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.