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."