity is far from won.

http://crunkfeministcollective.wordpress.com/2011/09/08/update-justice-for-kelley-williams-bolar/