This is an opinion column.

Here we go again, Alabama.

I went to Banks High School in Birmingham. It was famous for football in its day.

Johnny Musso. Jeff Rutledge. A kid named Jimmy Haywood as smooth as anyone I ever saw.

In 1977, the year before I started as a freshman, 239 kids graduated as seniors, according to the Banks yearbook, “Contrails.”

Nine out of every 10 of them were white.

By the time I graduated in 1981 my senior class was 66% white.

By 1984, the kids who were freshmen when I was a senior graduated in a class that was 56% white.

Three years after that, in 1987, the senior class was 37% white.

You see where I’m going. You see how it went.

Two years later the Birmingham School Board turned Banks into a middle school. It later closed, though the name has since been adopted by a private academy.

It is the story of schools all over the South.

It took Birmingham, a place synonymous with civil rights struggles, twenty years after Brown v. Board of Education to really integrate its schools. It took less time than that to resegregate.

There was white flight in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and Black flight since. A school system that was 70,000 strong when George Wallace shouted – predicted, as it turned out – “segregation forever” has lost 71% of its enrollment in the time since. Birmingham City Schools are about 1% white now.

It’s not just Birmingham. School systems in Montgomery, Huntsville and Mobile – though different in many ways – are all majority minority, according to U.S. News education reports.

And the state itself is now on that precipice.

White kids make up just 51% of public school students, while 32% are Black and 11% Hispanic, according to the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama. As that group put it in January, “this year’s enrollment continues a long-term trend. In 2000, 62% of students were white, and the percentage of Hispanic students barely registered.”

And here we go again.

Because flight has a new name, a new engine: School choice.

Gov. Kay Ivey and assorted lawmakers last week unveiled a bill that will designate $100 million in state money to pull from the public schools and hand it – in increments of up to $7,000 in tax credits per student – to those who would like to fly.

Details about how it would all go down are hard to come by, but students would be given some variety of education savings accounts, or ESAs, to help them leave their local public school.

To go to religious schools.

To private schools.

To schools that might seem better than those left behind, but have no way to prove it.

Alabama leaders want to take your money and hand it – separation of church and state be damned – to church schools and other institutions that don’t have to follow state standards, that don’t have to take the same standardized tests, that are almost impossible to compare to public schools.

The University of Alabama’s Institute for Social Science Research has studied results from students in from the Alabama Accountability Act program that allowed scholarships for children in failing schools to attend a private school.

It was no panacea.

Generally, scholarship students didn’t perform as well as students in the U.S. taking the same test, the UA group wrote. To be fair, Alabama public school students as a whole struggle to do well nationally.

It went on to say – again cautioning that these groups are almost impossible to compare because of differing curricula and tests – that “students in the scholarship program for years did not show consistent improvement.”

If we rush to pay students $100 million – to start, and it is sure to rise – to leave the public schools, we don’t guarantee their academic success. But we do leave many others behind.

Arizona’s school choice program has left the public school budgets with a gaping wound. Florida is suffering as well, according to the Florida Policy Institute, with the most dire predictions claiming billions could be diverted from public to private schools in the coming year.

Perhaps these programs can help some people, regardless of race, find better, more fitting schools and better options.

But they give families permission and money to flee. They are jet fuel for flight from the schools and systems that need support and conscientious parents the most. When we pour money into the exodus, we take it away from schools, communities, cities and the students that need it most.

You can’t run forever.

John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner at AL.com.