About the series
Alternatives that would have moved Johnnycake students south to largely white schools below U.S. 40 had been rejected, as had options that would have brought other students north.
At the committee’s October meeting, the fifth-grade teacher took the microphone.
“No one is talking about the fact that there is no diversity change north,” she said, adding that the school would remain 94 percent minority.
Detwiler, a native of Catonsville, didn’t expect enthusiasm for integration, but she hoped parents and teachers on the boundary committee might at least have a conversation about it.
As a white teacher, she was aware that she was in a unique position to force such a discussion.
“It was easier for me than it would have been if I was black,” Detwiler said. “I didn’t have to worry about being the angry, black woman. Instead, I was just the naggy white woman. And that’s different.”
For years, the Title I label — stamped on schools with predominantly poor students — hung over Johnnycake like “a black cloud,” Principal Bre-Anne Fortkamp said. It carried the same stigma as the words “inner city,” a place stereotyped as poor, chaotic — inferior.
Fortkamp, who is white, knew that the test scores at her school were lower than those at schools on the other side of U.S. 40.
But she had attended some of the best schools in Baltimore County herself — Riderwood Elementary, Dumbarton Middle and Towson High School — and had tested horribly. She believed that “kids are not test scores.”
As a principal, she took pride in other numbers — such as the more than 95 percent of families who responded on end-of-year surveys that they felt welcomed at the school and believed their children were getting a good education.
As much as they didn’t want to believe it, parents and staff who represented Johnnycake in the redistricting discussions had no doubt that their school was confronting racism.
“All the same reasons people are afraid to go into neighborhoods were the same reasons people didn’t want Johnnycake,” Fortkamp said. “And it was very black and white.”
The Johnnycake children did have struggles, said Gary Budd, a fourth-grade teacher. Some had lost family members to violence. Some had to wake up early to feed younger siblings and were cranky from lack of sleep.
But Budd, who is white, said he could relate.
“These are good kids who might have had some rough times in their lives,” he said. “We all have a common denominator: life.”
That was most clear to Sanford, who felt he had much in common with the parents from south of U.S. 40 who wanted their children to have the best educational advantages.
He moved to his neighborhood for a better life, and Johnnycake was a part of that. He believed his twin boys had received an excellent education there, which had helped them gain admission into a competitive middle school.
He felt he played as much a role in his children’s education as their teachers. There were homework checks every day, pop quizzes ahead of vocabulary tests, and his children weren’t allowed to bring home Cs.
He could have spent more money on a bigger house on the other side of U.S. 40, he said, but he chose his smaller, ranch-style home so it would be easy to take care of when he got older.
He had his sons’ academic careers planned out, all the way through college.
“I want them to do better than me,” said. Sanford, who drives a tractor-trailer for the U.S. Postal Service. “I tell my sons, ‘I expect nothing but greatness from you.’
“I think anybody who loves and cares about their kids holds them to that standard.”
Yet now he stood listening to other parents, and what he heard them saying was that he wasn’t good enough, that his standards for his children were inferior.
“All they saw was a black man whose kids go to Johnnycake,” he said. “They thought, ‘You’re black, I’m white, I can do things you can’t do.’ Maybe — but your kids can’t do things my kids can. I would put my two kids up against anybody on that side of 40.”
Sanford felt it as a blow to his entire community. The redistricting process had shown Sanford and his fellow parents that their children — the ones they saw as smart and full of potential — were seen only as liabilities.
They said they didn’t intend to hurt the people on the other side of the highway. For them, it wasn’t about race, or even class. Instead, they said they wanted to protect the high standards of their schools and give their children the best chance for a good education.
In interviews, parents said they offered to embrace some of Johnnycake’s students, as long as the balance of their schools did not shift so that the majority were students of color or came from low-income families.
Some research suggests that once a school has more than 40 percent of its students living in poverty, achievement starts to drop off.
“Honestly, it is hard to hold it against parents,” said Erica Mah, an Asian-American Hillcrest parent.
“They are looking at what is going to happen to my child, and not the greater good.”
Parents said they feared their children’s education would suffer if students weren’t being pushed to perform at the highest levels.
The parents’ worries were not baseless. The highest-performing schools are usually those with the wealthiest families. The percentage of Hillcrest fifth-graders who passed state standardized tests in 2016 in English and math was double that at Johnnycake. And the Hillcrest families were wealthier.
Parents at Westowne said in interviews that their school was a model for integration. About half of its students were black and Latino, and 46 percent qualified for a free or reduced-price meal. But when the idea of moving half of Westowne’s students out was floated as an option, parents fought back.
PTA president Justine Stull, who is white, said she had moved to her neighborhood in part because she believed her children would benefit from the diversity. But she worried that adding more minority children could tip the balance in her kids’ classrooms, burdening them with students who needed extra help.
“There is an overlap between race, poverty and childhood trauma,” she said. “They have learning issues that lead to behavioral struggles, behavioral needs.”
She was concerned about the impact of other students’ behavior on her own children’s learning.
“We don’t want to talk about these things,” Stull said. “They are too hard.” Race wasn’t the only issue. Class divisions emerged as well. Kitchel, who had long advocated for solutions to overcrowding at Hillcrest, had collaborated with parents from the other Catonsville-area schools — Westchester, Westowne and Catonsville — for years. But now they were fighting about how many students Hillcrest would unload to the others.
A vocal group of parents didn’t want their children to go to Catonsville Elementary School because they worried it could set them on a path to Arbutus Middle School.
\Arbutus is largely white, but it is poorer than Catonsville, and the parents didn’t want their children to be in a school with a large low-income population.
With all the disagreement among the four Catonsville schools, Kitchel felt that bringing in the other schools was just confusing the process.
“You had way too many schools involved chasing too few new seats involved,” he said. The new schools just couldn’t take that many students from Johnnycake before they would be overcrowded again.