A controversial school redistricting decision this January focused all of Philadelphia’s attention on Lower Merion, where a plan to bus students brought up issues of race, money, class and politics. So is Lower Merion really institutionalizing racism? Or is it just a few angry parents making a whole lot of noise?

Here on the Main Line, we like things to look nice.

Take our gleaming, brand new high schools for example: Harriton High School, which will be ready for students this fall, and Lower Merion High School, to open a year later, are planned as state-of-the-art temples of learning. At the price of a $238 million investment, they promise 60 percent more square footage per student than the national average, fed with students via a fleet of “74 ‘green’ buses powered by compressed natural gas” and producing an overachieving teenage army of National Merit scholars, state Science Olympiad winners, All-State band members and championship tennis teams.

The schools themselves certainly do look nice—as they should, after all, in one of the wealthiest school districts in Pennsylvania. But the battle to figure out which students will fill them has turned out to be uglier than anyone ever anticipated.

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The nastiest part of this messy battle came on Jan. 12, when the school board finally issued a decision at the last redistricting forum. The divisions that had consumed the community for almost a year were coming to a head. Outside, in advance of the meeting, protesters held signs with slogans that ranged from mildly optimistic to plaintive to downright accusatory: “We stand together, we walk together.” “Don’t sacrifice our kids.” “No 3R—[it’s] institutional racism.” “Stop the discrimination.”

Inside the meeting, matters were no better. Dozens of parents stood up and spoke in two-minute increments—the maximum time allotted per individual—and gave impassioned pleas, angry pleas, sorrowful pleas, and pleas that ran so verbose that three women had to split the same speech into three consecutive parts (a sort of mommy filibuster). The speeches, and the parents’ ability to contain their anger, varied but nearly all the speakers were asking the school board for the same thing: not to sacrifice their children by bussing them to Harriton.

“I speak today as a citizen of Ardmore, but even more as a black man. I cannot accept the treatment of me and my family as second class citizens,” said South Ardmore’s Aaron Williams. “I’m not calling anyone a racist. But look at that word. Look at this plan. That you drew a line through the black community and you thought that was right.” Williams was so discouraged he left the meeting before the final decision was reached, as did many other African American parents in the audience. By the time the school board ruled against them, voting 6-2 in favor of the plan, about a third of parents had walked out.

Ask anyone in Lower Merion why the redistricting lines fell where they did and you’ll hear as many different answers as there are neighborhoods. Some say it was about race—according to the Inquirer, racial minorities comprise 32 percent of those being bussed, but less than 20 percent of the school population. Others say it’s socioeconomic diversity—sharing the wealth, or the lack thereof. Some call it good old-fashioned politics, pointing out that no school board members reside in South Ardmore or Narberth. And still others say it was a mere matter of trying to balance the best interests of all the students. So which is it: The shame of the suburbs? Or a few angry parents generating a lot of commotion?

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For those who didn’t spend the past year circulating petitions and organizing protests, we’ll back up a moment to the one thing most people can agree on: the reason redistricting had to happen in the first place.
When the campaign to modernize the high schools began in 2003, a community advisory board recommended building two new schools of equal size. The problem was that 70 percent of the population resides in the eastern part of the township; to equalize enrollment, several hundred students would have to be bussed out of their neighborhoods to Harriton. So, last spring, the school board held community forums and hired an independent consultant to begin a systematic process of redistricting. They brought a draft plan to the community last fall.

And that, according to opponents, is where everything went wrong.

Board member Diane DiBonaventuro, who voted against the final plan, said at the Jan. 12 meeting that she had watched a well-intentioned effort collapse in the process of revising the plan three times. “The board caved to pressure from the areas most affected, and instead of tweaking the plan we allowed it to be totally discarded,” she said. ”Whichever interest group made the most noise and was best represented was going to have their way.”

The final plan required 200 students, who would have been able to attend Lower Merion High, to attend Harriton, cherry-picking communities from isolated, meandering slices of South Ardmore, one of the township’s most racially diverse communities; north Narberth, one of the township’s least wealthy communities; and Penn Valley, all while retaining a walk zone around Lower Merion High where children can choose their own high school.

To put it another way, says Ardmore parent Kate Galer, who organized the protest before the school board meeting and another one that morning before school, “they took the path of least resistance—though there may be a lot more resistance than they anticipated.”

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“Redistricting,” says Doug Young, the school district’s spokesman, “is an emotional process and at some level there’s going to be discord. I don’t think there’s ever been a redistricting plan that everyone loves.” But he calls it a necessary give and take. “When you look at the final plan, the key factors were enrollment balance, and trying to disrupt the fewest students based on the current feeder patterns. … The plan was not developed based on socioeconomic or racial balance.”

To parents in Ardmore, though, it seems too convenient to be coincidental.

“Magically, the dividing line is right down the middle of the minority community,” says Andrew Trentacoste, a father of three who lives half a block outside Lower Merion High’s walk zone in Ardmore. He joined up with a new community group called Lower Merion Voices United for Equity in Education, which was born during this heated redistricting fight. “It is incredibly clear if you overlay a redistricting map with a census map, whether it’s socioeconomic status or racial diversity, that diversity lies right down the middle of the dividing line for the high schools. So it seems pretty obvious to me that this is about racial divisions. It feels like racial bussing, like the bussing they did back in the ’50s and ’60s.”

Regina Brown, a vocal South Ardmore resident, says it’s that way by design: “The walk zone for Lower Merion High School goes out for one mile in every direction except South Ardmore, where it stops six-tenths of a mile in a perfectly residential area. Why not just apply your own [one-mile walk zone] policy? Because then you can’t send minority kids to Harriton.”

Brown, like a lot of parents from Ardmore and Narberth, is angry—and not just about this redistricting plan. “We’ve taken the brunt of every single redistricting action since 1963. They’ve closed all of our neighborhood schools, they’ve sent our kids at one time, kids in a 15-block stretch, to five different elementary schools.” Those Ardmore and Narberth residents now being sent to Harriton will be bussed out of their neighborhoods for all 13 years of their school careers. The thing that really gets Brown going, though, is the fact that these communities don’t have any representation on the school board (where members technically serve in at-large capacities, not as proportional representatives). “We were the only ones who didn’t have someone on the inside,” she says. “Other communities complained and those communities had board members.”

In Narberth, parents are just as unhappy.

“Our town is only half a mile square,” says Maureen O’Leary, who has three children at Belmont Hills elementary. “I never in a million years thought they would take this little tiny town and divide it in half. Next year from Narberth there are 10 kids being redistricted to Harriton. There are more kids than that at my bus stop. That’s not a plan to balance schools. I don’t know what that is.”

The reality is, even those whose children weren’t affected say the plan—and the very process of creating it—was so problematic that even they are unhappy with the outcome.

Bobby Bonds, a Bala Cynwyd resident who has two children in the district, was actively involved and says he was disappointed by the outcome. He says “the community as a whole was adversely effected” by a process “limited in its out-of-the-box thinking or innovation.”

“There is needed healing as a result of the final decision … and some additional accommodation has to be sought,” he says. As to the part race may have played, he says, “I wouldn’t call it coincidental. But it’s more important to deal with it honestly and openly than to sensationalize it.”

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He’s not the only one who doesn’t want to sensationalize the issue of diversity, which first came up in the community values portion of the process but was never formally adopted by the school board as a redistricting objective. Yet parents throughout Ardmore say it was a central factor, and they’re crying institutional racism.

After all, it’s not the first time the topic of race has come up here.

In 2007, the NAACP Main Line Branch, a group called Concerned Black Parents, Inc., and the families of eight African American students from Lower Merion filed a class action suit against the school district, alleging that African American students are routinely segregated into “modified” or below-grade-level classes, resulting in a substandard education.

And while the school district has made Adequate Yearly Progress as prescribed by No Child Left Behind since 2004, their report card still includes some alarming statistics. In math, for example, 89 percent of students are proficient, whereas only 51 percent of black students and only 53 percent of economically disadvantaged students were deemed proficient. And the older they got in the district the more black students fell behind. In the third grade, 10 percent of African American students were at “below basic” level in math, compared to 1 percent of all students. In seventh grade, 20 percent were below basic, compared to 6 percent of all students. By 11th grade, 46 percent of black students and only 8 percent of all students tested at below basic levels in math.

However, the school board is making this gap it’s top priority, says Young, taking steps like aggressively hiring diverse faculty and eliminating Modified courses.

Rev. Albert Davis Jr. of Ardmore’s Mount Calvary Baptist Church and president of the Main Line branch of the NAACP says there’s been some improvement. “They’re trying to address it,” he says. “I think No Child Left Behind has opened up a lot of concerns in areas where there may have been lots of divisions.”

Still, when it comes to redistricting, Davis doesn’t see much progress. This is the third time he’s stepped in during redistricting arguments, and he says the board was even less amenable this time than last time to his community’s concerns. As to whether the plan was in part racially motivated, Davis says, “That’s how it looks to me. Let’s be real. If you take a community that’s as small as this community is, and you take one street and say all the kids on this side can have a choice and you take all the kids on the other side say they have to go Harriton, what does that look like? We don’t feel it looks right.”

He, along with parents in Ardmore, ultimately filed four complaints with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, alleging that the plan places a disproportionate burden on African American students. As of February, the office was still determining whether to pursue an investigation, according to a spokesman.

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By all accounts, the redistricting process has resulted in a schism that Lower Merion may not soon be able to repair.

One school board member said she had witnessed the anger at the board’s own redistricting meetings generate “fear and intolerance in some of our middle school students.”

And plenty of people are still enraged about one very public gaffe on the part of the school district. The district had omitted one of Ardmore parent Aaron William’s comments from a video of the final redistricting meeting. (Superintendent Chris McGinley quickly reversed that decision: “While our policy might have allowed us to edit the tape, it is clear that the edit has had unintended consequences and the decision added more fuel to an already hot fire,” he wrote in a letter to parents.)

One woman said she had already moved her family out of Narberth to Merion Station to sidestep the redistricting lines.

And Brown says the fallout goes further than that. She says those who filed the complaints with the Department of Education are often hesitant to come forward: “The district has a history of being pretty brutal with anyone who tries to take legal action against them. … So a lot of people are very concerned that if they do complain they do it in a highly confidential way.”

Other parents say it’s more the community response that they’re dreading. “There are people that are not talking to me anymore because I’ve been so vocal about this,” says Galer, who organized the protests. And to be honest, says the volunteer on the township’s environmental council, she’s not so sure she’ll want to continue working with them either.

“The people that get up and complain are painted as crazy, are painted as whiners; but it’s hard not to sound like you’re whining when this never happens to anybody else,” O’Leary says. And Trentacoste adds: “It’s easier for people to say it’s just a small group of people making a big deal than it is to acknowledge that they might have supported a plan based in institutional racism. But we are, in our own small little slice of the world, doing racial bussing.”

Still, the rest of the community doesn’t necessarily want to hear it anymore. Many said off the record that they felt these parents were blowing things out of proportion, taking an always-emotional process too personally. And others said it wasn’t exactly accurate to conflate Narberth’s and South Ardmore’s concerns, to mix the very real issue of a racial achievement gap in our schools with trivial redistricting concerns.
“This was set up in such a way that it was every community for itself,” admits Sarah Hagearty Nalbantian, a Bala Cynwyd mother of two who circulated petitions, attended community and school board meetings and spoke repeatedly on behalf of her neighborhood. “But I don’t think there was any overt discrimination.”
And, she adds, regarding the now-bussed neighborhoods, “Some of those people I truly feel for, and others, while I hear their voice, I don’t feel as impacted by their concerns or their complaints.”

Meanwhile, school board elections are fast approaching. And a plea for support from the township’s Democratic leadership, which is endorsing a bipartisan slate for upcoming school board elections, has fueled fresh outrage in Ardmore and Narberth, largely thanks to this line in an email from top Democrats making the rounds in Lower Merion: “If Narberth and Ardmore were to get their School Board representative—what about all the other communities that should be represented proportionately?” Community members see the plan as an attempt to squeeze them out of school board representation yet again.

Not quite, according to Bruce Reed, president of Lower Merion’s Board of Commissioners and one of the memo’s signees. He says the point is to “retain a very capable school board,” rather than exclude anyone in particular. “It’s by no means preclusive. I would be very interested to have someone from the South Ardmore community, for example, on the combined slate.”

In other words, the memo implies, redistricting may seem like a big deal right now. But it will blow over, and at that point we’ll need quality school board members, not reactionaries.

After all, they tell us that—even after this messy, ugly, nasty redistricting fight—we’ll still have one of the finest school districts in the country. “To some level that’s not going to soften the blow, but I think at the back of their minds people do have a lot of pride in our top-notch public schools,” says the ever-optimistic Young.

For those in South Ardmore’s African American community though, that may not be enough.

“It’s not over,” says Rev. Davis, “I’ll say that.”

1. I wish I had a list of every person who has said to me, “busing your child to Harriton is no big deal,” so I could have given THEIR child a seat on the bus! Would you like your child to have my child’s seat on the bus, Ms. Nalbantian? I bet you would very quickly feel impacted by the concerns and complaints of others.

   Posted by Judy Diehl | March 5, 2009, 3:37 pm

2. What this article (as well as most other articles about this issue) fails to make plain is that this plan does not achieve ANY of the outcomes that redistricting was supposed to achieve.

   The high schools were not equalized; the middle schools were not even touched, let alone equalized. The ONLY change was to send a handful of students away from the only local school they had left.

   This can’t have been worth the time and money, let alone the damage to these two communities.

   Posted by Helene Speer | March 6, 2009, 7:48 pm

3. What needs to be addressed is what happened to the process that the school board set out from the beginning? A very clear path was set and not followed, which allowed the process to quickly lose integrity and trust. I don’t know how that can be repaired. The current school board should be ashamed of themselves for allowing the process to spiral out of control the way that it did.

   Posted by Priscilla Danz | March 10, 2009, 12:38 pm

4. guys can move to other places to live.

   Posted by who ever | March 26, 2009, 10:58 am

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