Stephanie Lee has a huge article in yesterday's Albany Times-Union about possible racism in the Hudson school system. In the wake of student fights and assistant principal disputes at school board meetings, Lee largely sticks with Michael Moore, who has a son in the Hudson schools and regularly attends and speaks at school board meetings. In 2008, after a Hispanic student handed a shoeshine brush to Moore's 14-year-old special education son and told him to use it as a hairbrush, Moore spoke at a school board meeting, "insisted he'd learned that his son's experience was not isolated and bluntly declared he knew of a white student who called blacks 'niggers,' Lee writes. "He said that hateful word -- repeating it over and over, as if to splatter its shame on everyone. Weeks later, then-Superintendent Fern Aefsky responded to Moore, whom she had recently commended for volunteerism: He was barred from school grounds." Lee writes the story even as school officials refused to allow the reporter on school grounds to research the article. Lee reports district enrollment for whites is 54 percent, and the black population is 29 percent. Last school year at the high school, Lee reports there were three Hispanic staff members, five blacks and 87 whites. Emil Meister III, president of the district Board of Education, diminishes the racism charges: "I don't think it's any different from any other urban -- and in some cases, suburban -- school. There's always going to be tensions between students regardless of race, color, creed," he told the Times-Union. H/T The Gossips of Rivertown.