‘Liberal Ann Arbor?’
Ann Arbor — a city that has long touted a liberal reputation — has been virtually paralyzed on the issue of school segregation for more than 20 years. While hundreds of other school districts nationwide have desegregated either voluntarily or under court order, Ann Arbor lags behind, maintaining 8 racially segregated schools. Ann Arbor’s immobility on desegregation raises serious questions about the commitment of the community — in the forefront of civil rights action in the 1960s — to achieve integrated schools. Despite the city's liberal image, the strongest community pressure evident in segregation problems has been to keep things the same. Coupled with school boards that have appointed committee after committee since 1963 to study segregation problems but refused to adopt a plan, and virtually no push from the black community to desegregate, racial balance problems in Ann Arbor schools have actually grown worse over the past two decades. “I am not surprised there hasn't been more pressure to desegregate schools,” said former school board member John Powell. “Ann Arbor is given the label of being liberal primarily because we are in a university community which espouses liberal ideas. But if you look deep within the heart of the community… We are conservative many ostensibly liberal members of the community gave verbal support to integration, but opposed actual plans that called for their children to be bussed or transferred to another school. Making changes is not easy.” said former school board member Lana Pollack, now a democratic state senator representing Ann Arbor. “If things are going alright for the majority of the system people will say: ‘Why change?’” As a result, the board's reluctance to act on segregation problems has received little public criticism — from newspaper editorials, black leaders or parents. Ann Arbor News editorials have not taken a strong stand on desegregation. Instead, most of The News’ editorials took a questioning approach to the issue, asking the board to clarify its intentions. Added former School Board President Wendy Barhydt: “You can't stay in office very long if people don't think what you're doing is right. Mostly the opinion we got from the public said that what we were doing was right. You represented their viewpoint so they elect and re-elect you.” The laws on this issue are clear, however. Since the historic 1954 case of Brown vs. Board of Education in which the US Supreme Court ruled that separate education was inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional, school districts have been ordered to desegregate. The 1965 closing of Jones Elementary School (75 percent black) was the district's first and only move to desegregate. The plan involved busing primarily black pupils to schools across the district — a method opposed by black parents then and in later board attempts to improve racial balance. That move — which former Ann Arbor mayor and black leader Albert Wheeler called a “dismal failure” — doomed future moves to desegregate. Studies conducted after the Jones closing said black children felt out of place at their new schools and that their academic performance did not dramatically improve. In 1977, the state Department of Education issued guidelines that encouraged school districts to improve racial balance at schools in which the percentage of black or white students was 15% above or below the district wide average. Eight Ann Arbor Elementary schools — Bryant, Dicken, Freeman, Lakewood, Mack, Newport, Northside and Stone — are currently racially imbalanced and had been for as long as 10 years before the state guidelines were issued. Trustees have been aware of these facts, but they are rarely discussed at school board meetings. Instead, almost like clockwork, boards have appointed committees to study racial balance about every five years. Opting to appoint a committee was usually justified as a strategy to avoid dividing the community over the issue. But the board's consistent failure to act on each committee's recommendations has left some segments of the community bitter, frustrated and questioning the board's sincerity. This year a newly appointed "Committee on Excellence '' is studying desegregation for the fifth time in 22 years. The closest Ann Arbor came to implementing a districtwide desegregation plan was the lastminute efforts of a liberal-majority board in June 1980. The liberals, led by Trustees Kathleen Dannemiller and Pollack, waited until the week before they left office to vote on a controversial desegregation plan which passed by a 6 3 vote. But by November, their conservative successors had voted to rescind the plan, putting an abrupt end to the liberal faction’s last minute attempt at desegregation. The liberal board members have been faulted for waiting so long to move the desegregation plan through. Former Superintendent Harry Howard has also been criticized for not taking a stronger stand on the issue. Dannemiller admits that if she had to do it over again she would spend less time trying to achieve "consensus" on the board and simply take a stand. Dannemiller said the liberals were "slapped in the face" by voters in the June 1980 election in which desegregation was a central issue. "Compromising to get community consensus is a naive way to achieve desegregation," Dannemiller now believes. "But there was a fear of polarizing the community then, so we chose to go for community consensus. What we did was the only way we could move forward and stay together. You sit up there and mean the best for kids… but you're not sure that you're right, and if you're not sure you're right, it gets real hard to do." Howard refused to comment on why desegregation problems have lingered for so long. He would only say that "nothing will happen unless the community and the board get ready to do something about it."Liberal ex-trustees now criticize Howard for that cautious attitude. They say stronger leadership could have made a difference. Howard was superintendent during that marathon seven-hour board meeting in November of 1930, when the bitter liberal-conservative split on the board mirrored the division in the community over the issue. "I don't think there's an issue that more clearly defines liberals and conservatives," Barhydt said in a recent interview. Curiously missing in that division, however, was a voice from the black community. The Ann Arbor chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (which lost its charter from 1978 to 1983 because of membership drops) has not taken a strong stand on desegregation. In part, this was due to black parents who opposed several proposed plans in the late 1960s to bus black children from Mack School to predominantly white schools. The parents said they supported racial integration but objected to being the sole group bearing the burden of desegregation. The local NAACP chapter maintained a cooperative relationship with the schools, and was confident that the trustees would make good on their promises to improve the quality of education for blacks, said Wheeler, who was president of the local and state NAACP chapters at the time. "We were interested in desegregation, but not just for desegregation’s sake," said Wheeler. "Our primary goal was a better academic learning environment. If desegregation could help that, fine." Former School Superintendent Scott Westerman, now the education school dean at Eastern Michigan University, said administrators were discouraged by the vigorous opposition to the proposed busing plans at Mack. "The board was bruised by the negative response to the proposal for desegregation at Mack and felt less confident in finding solutions after that, or less confident that it was an urgent matter for resolution," said Westerman, who held the top school post from 1967-1971. "It was there haunting members, but never was it of sufficient urgency to make it the primary objective of the board." Conservatives have traditionally opposed desegregation efforts by arguing that changing district boundary lines would destroy neighborhood schools by shuffling students to different schools for no sound educational reason. “I support — I even promote — integration,” said former conservative trustee Wendy Raeder. “I hope that one day all schools will be racially balanced. But I do not support desegregation as a tool. My first commitment is to neighborhood schools.” Former conservative trustee Paul Weinhold, who led the November 1980 move to rescind the previously approved desegregation plan, blames city housing patterns for the existence of segregated schools. School boards are not responsible for redrawing boundary lines to improve racial balance and should not be, Weinhold maintains, because such an “overt action” could put the district in legal danger. Instead, Weinhold recommended preserving neighborhood schools and making educational improvements in targeted schools. The neighborhood school view — which has been called “legal fiction” by one prominent national civil rights attorney — was considered at least partial fiction by liberal trustees when they cited the 10-year practice of busing North Campus children across the city. Like the Jones School pupils, the children from North Campus are predominantly low-income, minority groups. Ann Arbor school boards have approved the busing of these children since 1970 to schools outside their neighborhood that would otherwise have very low or no minority enrollment. “It’s OK to bus North Campus children all the way across town to a neighborhood that would otherwise be in danger of being called a white-impacted school,” Pollack said during the 1980 meeting. “It’s not OK to bus 20 percent of that distance if the kids are different — different, frankly, because of their parents' political clout.'' In 1972, then-School Superintendent Bruce McPherson threatened to sue the Board of Education when it rejected his plan to pair the overcrowded and predominantly white Clinton Elementary School and a temporary new school, predominantly black, on the opposite side of the l-94. Without an integration plan, McPherson warned, the location of the temporary school, Clinton II, would draw students from the two predominantly black federal housing projects in the neighborhood and create a segregated school. "I was disappointed with the board's decision because I saw it was going to cause some long-range problems for the district," McPherson said last week in a telephone interview from Chicago. ''Someone would be breathing down the board's neck requiring it to desegregate schools.'' Today, Bryant Elementary School (which opened in 1973 and replaced Clinton II) has a 50 percent black enrollment, making it one of the eight schools considered racially identifiable under state guidelines. McPherson, who was superintendent from 1971-1973, said he is not saying "I told you so" to the district, but is sorry that the problem still exists. "My concern is probably greater because I expect it could have been avoided." Currently a professor of education at the University of Illinois in Chicago, McPherson said the boards have been allowed to study and re-study racial balance problems because Ann Arbor seems to suffer from a kind of ideological "identity crisis" which often immobilizes the community. "Ann Arbor has difficulty making decisions because of stresses that pull it in a number or directions, and I think it has been going on for a long time. I think its reputation as a liberal university community is probably accurate. But there is much more of a balance between liberal and conservative elements than people realize. "At the Farmer's Market on Saturday morning, everything looks rosy. But get a controversial proposal on the table and you have those for and against it — and it soon becomes easier not to do anything at all."