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Donna Knutson, a black Hillcrest parent, said most parents were going to buy a house in the best neighborhood they could.
Still, she said, “You can put it as a financial issue so you don’t have to talk about it as a racial issue and a social issue. It is a really good argument to disguise other issues.”
At a certain point in the process, she said, it became clear that the parents were not going to discuss diversity. She said everyone retreated to their safe places.
“It was every man for himself.” essays and research — added up to a 3.
Detwiler said one fifth-grader stopped the discussion to explain what the issue was.
“No,” he said. “It’s because we’re black.” Part Two: school board set a new policy that explicitly called for increasing diversity, and then set up a strategy to carry it out.
Baltimore County has never taken that step because no political pressure has been put on leaders to do so.
Integration wasn’t even on the school board’s agenda.
“I don’t believe the board aggressively considered making schools more diverse as a significant factor in the final outcome,” said Michael Collins, a board member during the redistricting process.
Collins doesn’t remember a single discussion about integration in his five and a half years on the board. He said the board didn’t see integration as an objective because they believed their schools already offered equal access to good teachers and curriculum.
Collins doesn’t believe Dance would ever have been fired if he forced the issue. “We might have said, ‘Dallas this is not going to work,’ but we wouldn’t have said, ‘Go find another job,’ ” Collins said.
Hillcrest parent Donna Knutson said forced integration would have led people to sell houses and move, just as in the desegregation period decades ago. She and other parents thought more could have been done to make integration work. But they believed it needed to be a separate conversation.
Preston Smith, a Kansas City demographer who helps districts redraw school boundaries, said a growing number of school boards are taking control of the process back from the community. They are drafting the lines themselves, and then asking for community input.
Nicholas Stewart, the school board member who represented the southwest county, suggested the board could change the charge to the boundary committees. Rather than being told to “maintain” diversity, he said, volunteers could be told to “increase” it.
Sanford, of Johnnycake, thinks the adults missed something.
During the meetings, when adults were inside the cafeteria debating, their children — kids of different races and economic backgrounds, kids who didn’t know each other — were playing together outside. His sons had so much fun, he said, that they asked to go to every meeting, so they could keep playing with the kids from Catonsville and other schools south of 40.
“Our kids are good enough to play together, but they can’t learn together?” Sanford said.
“We can’t see what they see.”