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."