Baltimore City students created their own Maryland “Freedom” Board of Education in frustration over a state board of education that, they say, refuses to comply with a decade-old court decision calling for greater funding for city schools.

“This is about civil rights — if you don’t have the same adequate public education in the city that you have out in the counties — that’s inequality right there, ” said Michelle Shropshire, 20, a Baltimore Polytechnic Institute graduate who is attending the College of Notre Dame.

“This system, the courts have ruled, has been chronically underfunded for years. It doesn’t make sense when state officials make comparisons between the amount of money city students receive to those in other places. The needs here are greater,” she said.

Hundreds of protesters, led by the student-run Algebra Project, rallied at the Green Mount Cemetery on Saturday afternoon and later convened the first 13-member Freedom Board at the Seventh Baptist Church on North Avenue and St. Paul Street.

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The Algebra Project students, current high school students or recent city graduates now in college, were inspired by the famous Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

After blacks in Mississippi spent years struggling for equality in the state’s Democratic party, they created their own party, seeking recognition at the 1964 Democratic Convention.

The Freedom Board’s first three resolutions included a letter to the gubernatorial candidates, Republican Robert Ehrlich Jr., Democrat Martin O’Malley and the Green Party’s Ed Boyd, demanding $1.08 billion the students say the Baltimore Public School System is owed based on Judge Joseph Kaplan’s rulings in Bradford v. Maryland State Board of Education over the past 10 years.

They addressed a budget proposal for spending the funds, and also requested the suspension of 50 students Friday at a sit-in at Baltimore Freedom Academy high school — in show of solidarity with the new board — be rescinded.

“This board will serve as the primary commissioners on Education for the State of Maryland, for the purpose of complying with Circuit Court orders in Bradford v. Maryland State Department of Education,” Freedom board chairman Chris Goodman, a 2006 City College high graduate headed to the University of Maryland, wrote to Ehrlich, O’Malley and Boyd.

rcassie@baltimoreexaminer.com