This article isonein a series looking at the struggle to undosystemic inequality in New York City's northernsuburbs, where many believe inclusion and diversity efforts are further along than they really are.
With each day, a consensus is building that New York must forge a path toward anelusive goal:educational equity, or fairness of opportunity for students of all races, ethnicities and economic classes.
Two factors have triggered many to insistthat now is the time to face uncomfortable questions about unfair schooling: the pandemic's exposure of the opportunity gaps that separatestudents and theracial reckoning spurred by the Black Lives Matter movement.
New Board of Regents Chancellor Lester Young said last week that it's time to open new possibilities for students of color.
"We cannot have equityunless we have excellence," he told the Westchester Children's Association. "Now is the time to reshape public policy as well as public consciousness."
Frances Wills, who represents the Lower Hudson Valley on the Board of Regents, said New Yorkers can't be willing to revert to pre-pandemic conditions that partition opportunities for studentsin different communities.
"The pandemic has us staring at problems that were there all along," she told The Journal News/lohud. "We need a new vision of how to support all children."
There's one major problem, though, with this push for equity: New York has never had a stomach for it. For well over half a century, advocates have promoted ideasto equalize opportunities for students— school district mergers, desegregation efforts, the retargeting of state aid— only to seemost of themopposed,delayed or defeated.
In the Lower Hudson Valley, a region known for its political and social liberalism, supporters of the concept of equity are as common as Yankee fans. And yet, the region has a long, largely unknown or forgotten history of upholding aneducational status quo that separates students by race and class. The region has instead prioritized local control, the preservation of affluent school districts, andrestrictive zoningcodes for housing that make equity difficult to achieve.
Racismplayed a clear role in the formation of the northern suburbs as we now know them — racially restrictive deedswere once common in real estate transactions. It's no coincidence that three of the most significantschool desegregation court cases in the northern U.S.took place in the Lower Hudson Valley:in Ramapo (1943), New Rochelle (1961) and Yonkers (1985).
In addition, therehave been numerous attempts, over many decades, to getschool districts to consider mergersin the interest of efficiency and integration. Between the 1940s and 1960s, during a period of great suburban growth,the state proposed dozens of possible mergers in Westchester County. Butsuchplans faced fierceopposition and have been long forgotten.
A rare exception was the GreenburghCentralSchool District,born froma merger in 1968 — but only after a white district tried to avoid merging with an integrated district.
Clearly, states and school systems across the country have faced similar conflicts over educational inequities, withsimilar results. But New York is commonly believed to be different, more progressive and open to change.
Linda Tarrant-Reid, a Black historian from New Rochelle, said New Yorkers need to know the true history, and why opportunities for students are so different,in orderto chart a realistic path to something more equitable. Shegot out of attending the city's segregated school for Black children during the late 1950s, the Lincoln School,because her parents used a friend's address near another school.
"People who are paying attention know that it’s not over," she said. "The whole concept of the neighborhoodschool is fraught with segregation because communities and neighborhoods are still segregated. Nobody likes to talk about it, but schools are still lopsided everywhere."
A Journal News/lohud analysis of enrollment trends in Westchester, Rockland and Putnam countiesover the last two decades found that segregation remains thenorm. In 1999-2000, more than 90% of African American students attended 12 districts out of 54. In 2018-19, Black enrollment was 34% less, but 85% of Black studentswho remained attended the same 12 districts.
During the same period, Hispanic enrollment in the region doubled, leading to nine districts with majoritiesof Hispanic students.Eight of them are among the 12 districts that almost all Black students attend.
Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, D-Yonkers, who got into politics because of Yonkers' prominentdesegregation case, said students in affluent districts are still surprised when she tells them that students in neighboring school systems don't have musical instruments or easy access to guidance counselors.
"People don't realize how different things are when you go from district to district or even school to school," she said. "You have to have enough people who are willing to change the system. It's so hard. Everything is seen as a zero-sum game— 'If someone gets more, I get less.' I hope that during this COVID period, people have been forced to see things differently."
Going back to understand the present
It took two centuries forNew York'smap of almost 700 school districts to evolveinto its current form, a mix of affluent suburban districts,urban districts with far fewer resources, urban-suburban districts with growingdiversity and poverty,and rural districts.
In the 1850s, New York had more than11,000 school districts— mostly with a single school, rural, run by the community or a church,and without state oversight.
During the mid-1800s, family payments forschools were replaced by local taxes based on real estate values. Communities with high real estate values could support good schools, while poorer communities with lower values hadfewer resources for schools, driving away people who could afford to move.
"These cycles have been operating for a long time," saidTom Mauhs-Pugh, provost of Castleton University in Vermont, who did his 1994 dissertation on New York state's long-term driveto consolidate schools and increase control of education.
Thousands of school district mergers took place, thanks in part to state funds dangled as anincentive.
In 1947,a committee of the state Legislature (made up of22 white men) set out to propose a new master plan for schools based on several factors, including "the social and economic status of each area." Over a dozen merger proposalswere floated for Westchester, such as a joining of Pleasantville, Chappaqua, Ossining and Mount Pleasant as one district.
Mostdistricts north of New York City were rural and had small enrollments through the first half of the 20th century. But middle-class professionals started moving in duringthe suburban boom of the 1940s-1960s, leading to the development of what became suburban school districts with strong real estate values. These districtscould boast of well-credentialedstaffs and high standards, which would draw more families seeking manicured suburban neighborhoods that werelargely white.
State Education Commissioner James Allen Jr., whose tenure (1955-1969) coincided with the civil rights movement, became a firebrand for the racial and economic integration of schools.
"A child who has learned from experience to understand and appreciate people of races other than his own has a sounder basis both for his education and his life," Allen said in 1967.
Allenpreferred local districts to act on their own, but promised that the state would intervene if necessary. He promoted district mergers and, in1963, directed districts with more than 50% Black enrollment to create plans for eliminating racial imbalance.
But the Legislature weakened Allen's powers and school boards resisted his pleas. Largely white, rural districts continued to consolidate, but fast-growing suburban districts resisted mergers. By the1970s, the district map was largelyset in place, with urban districts having farfewer resources than neighboring suburban districts.
Greenburgh merger showedtensions
The story of one districtmergerillustratesthe tensions that defined suburban schooling for decades: the creation of the modern-day Greenburgh school district in 1968.
When the state began began promoting school district consolidations during the 1960s, the Town of Greenburgh had almost a dozen small districts that had been founded when Westchester was considered "country."Several districts did not havehigh schools, somergers seemed inevitable.
But districts wanted nothing to do with merger talk, preferring to strengthen their small, increasingly affluent school systems.
This was especially true if merger proposalsinvolved the Fairview school district, where 40% of students were African American. Fairview had integrated its schools byhaving all students in each grade attend the same school, an alternative to neighborhood schools that drewBlack and white families seeking progressive, integrated schools.
"Every possible combination of districts was discussed, but the all-white districts wanted to be pristine," said Harry Phillips, a longtime Greenburgh resident who wouldlater represent the Lower Hudson Valley on the state Board of Regents. Phillipswas discouraged by a Realtor at the time from moving into Fairview. "They would be happy to sell us a house next door in Ardsley," he said.
But the tiny, nearly all-white Hartsdale school district faced a problem. It didn't have a high schooland had been sending students after eighth grade to White Plains, which no longer had room for them. Hartsdale needed to merge with someone, and it proposed mergers with Ardsley and/or Edgemont, which were not interested.
Fairview, though, had a new high school, opened in 1961, and was open to a merger. But in1964, Hartsdale voters rejected a merger with Fairview by a 2-to-1 vote.
Fairview, with lower property values and high taxes, pushed the state to force a merger. A new state law allowed for a joint vote of both communities, which assured passage since Fairview had many more voters. Hartsdale went to the courts to stop a vote, but lost. The new Greenburgh district was formed in 1968.
A series of "cottage meetings" was held in families' homes to address tensions.
"There were parents who were concerned about whether their children would continue to receive an excellent education," said Nettie Webb, then a youngBlack teacher in Fairview who would become a principal and stay with the district for 38 years before retiring. "I told them that our teachers worked hard at our craft."
But the merger with Hartsdaleled to whiteflight, out of the district or to private schools. Greenburgh has long had one of the largest percentages in the region of students who don't attend the public schools.
"The district worked with real estate agents for years to change Greenburgh's undeserved reputation (as inferior)," said Numa Rousseve, a Black Greenburgh school board member from 1986 to 1996.
Outside the newdistrict, not much changed.
The Ardsley schools got its first Black student in 1965 when 15-year-old Ron Cook from Charleston, South Carolina, moved in with a local family. It was arranged as part of a Quaker program that sent Black students to northern schools to better prepare them for college.
Cook said during a 2018 interview that he encountered latent racism and ignorance but had a good school experience.
"A few people were kind," he told Greenburgh Town Supervisor Paul Feiner for an oral history project. "A few people were probably shocked and amazed they were associating with a Blackperson for the first time in school."
Today, the Town of Greenburgh is home to 10 districts. As of 2018-19,five hadBlack and Hispanic enrollments that represented 20% orless of their student bodies.
Landmark desegregation cases
The Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954 is famous for deciding that "separate but equal" education, or racial segregation,is unconstitutional.
But the case was bookended by pivotal, lesser knowndesegregation cases in Rockland and Westchester counties.
Thurgood Marshall, who argued Brown vs. Board of Education and would later serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, learned about northern school segregation in Hillburn, now a village in the Town of Ramapo. He was sent there in 1943 by the NAACP to assist Black parents who had had enough of their children being sent to a segregated, inferior school without indoor plumbing.
"It was very much segregated; we had crosses burned on our properties,"Glenda Royster said in a 2017 documentary about the case, called "Two Schools in Hillburn."She had been a student at the Brook School, where Black and Native American children were sent.
In 1943, Black parents said they wouldn't send their children to school at all if they couldn't attend the community's school for white children, which had plenty of room. Their children were declared truants, and Black families had to appear in court, represented by Marshall. Thestandoff got the state's attention.
The state education commissioner ruled that all children had to be sent to the main school, a move that led many white families to pull their kids out and send them to private schools.
"For a while I struggled with it," Travis Jackson, who was among the Blackstudents integrated into the main school, said in Joe Allen's film. "What’s wrong with me, that they don’twant to come to school with me? Later on, after I thought it through, I changed my question to— what’s wrong with them?"
The white families slowly returned.
June Alexander, who was an assistant toMarshall during the 1950s and continued to work on desegregation cases for the NAACP, said the Brook School case shaped Marshall's strategies for Brown vs. Board of Education.
"I think it affected his view of segregated schools outside the South in a very substantial way," she said in the film.
After Brown, alandmark ruling
Then in 1961— seven years after Brown vs. Board of Education— came a game-changing case in New Rochelle.
Eleven Black families challenged the schools system's segregating of Black children into a single elementary school, the Lincoln School. They filed suit in U.S. District Court, the first case in the North that sought to wield the precedent set byBrown.
"I remember everything like it was yesterday," saidRoslyn Koo-Hines, 66, whose parents,Rudolph and Marjorie Williams, were among the plaintiffs. "I remember the parents meeting in the dining room in my parents' house, one of my parentshaving to go to jail when they kept me out of school, posing for photos with the other kids."
Leading the case was Paul Zuber, a young Black lawyer who would go on to challenge segregated schools in several northern cities.
"The schools argued this was simply a neighborhood policy; the schools did notseek to segregate the students, but this was all about residential patterns," Zuber's son, also Paul Zuber, said at a recent virtual program marking the 60th anniversary of the case. "My fatherknew it was an opportunity to test the principles of Brown."
In early 1961, Judge Irving Kaufman ruled that the school board intentionally segregated Black students. The district appealed, inspiring Marshall to return to the suburbs and join Zuber's legal team. But the parents won out.
About 300 students were bused to other schools, Koo-Hines among them.
"My parents sat us down and told us we would integrate the schools, but that was a lot," she said. "I remember the cops being there to escort us off the bus. Parents were there to say they didn’twant us. The kids were mean because that's what their parents taught them. My first-grade teacher was hateful. We paid a price that's hard to talk about even now."
Tarrant-Reid, the historian whose parents used a friend's address, is involved with the Lincoln Park Conservancy, a nonprofit that seeks to educate the community about the case and local history.
"Not everybody likes to talk about it, dredging up memories," she said. "You have young, white teachers who don't know the history. But for people who were there, and their kids, it still affects you, stays with you."
A documentary is being made about the case.
Housing and schools in Yonkers
The word equity wasn't commonly used during the 1980s, but many residents of the City of Yonkers weren't interested in the concept.
WhenU.S. District Judge Leonard Sand ruled in 1985 that Yonkers had intentionally jammed most of its public housing into one section of western Yonkers, and that the city needed to build public housing in white neighborhoods and desegregate schools, he set in motion a battle of attrition and a nationally watched drama.
The case wasn't settled until 2007. An HBO mini-series about the case, "Show Me a Hero," premiered in2015.
It was political and communityopposition to the court decree that got the attention of Stewart-Cousins. Her family had moved to Yonkers in 1979, knowing little about the city's history or racial divides.
"It was embarrassing to me," she said. "I didn't want to live in an environment that did not want to desegregate. My kids were going tothe public schools."
She supported the mayoral campaign ofTerry Zaleski, who supported desegregation, and then went to work for him as director of community affairs.
Stewart-Cousins had once been told by a high school guidance counselor that she was not "college material." But she said she was still shocked to learn the degree to whichracism was still holding back people of color.
"I learned what everybody learned," she said "Even though we were supposed to be a progressivestate, we were still dealing with the roots of racism. And that it had spilled over. By limiting access to housing, [the city] waslimiting access to educational opportunity. Both of those things had to be changed. For me it was shocking toknow."
William Zorzi, who made the HBO series with David Simon, told The Journal News/lohud in 2015 that they were drawn to the case because the issues it raised are still alive.
"It's not like this went away as a result of this," he said. "It didn't go away in Yonkers and it didn't go away in the rest of the country."
The best of intentions
One school district in the Lower Hudson Valley did get national attention the mid-1960s for acknowledging that its schools were segregated and doing something about it before being taken to court.
In 1964, the White Plains school system decided to bus about 500 Black children to mostly white schools, in the interest of closing the achievement gap between Black and white students and better preparing all students for an integrated world.
White Plains' superintendent at the time,Carroll F. Johnson, wrote in a 1968 article that the effort was successful, as Black students were doing better in math and reading while white students were doing as well as they had been or even better.
"If integration is ever to move forward on a broad front, in school systems throughout the land, then white middle-class parents must be convinced that their own children will not suffer," Johnson wrote. "We believewe can offer them this assurance."
He wrote that the district did not try to move white students to "city center" schools since parents would not have gone along with it.
Two white teachers at the time agreed in a 1971 book, "Children in the Balance," that school integration, although difficult, was necessary in orderto overcome segregated housing in White Plains. "My children know that blackand whites do not very often live on the same block together," one teacher wrote.
But Black residents who remember those days say the school system's approach was typically paternalistic for the times.
"There was an effort, but teachers had in their minds what they thought we needed," saidCynthia Evans, a lifelong White Plains resident who was bused from public housing. "It was like, 'We are going to give you what we need to give you to make you what wethink you need to be.' They didn't come to us."
Evans recently retired after teaching in the White Plains schools for 32 years.
Cynthia Adams, a White Plains High School graduate who went on to a long career as a teacher and administrator in White Plains, said thatBlack students still felt like a separate class in white schools when she arrived to teach in the late 1960s. Therewere few Black teachers or staff members.
"There were positives, but it wasn't equitable," said Adams, now retired. "Desegregation was done on the backs ofBlack kids. They were the ones sent to other neighborhoods, where they didn't see [adults] who looked like them."
"Whenwe talk about equity, it's something that reaches far and wide and is still a problem," said Susan Bailey, who retired last year after teaching in White Plainsfor 33 years. "White Plains still needs more Black teachers."
The great equalizer: money
School district boundaries are now settled, and it's commonly understood in this progressive region of a generally progressive statethat schools in neighboring communitieshave very different resources.
One case in point: Many suburban districts lament the state-imposed tax cap that limits their ability to raise revenue. At the same time, the Mount Vernon district has voluntarily frozen its property-tax levy six times in the last seven years because officials believe residents can't afford to pay more.
Still, many New Yorkers are now demandingequity, and doing so louder than ever.
It starts at the top. The state Board of Regents chose New York's first Black chancellor, Lester Young, in January, and named New York's first Hispanic education commissioner, former Chancellor Betty Rosa, in February. Both leaders highlightthe importance of equity when discussing almost any issue in education.
So, what strategies can be employed to equalize opportunities for students?
The primaryfocus of equity advocates is one thing: money.
State education aid has long been seen as the great equalizer. Give more aid to districts with weaker tax bases, the argument goes, so they can hire more teachers,counselors and social workers, pay for sports, music and art, and give students a more equal opportunity at a full education.
Judith Johnson, a Regentandchampion of equity before her death in October 2019, told The Journal News/lohud in August of that yearthat "separate but equal" education would at least be better than separate and unequal. Shesaid that busing was finishedand that there was no commitment to a large scale program, like magnet schools, to drawstudents from across communities.
"Unfortunately it happens because of the way property is organized, constructed and sold," the former Peekskill and Mount Vernon superintendent said. "You end up with segregated communities."
Johnson said the only way to equalize opportunities for students was to give more state aid to needier districts."Let's provide all of the children with the resources they need," she said. "Let’s not kid ourselves — we are not doing that."
It's been tried before.
A milestone lawsuit against New York, brought by parents organized asthe Campaign for Fiscal Equity, resulted in a 2006 decision by the state Court of Appeals that found New York wasviolating students' constitutional right to a “sound and basic education.” The state promised to spend more on schools and created the "foundation aid" formula to drive more dollars to needy districts.
But the Great Recession hit and the effortsputtered after two years. New York's schools say they are owed $4 billion.
Now, Michael Rebell, the lawyer who led that lawsuit, sees a new opportunity.
He believes all the federal stimulus money coming to New York's schools— including $9 billion alone from the American Rescue Plan— could givethe state a window of a year or two to rethink school funding. To start, New York should determinehow much it now costs to educate a student.
"Nobody has done an analysis of what it costs to provide a sound, basic education in New York for 15 years.It's crazy," Rebell told The Journal News/lohud. "Before this federal money runs out, we need a fresh look. We've had demographic changes in New York,and we've seen the great need for psychologists, counselors, tutoring."
Rebell, executive director of the Center for Educational Equity at Teachers College atColumbia University, appears to have allies in Albany. Legislative leaders want to pump up education aid and were looking at revamping the foundation aid formula when the pandemic hit and disrupted everything.
"We're in this interesting environment, when people are talking about equity again," Rebell said. "Let's meet the challenge and figure out what it would take."
Staff writer David McKay Wilson contributed to this report.
Gary Stern has worked at The Journal News/lohud for over 30 years, primarily covering education and religion and serving as engagement editor. He is now an editor/reporter focusing on education. Reach him at gstern@lohud.com.Twitter:@garysternNY
