A missed chance to mend the split
Bridging the divide
and Westowne elementary schools. To the north are the largely black communities that feed Edmondson Heights and Johnnycake elementaries.
At the start of the redistricting process, county schools Superintendent Dallas Dance looked at the map and saw a rare opportunity: to better integrate students of different races and classes.
“When you have a diverse school population, all students thrive,” Dance said, adding that not just low-income students of color benefit, but also affluent students. “When you have integrated schools, students have the opportunity to push each other.”
Educators across the country are looking back to the successes that followed the Supreme Court’s 1954 order to desegregate schools. In the 1970s and 1980s, when schools were the most integrated they would be, black students made stunning gains in national tests in reading and math. In some subjects, they cut the so-called achievement gap with white students in half — and white achievement did not suffer.
But after a backlash against busing in the 1970s, the courts backed away from requiring districts to integrate. In 2007, the Supreme Court struck down even voluntary school desegregation plans, making it illegal for schools to assign students based solely on race.
Schools have gradually resegregated, and progress in closing the achievement gap has mostly stalled. None of the efforts to shrink it — by setting higher standards, imposing more testing, holding teachers more accountable — have worked.
By 2014, even as the state’s population grew more diverse, more than one-quarter of its public schools were highly segregated, according to the Maryland Equity Project at the University of Maryland.
Maryland was the third-most-segregated state in the nation for black students in 2014, the Civil Rights Project at the University of California at Los Angeles reported last year.
In those segregated schools, researchers say, students will often find themselves with less-experienced teachers in lessrigorous classes — and more likely to lag behind their peers.
School districts still have tools they can use to integrate, including creating magnet programs and charter schools, and redrawing school boundary lines. But small, voluntary steps like these in Maryland have proved almost impossible to execute.
Baltimore County — the largest school district in the region, with 112,000 students and an increasingly diverse population — could be a leader in integration. But at the time of the redistricting, there were six new members on the county school board and Dance’s contract was up for renewal. He didn’t feel that he could force the issue.
The school board, meanwhile, didn’t make integration a priority, and there was no push from the community to take it on.
That meant the question of diversity was essentially turned over to the committee of about 45 people, most of them parents.
As the process unfolded, redrawing the boundary lines exposed fault lines between their communities.
“It was like, they were fighting to keep what they got, and we were fighting to keep what we got,” Sanford said, “instead of us fighting to figure out how to make what we had better.” communities intact and allowed children to walk to school. Members were also to consider diversity of the students.
One in five Baltimore County schools was highly segregated in 2014, according to the Maryland Equity Project. The percentage of such schools has grown over the past three decades.
Some districts make diversity a priority when redrawing school boundary lines, but they are the exception. The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank based in New York, has identified only 50 such districts in the nation. They include Montgomery County.
In Baltimore County, the current school board chair believes that the board and the superintendent have always placed an emphasis on ensuring that resources were evenly spread among schools.
“This board has had equity as a primary platform in our decision-making process,” Edward Gilliss said. “I like to think that equity lens has carried through on these redistricting processes.”
He said the board created a transparent redistricting process with substantial community input.
North of the highway are Johnnycake and Edmondson Heights elementary schools, with largely minority students from low-income families. Neither was scheduled to get a new building, but both were in need of work.
Johnnycake was 85 percent black and Hispanic. Three-quarters of its students received free or reduced-price lunches. Only a quarter of its fifth-graders were passing English and math tests.
The school had 105 more students than it had room for. Children learned in six trailers lined up next to the main building. Special-education students who needed small-group help met with teachers in a former supply room transformed into a mini-classroom. Students attended math class in the cafeteria.
Sanford thought that the portable classrooms were a safety risk and an eyesore in a community where he and others paid property taxes for their well-maintained, single-family homes.
He and other Johnnycake parents began the redistricting process thinking about how to improve student-teacher ratios and get the children out of the trailers and back into the main school building.
On the south side of Route 40 in Catonsville were four aging, crowded schools made up of predominantly white families whose PTAs had come together for years to fight for renovations and more space.
These parents from Westchester, Hillcrest, Westowne and Catonsville elementaries had in many cases paid a premium for their houses so they could ensure that their children were in some of the best schools in the county.
Hillcrest, for example, is 68 percent white. A quarter of its students received subsidized lunches. About half of fifthgraders passed the English tests. Fifty-nine percent passed math.
Hillcrest parents loved that they could walk their children to school in a closely knit community. Construction had already begun on the new Catonsville and Westowne schools, and parents saw redistricting as the final step in their winning battle before they moved into the new buildings the next year.
Parents said they didn’t want their children to have to cross busy U.S. 40 to go to school, or to be moved to schools they saw as inferior.
James Kitchel, a Hillcrest father, said he didn’t expect when he walked into the cafeteria at Catonsville High School on a hot September night that he would be confronted with parents from many other schools. He and other parents thought it would just be their four schools redrawing a few lines.
Integration wasn’t what they had fought for, or thought about.