Grassroots Integration

Originally published on May 17, 2004.

Through much of the last half-century, the struggle for school integration played on public stages, from the country's highest courts to streets choked with tear gas.

It goes on still, but in places such as Nancy and Kevin Peter's West Mount Airy living room, amid antiques and touches of Ikea, chardonnay, and the upstairs echo of children's laughter.

Here the Peters convene the Henry Group, about two dozen parents who have made the same, admittedly difficult decision: to send their sons and daughters to the local public elementary school.

They are mostly white and middle class. The school is mostly black and increasingly poor, with strained resources and test scores above average in one grade, well below in another.

Even in a city neighborhood with a fabled pride in its diversity and an indelible streak of 1960s idealism, parents of any color with the means to choose do not often choose Charles W. Henry Elementary.

The Peters' efforts to recruit them yielded nine families this year - seven white, one black and one biracial - for a K-8 school of 550 students.

"It's not about integration per se," says Nancy Peter, whose son is a Henry kindergartner. " It's about enriching what we have here so it benefits all. If we had a park that nobody liked, and the only people who used it were those who didn't have the means to leave, wouldn't the neighborhood get together to improve the park?"

But a school?

"I've heard it many times" from parents, Kevin Peter says.

"'We can't sacrifice our own kids for the cause.'"

Fifty years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down legally mandated school segregation in its epochal Brown v. Board of Education decision, public education in America is not the model of integration once predicted. Not anywhere near.

In the story of Henry Elementary - a potentially perfect mixing bowl of races and classes - are some of the knottiest reasons why.

"You want your kids to go to school in a world that has different people and you want them to get a really good education," said Shelly Yanoff, a social activist who sent her children to Henry 30 years ago and still lives in West Mount Airy.

"There has always been a feeling that if it couldn't happen here, you couldn't make it happen anywhere."

Since the Brown ruling, forces with a big pull on parents' minds have swept around and through the brick schoolhouse on a hillock at Greene Street and Carpenter Lane.

The blockbusting panics of the 1950s and '60s.

The chronic teacher strikes of the '70s.

The district's desegregation plan in the '80s, followed by bone-gouging budget cuts in the '90s, followed by the momentous charter-school movement.

Through it all, Henry has gone on a demographic roller-coaster ride, with fleeting moments of near-textbook integration. Today it is as racially lopsided as it was in 1954.

Almost uniformly white then, it is 83 percent African American now. Nearly half of its students get free or reduced-price lunches.

Henry is an anomaly in a destination neighborhood where the median home price has climbed from $114,000 to $225,000 in the last decade and the racial split is almost 50-50.

Which is not to say the scales are balanced there.

The annual income of white households averages $107,000; of black households, $52,000. Among whites, 74 percent have bachelor's degrees; among blacks, 33 percent.

In the education of West Mount Airy children, the difference is chasmic: 86 percent of black students are in the public school system, but only 20 percent of whites.

"The kids don't go to school together," said Leslie Winder, a consultant and an African American who is the mother of a Henry fourth grader. "That just drives me nuts."

Winder herself is a child of Henry. About 1970, she recalls, it was a melange of "kids from rowhomes to huge houses, kids of all races." When she moved back four years ago from out of state, nostalgia beckoned and she enrolled her daughter.

"I got real nervous when people started looking at me oddly and saying, 'Oh, really?'"

Her child is doing well, but her husband, a salesman who is white, would prefer private school, Winder said. "He asks, 'How long are you going to stick with the neighborhood thing?'"

Though committed to Henry, she conceded, "You look at test scores and think, 'Who in their right mind would send a kid to Philadelphia public schools?'"

Henry fares better than most. On the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests, more than two-thirds of its eighth graders meet or exceed math and reading standards.

Among fifth graders, however, fewer than half are proficient in reading and barely one-quarter in math - landing the school on a warning list under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Principal Caren Trantas has a raft of strategies to lift those scores, from a new curriculum and smaller classes to math and reading coaches.

Ironically, as soon as Henry would get off the list, it could be required by the same law to accept children from failing schools elsewhere in the city.

"Being a democrat in the full sense of the word, it seems fair," Trantas said. "Every child has the right to do better."

But for a school that needs academic excellence to sell itself to the neighborhood, it is "a Catch-22," she said.

"You work hard to get students above level, and as a result you get more who aren't."

The very year Henry Elementary was born, 1908, Philadelphia School Superintendent Martin Brumbaugh ordered a "scientific investigation" into the "problem of the colored child."

His study addressed a troubling number of over-age black students in the system - without taking into account the wide practice of setting them back a few grades as they moved in from the South. Brumbaugh (later Pennsylvania governor) concluded that "the curriculum is entirely unfitted to capability."

An 1881 state law prohibited the creation of separate schools for black children, but that did not stop Brumbaugh. He declared that some were justified, all the more so because they provided the only teaching jobs in the city for blacks.

One of those schools was two miles from Henry Elementary, though in truth a world away. Henry served white children in the bucolic northwest end of German Township.

"There was a lot of discussion about building such an immense school, six rooms, in the wilds," noted one newspaper account, which referred to it as "Tilden's Folly," after the school board's building manager.

Yet wings soon sprouted to accommodate a burgeoning community with a dual identity as garden suburb and mill town.

Among the arrivals were African Americans, who, by the 1940s, made up one-tenth of the population in Germantown and the Mount Airys. Their children often went to all-black elementaries, but they were a growing presence in otherwise white Roosevelt Junior High. At Henry, seventh and eighth grades were added, eliminating the need for its students to go to Roosevelt.

Not until 1955, the year after the Brown ruling, did Henry come face-to-face with changing reality. Its attendance boundaries were redrawn, pulling in a pocket of mostly impoverished black students from jam-packed Emlen Elementary across Germantown Avenue.

"That got people worried," said Eve Oshtry, a longtime resident and Henry teacher. "It suddenly changed the makeup."

To prevent even more from coming, Henry parents asked the school board to restore the old lines. The board refused, but it did find a different way to deal with Emlen's overcrowding: parking six classroom trailers in its school yard.

The Philadelphia NAACP filed a federal lawsuit alleging that the board violated the Emlen students' constitutional rights. It was one of the first such suits in a Northern district in the wake of the Brown ruling, but although the judge told the board to come up with a desegregation plan, he put no enforcement muscle into the order.

A far more seismic force was rocking Philadelphia: real estate blockbusters with an arsenal of scare tactics, out to buy low from whites and sell high to blacks. Throughout Germantown, East Mount Airy, West Oak Lane, whole streets changed complexion almost overnight.

The speculators were busy in West Mount Airy, too, making harassing phone calls and slipping their cards into doors with the warning that blacks would be moving in and to sell now. But there they met legendary resistance from religious and civic leaders who quickly organized the West Mount Airy Neighbors.

Shirley Melvin, one of the charter members and now 79, recalls them contacting agents and threatening: " 'We have 600 members and a newsletter. Your name will be in headlines, and it won't be complimentary. ' They stopped."

When blacks bought homes on white blocks, the group prevailed on neighbors to host welcoming teas. And it opened an integrated day camp - thought to be the city's first - offering children art and dance lessons and adults a reason to mingle.

West Mount Airy emerged from the blockbusting battles about 60 percent white and 40 percent black in 1970 - "gracefully integrated," as Melvin put it. "People said, 'This is the way we want to live.'"

The ground had not held at Henry Elementary, however. By that year, less than one-third of its students were white.

All through the '60s, children had drained away, many to the Julia R. Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School, which started with fifth grade. The district's new selective-admissions school was intended to give high achievers an alternative within the public system. Demographically, the effect was to speed the middle-class, largely white exodus from neighborhood elementaries.

Nancy Peter's mother, Marian Darmstadter, kept her at Henry from 1961 to 1968, until "it became impossible."

"By sixth grade, kids went to Masterman or private school," Darmstadter said. "There wasn't a critical mass of middle-class kids of both races. It lost all integration."

Rifts were opening everywhere, even over education philosophy. Trendy "open classrooms" had gained a following among white parents; black parents generally preferred the traditional structure. When Henry offered both, "it was hard not to get classrooms that were totally segregated," said Pat Russell, Leslie Winder's mother.

Other forces - as disparate as the Vietnam War and the rise of youth gangs in the city - conspired to create what Nancy Peter remembers as an uneasy dynamic even among the children.

"We started breaking into racial groups," she said. "Whites were into being hippies and blacks weren't. One day in the school yard, the black boys were pitted against the white boys. All the white boys got beaten up, except for Scott."

For seventh grade on, she was sent to Akiba Hebrew Academy, just over the city line in Merion.

That year, 1968, the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission asked the Philadelphia School District for a school desegregation plan that included mandatory busing. Three superintendents in a row - Mark Shedd, Matthew Costanzo and Michael Marcase - declined, even as the commission repeatedly petitioned Commonwealth Court to force them.

That standoff was dwarfed by bigger trouble: teacher strikes, occurring almost yearly in the 1970s. To make ends meet, the district laid off faculty, increased class sizes, and cut bedrock instructional programs.

James "Torch" Lytle, now superintendent of the Trenton School District and then a high-ranking Philadelphia district official, said the city system was "in the beyond" during that decade. "White parents were bailing out. It was a mess."

Lytle lived in West Mount Airy. When the strikes became incessant, he, too, sent his children to private school.

Those who stayed were at a loss to turn the tide. Pat Russell, then president of the Home and School Association, tried to convince middle-class parents that, if they hung in, Henry could rival Masterman.

Instead, "I felt desertion," she recalled. "We'd ask 'Why do you have to leave? We'll make changes. ' There were powerful people in the community who could have done it. Yet they were gone" from the school.

By 1980, the neighborhood was in near-perfect racial balance, and Henry was 80 percent African American - 10 percentage points from the official definition of racial isolation.

Those who thought Henry's course was irreversible were wrong.

In 1982, Philadelphia got its first African American school superintendent. Like her predecessors, Constance Clayton rejected the Human Relations Commission's demand for forced busing to desegregate schools. Unlike them, she set into motion an ambitiously broad, voluntary plan.

The most dramatic part of it gave students the option to be bused. At the peak, an estimated 14,000 took it, mostly blacks who traveled to predominantly white schools in the Northeast.

Another part of her plan would transform Henry.

Upward of $5 million was channeled annually to about 20 schools with majority-black enrollments in racially mixed neighborhoods. Not only were the schools lavished with perks, but white students whose neighborhood schools were not targeted for desegregation also could transfer in, bused by the district.

"You did what you had to do to keep children who had a choice" of going to private or parochial school, said Ralph Smith, the University of Pennsylvania law professor who designed Clayton's desegregation strategy. "Basically, you had to figure out what the draw was."

For Henry, it was figured well, from small classes, specialist teachers and a computer lab to free after-school care. At a time when the working mom was becoming the trend-to-be-reckoned-with, the school offered another powerful lure: full-day kindergarten.

"It made Henry very attractive," said Oshtry, a kindergarten teacher. If school-shopping parents were still on the fence, "I would say, 'We can't pretend to be the same as private school. But there are advantages in having your child in a school whose population more accurately reflects reality. If you're not satisfied, you can make a change. Then think of all the money you've saved.'"

The resources hit their mark.

White children streamed into Henry, not only from West Mount Airy, but Germantown and beyond. Black parents from poor neighborhoods tried to slip their children in by faking West Mount Airy addresses. In the name of racial balance, the policy required those who were found out to be sent back.

By the late 1980s, the black-white breakdown at Henry was 60-40.

The school also got an infusion of activist parents in those years. They raised money for musical instruments and found cut-rate deals for students to attend Academy of Music concerts. They even put on a show.

"Every year, we'd have a musical with hundreds of kids," said Judith Bernstein-Baker, a Henry mother. "It was phenomenal. When you have involved parents, you can get a lot done."

The school was becoming a community hub, she said, "and that was a wonderful thing."

But this, too, would pass.

This year, St. Patrick's Day fell on the third Wednesday of March, the monthly meeting of the Henry Home and School Association. Appropriately, the subject was the spending of the green, what little there is of it.

About 30 parents, evenly black and white, gathered in the basement library. Its book collection is aging, its card catalog dysfunctional, and its librarian long gone.

The room was dejectedly rapt as principal Trantas delivered the bad news: about the 2004-05 budget, down at least $100,000. About a projected enrollment drop of 16 children. About the probable retirement of several teachers and the long odds of their being replaced.

Kim Puhl, the association president, wondered whether noontime aides who patrol the lunchroom would be cut. A rowdy cafeteria, she warned, would scare away parents of prospective students, especially young ones.

No decisions had been made yet, Trantas said. Ominously she added, "The budget is ugly."

So it has been for at least 10 years.

Clayton had stabilized the district's finances in the 1980s, but they began to crumble even before she retired in 1993.

In Harrisburg, the legislature made changes in the school-funding formula that body-slammed Philadelphia. Through the '90s, per-pupil spending in the district declined in real terms as state aid stagnated.

The extras that made Henry a draw started to melt away. A math lab, some specialist teachers, full-day kindergarten aides. The music teacher moved to a music magnet school where his program wouldn't be eviscerated, and down came the curtain on the annual show.

"It went from being a school where there was a whole lot going on besides the core academic subjects, to a bare-bones operation," said Paul Socolar, editor of the grassroots newsletter Philadelphia Public School Notebook and father of two Henry students in the '90s.

In June 1995, 100 sign-waving parents paraded along Lincoln Drive to protest yet another budget cut, this one of $129,000.

Others were walking, too - away from Henry.

Cred Dobson, who had gone to all-black schools in pre-Brown South Carolina, saw both racial and economic diversity slip away during 18 years as a Henry math teacher. He left last year to coordinate regional math programs for the district.

"I always called a hippie community - the food co-op, all these liberals in the churches, volunteerism," said Dobson, Philadelphia's teacher of the year in 1999. "They always spoke about diversity. Yet when it came to maintaining diversity in the public school, they couldn't do it."

As for the black middle class, "it's hard to get them to commit to public school in the city," he said. "We came through the scuffle, we want to get the best education we can. If we can afford it, we go elsewhere."

Both white and black middle-class parents have been enamored of the charter school movement, which since 1997 has given them the opportunity to create their own schools with public money. Mount Airy families were behind the Green Woods Charter in Fairmount Park, which specializes in nature study.

All told, Henry's population has steadily slipped, from nearly 800 to 550 in the last three years. And as enrollment goes, so goes funding.

That has made Henry only more reliant on parents willing and able to dig deep to provide the lures that the budget no longer can.

The one bright spot during the March Home and School meeting was the announcement that parents were raising money to resurrect the musical: Dear Edwina, on June 6.

Among them was Steve Green, an African American father of a second grader, and a keeper of the faith in an integrated future that not everyone sees for Henry Elementary.

Transportation director at Bryn Mawr College and a musician, Green went to a racially mixed music magnet school in hostile territory, white Kensington in the '60s, and got used to being taunted and, occasionally, chased.

One evening, he and a white friend were leaving school after band practice and were subjected to racial slurs. Green took the El home. The next morning, his friend had two black eyes.

"He stood for me," Green said, still touched. "It was a kind of violent diversity, but even in that, I found a flower." Such friendships "were a saving grace to my life outlook."

Academics are important, he said, "but what good is an intelligent person filled with ignorance" of other cultures? "That is not a successful education."

On a winter evening at the Peters' house, the Henry Group was making its pitch to William Aliprando.

His children are only 1 and 3 years old, but already Aliprando and his wife, Leslie Klinefelter, are school-shopping. They are professionals who are white - he a database manager for a pharmaceuticals firm, she a nurse practitioner - and open to all options. Including private school. Including the suburbs. Including Henry Elementary.

Ulrike Shapiro, a German-born musician, sang Henry's praises for five minutes. Her son "loves everything," she said. "His class spent two days in the library because the kindergarten classroom was flooded and he thought that was the greatest thing ever."

"I was at the school judging the science fair, and I had an epiphany," Nancy Peter said. "It was chaos, but my kid was part of it. I realized it wasn't chaos, it was exuberance."

"Our daughter comes home motivated," said Tom Landers, also the parent of a kindergartner. "Henry has not destroyed her," he added wryly, getting a knowing laugh from the others.

When Aliprando and Klinefelter moved to Mount Airy four years ago, in love with the big homes and the diversity, "we knew it would be a problem, the school thing," she said. "But we decided to deal with it when the time came."

They have given themselves until November, when private school applications are due for the 2005-06 school year, to make up their minds.

At Henry, "they don't have a music class, but a parent teaches music," Aliprando said. "There's not much playground, but people tell us you can make up for it by taking them places to play outside of school. You have to fill in the gaps yourself. That's OK, if you think they're getting a good experience."

Diversity is part of that "good experience," said Aliprando, who attended an all-white parochial school in Brooklyn. "It's nice, but it's more of a bonus."

"The top thing is the quality of education they would get," he said. "I don't know what else."

Contact staff writer Dale Mezzacappa at 215-854-5112 or dmezzacappa@phillynews.com.

Inquirer staff writer Anthony R. Wood contributed to this article.