CHAPTER 7
The Urban-Suburban Program
In the Black Third Ward of 1965, six-year-old Kirk Holmes was part of Rochester royalty.
His maternal grandparents, Stanley and Dolores Thomas, were co-owners of the Pythodd Club, a legendary jazz venue that hosted musicians like Miles Davis, George Benson, and Wes Montgomery. Stanley was a leader of the local Elks and Masons and had been the first Black person to work as a department manager in city government. Kirk’s great-grandfather was one of the first Black students at Cornell University. A child could hardly have been better suited to succeed in the neighborhood school, School 19, just a few blocks from the Holmes house. Kirk’s mother, though, had other ideas. “I think she’d already seen there was a decline in the school system from when she was a child,” he said. “She was very interested in us having a better experience.” That is how Holmes, on the first day of first grade in 1965, found himself on an unfamiliar bus ride to Briarwood School in West Irondequoit, one of twenty-five pioneers in a momentous experiment in education called the Urban-Suburban Interdistrict Transfer Program.1
State education commissioner James Allen’s 1963 letter asking about desegregation efforts had created a stir in the Rochester City School District. By contrast, suburban Monroe County school districts, including West Irondequoit, mostly ignored it. Race relations were fine, they responded, because there were hardly any minority students with whom their white students might quarrel. But “on more careful consideration, it became apparent to several sensitive [West Irondequoit] board members that there was indeed a problem of racial isolation in reverse in Irondequoit.” At the time there were 2 Black students out of 5,800 in the district.2
A series of community conversations and closed-door school board meetings culminated in March 1965 with a unanimous board resolution recognizing that the racial makeup of the town “[did] not provide the environment in which . . . intercultural experience can take place” and accepting the school district’s obligation to solve that problem. A much-publicized set of cross-district conferences the previous year and RCSD’s ongoing experiment with open enrollment pointed the way toward the solution, which was announced the following month. The district said that it would accept eighty Rochester first-graders as part of the open enrollment process, a figure that was later revised downward to twenty-five. It also pledged to develop “curriculum materials dealing with minority group problems.” Walter Crewson, the associate state education commissioner, called the plan a “major breakthrough,” unprecedented in the nation.3
This was the beginning of Urban-Suburban, then and now the most prominent plank in Monroe County’s meager desegregation platform. Its legacy is decidedly mixed. Through it, generations of minority children have found an alternative to RCSD, even as the vast majority of applicants have been turned away. The program earned high praise as a national innovation in the late 1960s but has since been bypassed by more comprehensive efforts, voluntary or otherwise, in cities in every region of the country. An evolving state funding mechanism has turned it into a budget hustle for suburban districts with declining enrollment. Standing in the way of change or expansion is the same prejudice it was intended to address more than half a century ago when Holmes, age six, first stepped off the bus in Irondequoit. “I remember being kind of nervous and scared of walking into a strange environment. It was fairly intimidating,” he said. “I don’t think I had a real understanding of why, but I knew I stood out and I felt very self-conscious and nervous about being the oddball.”4
The program grew out of a number of fledgling voluntary desegregation efforts in both the city and the suburbs. Among the first was a series of cross-town field trips within the city school district, bringing together students from majority-Black Madison High School with those from schools that were exclusively white or nearly so. The first such conference took place in November 1963 at Madison, with twelfth graders visiting from John Marshall High School, which had 1 Black student in a student body of more than 1,500; another followed several months later with students from Charlotte High School. The idea then crossed into the suburbs, with Madison students joining peers from Brighton and East Irondequoit to talk in general terms about racism. One Madison student felt obliged to declare that intermarriage was not his aim.5
The common denominator was Norman Gross, the strong-minded, sharp-tongued head of the social studies department at Madison. Born in Rochester in 1923, Gross received his PhD from the University of Rochester and took a teaching job in the city, quickly rising through the ranks to become president of the Rochester Teachers Union in 1956 at age thirty-three. He was also active in the NAACP and, along with a Black science teacher named Regina Brown, started the first Black history course in the district.6 His daughter, Deborah Gitomer, said that growing up Jewish during World War II, as well as seeing his parents divorce at a time when that was uncommon, gave Gross empathy with marginalized groups and a penchant for combat. “He was just one to fight back—physically at first, but then he got into these causes,” she said. “He was always a champion of the under-dog. . . . He was more accepting of people with different ideas and was willing to defend that.”7
Gross believed strongly that Black students’ isolation would create an even greater social chasm in future generations. “The next generation of adult Blacks are becoming very embittered toward white society,” he warned a suburban audience in 1968. “This problem is not just the city’s; it’s the county’s, too. We are all in this together whether we like it or not.”8 His outlook, experience, and willingness to scrap made him an ideal partner for West Irondequoit, where Superintendent Earle Helmer and the school board were committed to a change themselves. “We had sort of a segregated society, and we thought it would be good for our kids to mix with other kids,” one board member, James Littwitz, said forty-nine years after Urban-Suburban began. “It turns out they get along fine if you leave them alone.”9
They were not, in fact, left alone—at least not at first. Before Rochester children even arrived in Irondequoit three town residents sued to stop the program, arguing that the district had pushed it through without public involvement and that it was racially discriminatory against white Irondequoit children. The main plaintiff, Doyle O. Etter, said that the district should not be occupying itself with a “purely social matter” like racial segregation. The plaintiffs’ request for an injunction was rejected the day before school began and the case was eventually dismissed after a series of unsuccessful appeals. James Allen also rejected an administrative objection, writing that it was “too late in the day to maintain any such position.” Inside the schools, meanwhile, some teachers harbored biases of their own. In a survey distributed before the program began, the eight participating first-grade teachers in West Irondequoit unanimously said that they “would not be willing to admit Negroes to close kinship by marriage.”10
FIGURE 7.1. Norman Gross, founding director of the Urban-Suburban Interdistrict Transfer Program, seen in 1982. Photo by David Cook, courtesy of the Democrat and Chronicle.
Critics of the program in Irondequoit eventually shifted their activity to school board campaigns. An antibusing candidate named Stephen Rounds overwhelmingly won a seat in the summer of 1965, just two months after the program was announced, trouncing his more moderate opponent by twenty points in an election featuring the highest voter turnout in years. He was joined on the board by fellow program critics Rebecca Herdle (in 1966) and Marilynne Anderson (in 1967). District residents also turned down a bond proposition and the 1967 district budget. Gross dismissed these opponents as the town’s “resident bigots.”11
Early participants in Urban-Suburban reported a mostly positive experience, at least during their elementary school years. Some racial incidents were born of curiosity; one researcher noticed many instances of children questioningly touching the skin or hair of a child of the other race. Mary Halpin, one of Kirk Holmes’s teachers at Briarwood, recalled a white girl asking a Black boy who was sucking his thumb whether it was chocolate or vanilla. “I think they were a little unsure, but on the other hand, I wonder if they really saw color,” she said. “They must have . . . but I didn’t sense any unfriendliness. They played with each other.”12
Middle school and high school were where many Urban-Suburban students first ran up against explicit racism in their suburban settings. Holmes recalled a middle school teacher who wouldn’t recommend him for advanced mathematics despite his high grades in her class, informing him that Black people lacked the “intellectual capacity” for math. He got his hands on the advanced textbook and tested into the class the following year. He later achieved a nearly perfect score on the math portion of the SATs and eventually got engineering and business degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University. “Some teachers I’ll be indebted to forever and think fondly of,” he said. “I had others who did everything they could to hold me down and put me down.” The logistics of the program grew trickier (and still do) in high school, when sports practice and other after-school events ran late into the evening. Some suburban parents assumed the role of proxy parents, driving Urban-Suburban students back to the city in the evening or letting them sleep over. “We never, ever missed out on anything,” one early Brighton enrollee, Yvette Singletary, said.13
In 1967 West Irondequoit commissioned a review of the program, interviewing teachers, administrators, and other school staff about their experiences. Their responses revealed both implicit and blatant racism that the Black children may have overlooked or chosen to ignore. “At the beginning, ‘you dirty n——’ was a recurrent comment by the Irondequoit children,” one teacher wrote. Another reported: “When we found the word ‘Black’ standing for ‘bad’ in the literature, one child said [to a Black girl], in a derogatory tone, ‘Just like you.’ The child’s parent is actively opposed to the program.”
Indeed, the teachers’ overall conclusion had more to do with the paucity of the Irondequoit students’ cultural understanding than with the progress of the Black children. “The students here are so much alike in their thinking. So many of them are from Kodak families,” one wrote. “[They] don’t have any interest in anything but themselves and their neighborhood. . . . They know plenty of bigoted comments, however, that they use whenever we discuss current events dealing with race.” Another said: “I have a sophomore who hasn’t been downtown in four years. Most are so sheltered that the existence of different cultural viewpoints is meaningless.”
Many teachers complained about the lack of curricular materials that represented Black people fairly, or at all. One teacher said that during a geography lesson she decided to skip the section on city living because it contained only pictures of slums. The mere fact of a diverse classroom, though, was a powerful teaching tool, for Black children but especially for white children: “The Negro [in the classroom] was clearly the prime stimulant of serious thinking. In that class the students brought in and knowledgeably discussed a greater diversity of ideas than appeared to have been absorbed from the readings, which had been selected for diversity. . . . Students also observed the decrease in their own use of stereotypes about Negroes, other societies and in their own society as they found that they simply didn’t fit their observations.”14
Other suburban districts were watching the West Irondequoit experiment closely and taking tentative steps of their own. In the summer of 1964, Brighton had accepted twenty-five children from School 19 into its summer school program. The experiment was organized and largely funded by the parent-teacher organizations at both schools and, it was concluded, allowed the children to “experience a break in their usual patterns of separateness.” It continued for two more years before Brighton decided to take Rochester children during the school year as well. Brighton was joined in 1966 by the Harley School, a private school, as well as by Brockport, where another desegregated summer school program had been running on the SUNY Brockport campus. Two years later Penfield, Pittsford, and Wheatland-Chili joined, along with several other private and parochial schools; by 1969, more than three thousand city students were participating. As Project UNIQUE noted hopefully a few years into the program: “References to ‘your children’ and ‘our children’ are diminishing and comments about ‘children’ are becoming increasingly common.”15
The decision to take part in the program drew opposition in other districts just as it had in West Irondequoit. The leading antibusing advocate in Brighton, real estate agent David Cromwell, said: “We do not object to Negroes living in Brighton, but we pay a premium to live here and associate with certain kinds of people. I don’t want to sound snobbish, but this is a fact.” A newspaper survey in Brighton and Pittsford showed stark differences in opinion. Some parents were in favor; others agreed with one mother who said: “It would be very cruel to inner-city children to expect them to compete socially with Pittsford children. I feel sure they wouldn’t be able to make real friends.”16 Nor did this opposition end once the program had been adopted. As late as 1972, a poll showed that 60 percent of suburban parents wished that their districts would stop accepting Black students through Urban-Suburban.17
Other districts avoided the controversy altogether by opting against participation. The Hilton superintendent polled administrators and teachers in 1967 and found that though the majority believed that the district bore some responsibility in “equalizing educational opportunity” with the city, only three of thirty-two were in favor of joining Urban-Suburban.18 The topic brought opposing residents to school board meetings in huge numbers. An East Rochester crowd told Norman Gross that they opposed the program because of fears of violence and interracial marriage. In some cases, opposition organizations formed. “The Black community is sick of the ‘general assembly’ suburban school board meetings where 600 white people turn up to decide if twenty-five little Black children can go to school in their district,” Gross complained. Nonetheless, he was traveling through the county well into the 1970s haranguing suburban districts to join the program, to no avail. Webster studied the question on and off for ten years before ultimately voting against participation in March 1978. Board members said that they were interested in pursuing other avenues toward integration. Gross didn’t buy it. “The people in Webster just seem not to want minority kids out there, unless they just happen to move out there and they [the residents] can’t help it,” he said. A poll of residents released by the district the previous month showed 75 percent opposition.19
In an essay submitted to the Black magazine about . . . time, Gross chided suburban residents for shedding “crocodile tears” over the fate of Black city residents and dispensed with their purported reasons not to participate in Urban-Suburban. “Unfortunately, even if we distill all the arguments and rationalizations opposing the program, we are left with one impurity—a racist attitude,” he wrote. “If only people would come to grips with the sad reality of their attitudes, perhaps, they would try to make some accommodations for it.”20
At the same time, the program was struggling to stay afloat financially. It received most of its initial funding from the US Department of Education, in particular the Title I program for educating children in poverty. In 1974 a law was passed prohibiting the use of Title I or other federal funds to bus children for the purpose of racial desegregation. The state then took over most of the transportation costs and the program became dependent on irregular grant funding from public and private sources. Gross waged annual battles with state and federal officials, begging for additional funding and shrinking the program when he didn’t receive it; Rochester parents filed a federal lawsuit in 1974 to keep it operational. Because the state busing funding did not cover all costs, the city and suburban districts swapped students like hostage negotiators in an attempt to even out their costs. “It’s become a nightmare of red tape and contradiction,” Gross said in 1975. “Their [federal officials’] positions are so idiotic, it’s unbelievable.” The program’s enrollment dipped by several hundred students until 1982, when the east-side BOCES assumed the role of fiscal sponsor and the districts agreed to pay for it out of their own per-pupil funding.21
The program found its financial footing just as two important changes were happening; both had the effect of greatly reducing the program’s public profile for several decades to come. First Gross, its founding director and most public advocate, retired in 1982.With him went much of the energy and most of the institutional knowledge behind the push for expansion. More important was a noticeable shift in the national discussion about racial equity in education. By the mid-1980s most communities had either gone through their reckoning with court-ordered segregation or, like Rochester, managed to escape it. The integrationist fervor of the Civil Rights era was replaced by a trust in technical rather than social fixes. The age of accountability was beginning, and Urban-Suburban found itself on an island. Enrollment fell from 1,100 in 1980 to fewer than 400 in 2003. The program administrators turned their priority from recruitment of new suburban districts to the support of the students already participating.22
“It was like this secretive thing,” former Fairport superintendent William Cala said. “[All the county superintendents] would meet monthly and there would be an Urban-Suburban report and I didn’t even know what it was. . . . Absolutely fear is what drove the whole thing underground, and it drove the spirit of not talking about it.”23
Under Cala’s direction, Fairport in 2003 became the seventh participating suburban district. The motivation to join came after a series of “mini racial conflicts” in the middle school and high school. To address the problem, Cala invited a local speaker on diversity to present at the high school. Afterward the speaker, a Black man, told Cala that a student had yelled a racial epithet at him as he walked into the building. “That was it for me,” he said. “It fortified my thought I had to do something. . . . I told the board: ‘I believe the only thing that will change the attitude is to have more kids of color in the school, period.’” The board was supportive of the idea of joining Urban-Suburban and a series of public hearings and information sessions did not bring about the level of vitriol Cala had been expecting. The resolution to join passed unanimously and Fairport quickly became one of the program’s most active participants.24
In 1965 West Irondequoit’s action prompted several other schools and school districts to join as well. Fairport’s decision, on the other hand, did not prove catalytic. The Honeoye Falls-Lima, Hilton, and Churchville-Chili school districts all considered the program from 2006 to 2011 and ultimately decided against participating. Churchville-Chili’s school board determined that the program “did not match the district’s core beliefs” and instead announced that it would “increase dialogue on the topic.”25
“I thought it would be a baptism of fire getting the program into another district after 38 years, and then the rest of them would just fall into place because they’d see it wasn’t so difficult,” Cala said. “That movement didn’t come until later. . . . The kind of response you got from other boards and superintendents was frightening, and if they don’t want to hear it, you’re not going to get very far.”26 The opposition that Cala described was, for the moment, limited to private conversations among district leaders. That remained the case until 2014, when the outcry that program administrators had long feared came boiling to the surface in the west-side district of Spencerport.
The Urban-Suburban debate in Spencerport began innocuously enough in October 2014 with a presentation from Superintendent Michael Crumb to the school board. He repeated the talking points provided by the program. Principals are allowed to choose the students they take in, with parental involvement a key consideration. Transportation and all other costs are covered. Nearly all students persist and graduate from the district they’re placed in. A community forum was scheduled for early December in advance of a vote on joining for the 2015–16 school year.27
The district had prepared responses to the questions it thought residents might have. Instead they heard racist arguments of the kind honed during the fights over busing in Rochester in the late 1960s. What if, some asked, the city children took all the spots on the basketball team? What if their properties values went down? Why didn’t the families who wanted to attend Spencerport schools just buy houses in town? One man insisted that he’d stop paying property taxes if the vote went through; a recent alumna said she’d never send her children to Spencerport schools if the city children were there as well. “Personally I feel we’re sending the wrong message in this program,” one resident said. “We’re saying that working hard and doing what’s necessary for your family is not necessary because someone else will pick up the tab. . . . People should learn a work ethic to get something they want in this world.” The crowd of hundreds, a clear majority, shouted its approval.28
Sitting near the front of the auditorium were Jeremy and Rachel Ouimet. He is white and she is Black; some of their six children, three from previous marriages and three they’d had together, were part of the district’s 13 percent nonwhite enrollment. As neighbor after neighbor took the podium to warn about “those kids,” they heard very clearly a reference to their own family. “When we found out Spencerport was considering this, we were excited,” Rachel Ouimet said. “We didn’t think there’d be any pushback whatsoever. . . . This may be ignorant, but I thought the community had gotten past that. But when you hear the racism, you realize how segregated our schools really are.”29
Supporters of the program, including the teachers association and several Spencerport residents who taught in participating districts, came out in greater numbers at a second public forum to voice their opinions. The district cut the number of Rochester students it intended to take by half in an effort to appease the detractors, and the board ultimately approved the measure by a unanimous vote at the end of February. “We’re not talking about social engineering or any other nonsense that’s come out of this discourse,” board member Gary Bracken said. “We’re talking about a small group of kids that wants a chance for a better education.”30
Spencerport was the first site of Urban-Suburban’s second great burst of energy, from 2014 to 2017, coinciding with its fiftieth anniversary. In the fall of 2014 the director, Theresa Woodson, and West Irondequoit superintendent Jeff Crane, the chairman of the program’s board of directors, undertook a tour of the outstanding districts to ask what was keeping them from joining. They proved more persuasive than Gross ever had, cajoling another seven districts to participate. They were helped along the way by a wrinkle in the state’s school finance formula, a tweak in the eligibility rules and, perhaps, the heat emanating from the conflagration in Spencerport, where the two forums became touchstone moments in an otherwise languid countywide investigation into racism and privilege.
Even in defeat, the Spencerport opposition ultimately succeeded in reintroducing an issue that most thought had already been settled. It is the definition of racism, opponents said, for the program to disallow Rochester’s white students based solely on the color of their skin. That is the same point that the parents of a nine-year-old girl in Irondequoit had raised sixteen years earlier.
According to the original Urban-Suburban charter, the purpose was “the reduction of minority group isolation.” Nevertheless, a few white Rochester students gained admission to suburban schools, including at least one in the inaugural 1965 class, which an RCSD official said had been “chosen without regard for race.” Norman Gross dismissed these as aberrations and called them instances of parental “subterfuge” rather than policy. “It was well understood [at the beginning] that white children were not eligible for transfer from Rochester to suburban schools,” he wrote in 1998. “Obviously, the transfer of white students to suburban schools would not reduce minority group isolation.”31
His comments came in response to the most significant challenge to Urban-Suburban since its funding crisis was resolved. That challenge came in the person of Jessica Haak, a white city resident whose parents had managed to enroll her in West Irondequoit’s Iroquois Middle School. Haak’s mother, Laurie Brewer, said no one ever told her about the minority-only rule, even when the family had a face-to-face meeting with an assistant principal before the school year began. Nonetheless, program administrators realized that Haak was white the first week of the 1998 school year and ejected her from the program. Her enrollment, they said, would “breach the integrity” of the program and could jeopardize its funding, which required faithful adherence to its charter mission. Instead Haak returned to School 39 in RCSD while her parents retained an attorney.32 They filed suit and, in January 1999, obtained an injunction from US District Court Judge David Larimer holding that the use of racial admissions criteria was unconstitutional. Haak packed her backpack up again and returned to Iroquois while BOCES put new admissions to Urban-Suburban on hold.33
For eighteen months the future of the program and its six hundred students was very much in doubt. As program advocates pointed out, the entire premise of Urban-Suburban was the shuffling of students to equalize the racial balance, at least in suburban schools. A prohibition on racial selection criteria would not only frustrate that effort but also run afoul of the program’s enabling legislation. The case was sent on to the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which in May 2000 reversed Larimer’s ruling—in particular, his decision to grant an injunction allowing Haak to attend Iroquois Elementary School immediately rather than allowing the case to proceed through the courts. In his majority opinion, Judge Chester Straub ruled that the injunction was premature. He then proceeded to the meatier question of whether reducing racial isolation could be considered a “compelling governmental interest.” The law on that point was far from settled. Haak’s attorneys and Larimer relied on the recently set precedent of Hopwood v. Texas. There, four white applicants to the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Law sued over their rejection, saying that it occurred because of the university’s affirmative action plan. The US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1996 upheld their case, ruling that the consideration of students’ race in admissions was unconstitutional.34
Hopwood became binding precedent in the Fifth Circuit after the US Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal. That did not, however, make it the law elsewhere in the country. As Straub wrote, “This Circuit has not previously taken the position that diversity, or other non-remedial state interests, can never be compelling in the educational setting.” He instead based his decision largely on an earlier precedent from the Second Circuit having to do with a voluntary desegregation plan in Queens’s Andrew Jackson High School. That plan from the 1970s allowed both white and minority students to transfer within the district, but only to schools where they would join a demographic minority—white students to mostly Black schools or vice versa. The plan was struck down as a court-ordered desegregation plan, but the underlying logic was affirmed: “The state has a compelling interest in ensuring . . . the continuation of relatively integrated schools for the maximum number of students.” Based on the precedent of Parent Ass’n of Andrew Jackson High Sch. v. Ambach, Straub wrote: “We conclude that we are bound [to rule] that a compelling interest can be found in a program that has as its object the reduction of racial isolation and what appears to be de facto segregation.”35
Coming on the heels of Hopwood, the court’s 2–1 ruling raised eyebrows. “I would be very surprised if this is going to hold up,” one expert said. Yet hold up it did. Rather than appealing the ruling, Haak’s family came to a settlement with the program. She was allowed to stay in West Irondequoit with the understanding that it did not create a precedent for the program. In June 2000 Urban-Suburban reopened its application process.36
The immediate crisis had passed but the feeling of uncertainty lingered. Program leaders knew that their standing remained susceptible to a more finely honed challenge in front of a different bench of judges. This instability only increased in 2007 when the US Supreme Court issued perhaps its most significant ruling on the question of school segregation since Milliken v. Bradley. The ruling addressed student placement plans in place in Seattle and Louisville, Kentucky, that used students’ race as a criterion in assigning them to schools. In a 5–4 ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts declared such an assignment protocol inadmissible under the logic of Brown v. Board of Education: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” The only saving grace from the districts’ perspective was a tempering concurrence by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the swing vote: “A district may consider it a compelling interest to achieve a diverse student population,” he wrote. “Race may be one component of that diversity, but other demographic factors, plus special talents and needs, should also be considered.” The case opened Urban-Suburban and similar plans across the country to broad challenge in the courts. In Rochester, however, the ruling had no effect. Cala, by then the RCSD interim superintendent, met with the six other participating suburban superintendents to discuss the development. “I said, ‘Here’s the deal, guys: You can’t go on selecting kids the way you’re selecting kids,’” Cala said. “And they didn’t do anything. They just kept on doing it the way they were doing it.”37
Roberts’s admonition may not have led to changes in the program in 2007, but it was very much in the minds of Urban-Suburban leaders in the winter of 2014–15 as Spencerport boiled over. Other districts joined the program with less public outcry—East Irondequoit, East Rochester, and Hilton in March, Kendall in April—but there, too, school board members and residents said that they’d prefer to see white students in Rochester included. Rush-Henrietta went further, saying that it would not participate unless the program governance board changed the fifty-year-old mission statement to put an “emphasis on increasing opportunities for economically disadvantaged city students rather than emphasizing race or ethnicity.”38
In June the board did just that. To the program’s original purpose of “voluntarily decreas[ing] racial isolation” the board added that it should “deconcentrate poverty and enhance opportunities for students in the Rochester City School District and in the suburban districts of the Greater Rochester Area.” That change in emphasis opened the way for poor white students from Rochester to apply to suburban schools. The following year three white children were chosen to attend such schools. “Hopefully, at least around the [governance board] table, we felt we were becoming even more inclusive and creating more opportunities for kids,” Crane said. “We’d been talking about the kids in the city who were not of color being part of the process and the Spencerport experience actually helped our decision-making by making it more urgent.”39
The following three years saw Honeoye Falls-Lima, Rush-Henrietta, and Webster join the program as well.40 All eight joining districts professed a strong interest in providing an option for Rochester students as well as exposing their own students to greater diversity. When explaining the program to their own board members and residents, though, they all added another important consideration: the opportunity to prop up sagging enrollment and make money in the process.
When students leave RCSD for another public option, including a suburban district or a charter school, they bring along their allotment of state education dollars, known as per-pupil funding. The New York State Education Department uses a variety of factors to determine the per-pupil figure for each district, and that figure can vary widely from one district to another. Rochester’s per-pupil figure is by far the highest in Monroe County, in recognition of the increased challenges many of its students face. When its students go to suburban schools with significantly lower per-pupil figures, those receiving districts pocket the difference in state funding. Multiplied by dozens or scores of students, the net impact for a suburban district can be substantial. The three districts with the highest Urban-Suburban enrollment in 2017–18—West Irondequoit, Pittsford, and Brighton—all took in more than $1 million in incremental state funding, an average of more than $9,000 per student. Overall, suburban districts generated a net revenue of $7.1 million from 807 Urban-Suburban students, or 0.8 percent of their total operating budgets that year.41
At the same time, nearly every Monroe County school district faced declining enrollment, jeopardizing their ability to offer some specialized classes or fill regular classes to capacity. In the wave of Urban-Suburban entrances from 2014 to 2017, every suburban district to join noted the benefit in terms of maintaining programs for its own students. “If you look at it from a sustainability standpoint, it starts to make sense for some districts,” East Rochester interim superintendent Richard Stutzman said in January 2015, a month before that district joined the program. “If people really took a hard look at our numbers and what we stand to gain out of this, most rational people would say it’s worth a shot.”42 A task force in Honeoye Falls-Lima (HFL) noted it had lost an average of forty-four students per year over the preceding five years. “The Urban-Suburban Program provides a mechanism for selectively increasing enrollment to maintain HFL’s current program offerings,” it wrote. “In addition, boosting enrollment through this program provides more incremental revenue to the district than if the increased enrollment occurred through families moving into the school district.”43
School officials in Rochester observed the same trend with less enthusiasm. After all, the reason the city has a higher per-pupil rate is its substantially higher proportion of students with disabilities or other special needs, none of whom were being selected to attend school in the suburbs. It is also responsible for busing the students to and from their suburban schools every day, an expense that totaled $1.8 million in 2014–15. “Suburban districts have asserted that the incoming state aid has proven to be a consistent revenue stream, which significantly more than offsets the expense,” the RCSD budget office observed in an internal memo. As one mother put it, shortly after pulling her son from Spencerport over what she believed was a racist incident: “It’s just like with the jail and prison system. Every person is a dollar amount.” Crane, Urban-Suburban’s most prominent backer until his retirement in 2018, acknowledged the issue but said that he considered the funding differential an admittedly unsavory means to a greater end. “I think most of the school districts are in there for the right reasons,” he said. “I think maybe there’s a couple that joined for the wrong reasons, but I’m hoping that once they see the good it does for all kids, their priorities will change.”44
The Jessica Haak case was decided by a narrow 2–1 opinion in the US Court of Appeals, with the second vote coming from Judge Fred I. Parker. In his brief concurring opinion, Parker pointed out that racial isolation—the social ill that Urban-Suburban purportedly addresses—had worsened markedly since 1965, with the proportion of minority students in RCSD more than tripling to 80 percent:
It is important to note that this program has been in existence for 35 years. The program’s goal, as acknowledged in the majority opinion, is reduction of racial isolation. . . . It is extremely difficult to see how this program has had any meaningful impact upon the existence of schools or school districts with “a predominant number or percentage of students of a particular racial/ethnic group.”
Therefore, even though the defendants may have had a sufficiently compelling interest to justify the program at its inception, it is difficult to see how the interest continues, given the program’s limited impact. If a compelling interest no longer exists, it seems to me that the entire program may fail as being unconstitutional, and the plaintiffs would have no remedy.45
The question, in other words, was not just whether the program was appropriately tailored to the governmental interest in question but also whether, after several generations, Urban-Suburban could still claim to be serving any relevant purpose.
Parker’s criticism touched a point that has been controversial since the first cohort of second graders from School 19 boarded an Irondequoit-bound bus in September 1965. The program’s advocates point to the academic opportunities that Rochester children have gained from participation, and the greater, if anecdotal, benefits to all children from racial integration. The initial mission statement, though, does not concern itself with providing benefits to the specific, fortunate children chosen to participate; it promises a community-wide reduction of racial isolation. As Norman Gross wrote: “The Urban-Suburban Transfer program is not a statistical exercise in which students become numbers and groups become totals. Our hope is to alter the current trend toward racial polarization by reducing racial imbalance in the schools.”46
Has such a reduction taken place? The answer, of course, is no. As early as 1967, a West Irondequoit teacher conceded: “What we have is two hand-picked Negroes in the class.”47 Greater Rochester, like many similar metro areas, is more segregated by race today than it ever has been. Was Parker right, then, to observe that the program “has [not] had any meaningful impact” on the relationship of minority and white students in Monroe County? Does Urban-Suburban do any good?
After some early, mostly qualitative indications of success in the late 1960s, Urban-Suburban has received relatively little scrutiny from either researchers or participating school districts. Then and now, media accounts of the program have focused on anecdotes of satisfied minority students and, ideally, their white suburban friends. Suburban districts have either committed to it or not; no one found an examination of its greater purpose and efficacy particularly convenient. One exception came in 1979, when researchers noted that high-achieving students were much more likely than others to leave city schools via Urban-Suburban. “One is to seriously question what impact the Urban-Suburban program is having on the district and those Black and Hispanic students left behind and not in the program,” they concluded.48 As the city school district slid, though, both in fact and reputation, its leverage in advocating for outside change declined. The scope and urgency with which Urban-Suburban was hatched came to be ignored.
The most comprehensive research into the program was conducted by Kara Finnigan, a professor at the University of Rochester’s Warner School of Education. She and her students obtained and meticulously compiled enrollment records from 1965 through the 1990s and conducted two dozen interviews with past and present program administrators, including suburban principals responsible for selecting students for their schools. Finnigan and fellow researchers have also placed Urban-Suburban into the larger national context of interdistrict exchange programs. Their conclusions—at least for those who defend the program as a meaningful countervailing force against school segregation—are discouraging.49
The selective enrollment standard for Urban-Suburban was established at the beginning, when West Irondequoit residents were assured that Rochester students in the inaugural class “would be chosen carefully for the ability and achievement qualifications which would enable [them] to fit easily into our class situations.”50 This care in selection was enforced in the administration of the program through a feedback loop from students and teachers. One early researcher in West Irondequoit noted:
As long as the city sent pupils to West Irondequoit who were average or better in ability and social adjustment, restraints seemed to be minimal. Those pupils who fell below these standards, however, seemed to create more problems for teachers than did similar white pupils. While no cause and effect relationship was identified, white pupils appeared to more readily reject Negro pupils who were unable to keep up or who became behavior problems. City and suburban administrators, through orientation activities and other information, encouraged the average ability, well-adjusted expectations of teachers.51
If anything, the choosing has become even more careful after fifty years. Like National Football League general managers scouting quarterback prospects, suburban administrators have full access to applicants’ academic records and conduct careful interviews with prospective students and their families. Enrollment at each school is capped to ensure that city students are only taking vacant seats in classrooms and not leading to additional costs. This aspect of Urban-Suburban—having a draft rather than a lottery—is unique among the handful of similar programs nationwide. Interdistrict choice programs in St. Louis, Hartford, Minneapolis, East Palo Alto, Boston, Omaha, and Milwaukee all use some sort of random lottery to place students in suburban districts.52
Through her database of enrollment and transportation records, Finnigan was able to determine the zip codes of participating Rochester students over time. She found some evidence that in the decades since the program began, an increasing proportion of participating students have come from the city’s comparatively wealthier neighborhoods rather than the poorest ones. The zip code including the former Seventh Ward, for instance, contributed 7 percent of Urban-Suburban students in the 2000s compared to 26 percent in the 1960s. This may have been, in part, an artifact of informal information-sharing networks—the program since the 1980s has done very little marketing to Rochester families—as well as a reflection of a teacher referral program, since discontinued, that kept some children’s names out of the application pool, the first step in a stringent screening process.53
In the wave of conversations from 2014 to 2017, a constant theme at suburban school board meetings was the academic and moral quality of the students who would be participating. Rush-Henrietta assured residents that the students would not bring “city issues” into the district. Another administrator said, “The students we bring out here couldn’t be better behaved, to be honest with you . . . because they’ve been so diligently selected to come here.” This tale of the talented tenth proved an important selling point for suburban residents most interested in their own children’s education. From a wider perspective, though, it represents an inequity that even the program’s staunchest supporters find uncomfortable. If suburban schools ever choose students with disabilities, or those with unstable family backgrounds, or those who don’t speak English well, it is unintentional. As the Honeoye Falls-Lima task force wrote, “The selection process gives the district significant latitude to select students who can enter HFL with minimal transition needs and supports. . . . The intent is to enroll general education students without materially increasing costs.”54
Suburban administrators were even more frank when Finnigan allowed them to speak anonymously. Besides high academic marks, the criteria they mentioned included an intact two-parent household and a clean disciplinary record. One admitted to rejecting an applicant after the parents asked what support systems the district had in place for Black children. Above all, administrators were unanimous in screening out city children with disabilities that might require costly interventions. As one said: “It’s a philosophical understanding that we will co-exist with Urban-Suburban as long as it can benefit us with our cultural diversity as well as our fiscal responsibility to the taxpayer here.” Another said it was important to avoid children who might end up “soaking up all our resources.”55
Students accepted into the program count toward their suburban district’s statistics and are treated as if they lived in that district. But they can be removed at any time and sent back to RCSD. Although administrators downplay the frequency of such expulsions, Finnigan found that the program had a high level of attrition, with nearly half of all accepted students participating for fewer than two years. Many of those students withdrew because they moved to the suburbs or out of town, but in one year nearly a third voluntarily left for either RCSD or a private school and 10 percent were made to leave.56
Administrators told Finnigan that students are asked to leave because of either disciplinary or academic shortcomings. In at least one case, though, a family accused a suburban district of retaliating against their daughter’s need for special education services. In 2004 a woman named Lorie Dennis sued the Pittsford Central School District in federal court after her seven-year-old daughter was removed from Urban-Suburban there. The district evidently had not realized when it accepted the girl that she had received some special education services in prekindergarten. When she began to struggle academically in school her mother pressed for another evaluation, at which it was determined that the girl had some developmental delays. According to the lawsuit, the district then asked the mother to withdraw her request for special education services; when she did not, it notified her that her daughter was not welcome to return in the fall. The lawsuit, for discrimination and retaliation, was settled out of court.57
An even clearer illustration came in 1994 when Penfield, one of the longest-standing districts in the program, announced it would pull out unless the city school district covered the cost of any supplemental help participating students needed, including special education or tutoring. “We’re continuing the ownership, but feel the sending school district has to accept its financial responsibilities,” Superintendent Richard Mace said. The particular case he had in mind was that of a female Urban-Suburban student who became pregnant. After her son was born, Penfield objected to paying the cost of the girl’s home tutoring and Urban-Suburban director Evelyn Scott told her she had to return to RCSD. “I feel that when an Urban-Suburban girl gets pregnant, that’s not exactly a good role model for other Urban-Suburban girls coming up,” Scott said. The student appealed the decision with help from the Legal Aid Society and was allowed to remain. “Out in Penfield, there are a lot of white girls that get pregnant, [and] most of them stay right there,” she said.58
Students who stayed and graduated from their adoptive districts have said, almost uniformly, that they were thankful for the experience and would do it again. “It was the best experience of my life,” stated Jessica Lewis, a 2003 West Irondequoit graduate who later worked for Urban-Suburban at BOCES. “It’s just an incredible opportunity I’m very grateful for.” Wayne Johnson, a member of the first class in Irondequoit, recalled how his classmates’ parents created an informal network to drive him home after sports or other activities when the bus wasn’t available.59 The Urban-Suburban Alumni Association boasts of a number of members in impressive professional fields. Almost without exception, though, alumni also report having learned early to navigate various forms of prejudice, explicit or otherwise. A third grader in Brighton was enlisted to play the part of an enslaved person in a role-playing activity. Lewis recalled a secretary who objected to giving her a parking pass as a senior, saying they were only for “tax-paying residents.” Many also mentioned a sense of isolation from other Black students, particularly if they attended schools with very few minorities. Urban-Suburban students are touted in the suburbs as the agents of cultural exchange, a role that can be wearying in practice. “It definitely can get tiring,” one Urban-Suburban student said. “Some days I just don’t feel—not that I don’t want to have to be the representative [for my race], but I feel sometimes I shouldn’t have to be.”60
Amending Urban-Suburban to make it more equitable would not be complicated. First, institute either a true lottery or a requirement that suburban districts accept cohorts that are roughly representative of the RCSD student body. Second, bar districts from “exiting” students based on behavior, grades, or special education needs. Third, add supports to help students and their families become better integrated into the school community. These changes, laid out in the conclusion, would bring the program more into line with what exists in other communities and would go some way toward alleviating the strain on the city school district.
What stands in the way of such changes is district leaders’ vivid fear of backlash from their residents. Many school administrators told Finnigan about how changes in the direction of greater equity—changes they themselves believed in—would not be “viable” in their districts. “It’s a dicey topic and it brings out the ugliness in people,” one said.61 Crane was acutely aware of lurking racism in his own and other suburban communities. On the one hand, he said it was the responsibility of leaders not to bow before that pressure; on the other hand, he conceded the many ways in which even the prospect of dissent has been a hindrance to change. “We’ve talked more about how to get it more like a lottery without opening ourselves up to people trying to force us to lose the program,” he said. “Now, compare (our) interview process to the other seven inter-district transfer programs in the country, and they’re like, ‘What?! It’s not a lottery?’” As Webster Board of Education president Mike Suffoletto said in January 2015, “You don’t want to create a situation like Spencerport is going through right now.”62
In the absence of structural changes to the program, dogged faith in its premise continues to maintain it. Crane graduated from Fairport High School in 1970 and went off to Athens College in northern Alabama, where one night he and some classmates went out to a bar. On his way to the restroom, Crane saw a back room he hadn’t noticed before with a solitary Black customer inside. The man gave his order to the Black bartender, who relayed it to the white bartender, who made the drink and passed it back to the Black bartender and, ultimately, the Black customer. The man’s money took the same circuitous route in reverse. It shocked him, he said, and put him on a life course he believed to be “more relevant.”63 That included transferring back to SUNY Brockport to earn a teaching degree and, ultimately, leading one of Monroe County’s more diverse suburban school districts for nearly twenty years.
His belief in the efficacy of Urban-Suburban can be traced to that chance encounter in a dive bar in Alabama in 1971 and the lesson he drew from it—that a single personal interaction across racial or cultural lines has the potential to unsettle the assumptions of a person or even a community. That sentiment has always been the hope behind the program and the defense against its critics. “We’ve been accused of being a token—well, we certainly are,” Norman Gross said when retiring in 1982. “But we’re better than no program at all.”64
Or, as Crane said on his own retirement thirty-six years later: “You take somewhere between 400 and 900 kids every year for 50 years, then you add in the thousands of kids that those kids have met—that’s important. That’s a worthwhile effort, and one we’ve worked hard to protect even though it’s got its flaws.”65
More than half a century after the program’s founding, it is important to remember the different political context that prevailed in 1965. White Monroe County residents then could read in the newspaper nearly every day about the federal government taking action against school segregation, mainly in the South but also, ominously, in the North. The local NAACP had filed a lawsuit against the Rochester City School District, where open enrollment was already underway. There was little reason to believe then that the community would emerge with its racial status quo unmoved—it was just a matter of how momentous the change would be, and whether the local white community would manage to exercise any control over its direction.
For this reason, the prospect of gradual, voluntary, small-scale desegregation efforts such as the transurban student conferences and, later, Urban-Suburban, was immediately appealing. Here was a way to get out in front of the problem in a resolutely incremental way. It allowed white school leaders in both the city and suburbs to trumpet the community’s measured progress while staving off a judicial intervention that surely would prove more disruptive. The federal government in 1969 chose Rochester as a national exemplar in desegregation. “We have done more or as much as any other city [in addressing racial imbalance],” Rochester Board of Education president and staunch busing opponent Louis Cerulli said in 1966.66
At the same time, the program was never envisioned as a full solution. Throughout its first decade, discussions about Urban-Suburban regularly veered into speculation on topics later deemed verboten, including cross-district magnet schools and a metropolitan school system. “It was always our idea that you eventually would have a metropolitan school district,” said Walter Cooper, who was part of the discussions around the program’s founding and helped launch it in Penfield. “Experience with students in Urban-Suburban would at least give . . . the idea that it was a situation that was good for everybody. But it was never really pushed.”67
White liberals early on adopted the program as a key component of a communitywide vision of education and spent more than a decade fighting for sustained funding to keep it alive. By the time that battle was won in the early 1980s, though, Urban-Suburban was the only local desegregation effort remaining and the politics of school improvement had shifted. Other northern cities, including Buffalo and Boston, had been forced into desegregation efforts via court order while Rochester waited patiently for the returns of Urban-Suburban to come in. When those returns failed to materialize no energy remained to renew the desegregation effort—or even to diagnose its failure. The initial focus on countywide desegregation had narrowed to a tallying of individual success stories from a carefully curated group of high-performing students. Initially hailed as a lighthouse in the national striving for educational equality, Urban-Suburban instead became more like a safe harbor for Monroe County to wait out the storm of the Civil Rights movement.