CHAPTER 6

Considering the Metropolis

Even as debate over the contours of desegregation raged in the Rochester City School District in the 1960s and 1970s, it was becoming increasingly clear that the solution to racial isolation and inequality could not be contained within city lines. Every year the white population—and with it, the tax base—was shifting to the suburbs. In 1940, 74 percent of white Monroe County residents lived in the city of Rochester. In 1970, only 37 percent of them did. By 2010 it was down to 16 percent. Many of these suburban residents were glad to have escaped the social, educational, and financial crises of Rochester and staunchly resisted efforts they believed would draw them back in. “We are in the business of education, and any extension beyond this is not the business of boards of education,” Greece school board vice president Wilho Salminen wrote in 1966 in opposing joining Urban-Suburban. “[The] Greece Central School District is beset with too many problems of its own to become physically involved in racial problems.”1

Others, though, considered it a moral obligation for the suburbs to share in the city’s deepening woes, or otherwise saw the looming workforce shortage as a regional economic dilemma. Opinions varied considerably as to the proper scope of involvement, ranging from one-time “cultural exchanges” to forming a single, unified countywide school district. “The basic solution, to indulge in a bit of oversimplification, is a metropolitan form of government where all residents of the county can participate equally in some of the problems peculiar to the City of Rochester,” the developer James Wilmot wrote to Xerox CEO Joseph C. Wilson in 1966. “The biggest obstacle seems to be just plain human nature.” This idea had a long history, dating to before the Great Migration, when towns saw a potential marriage with the city as a boon and not an act of altruism. In the suburbs as in the city, though, “human nature” surfaced repeatedly in the form of packed public meetings, angry letters to the editor, and resounding electoral rejections, opposing even voluntary desegregation efforts that crossed district boundaries. “If I wanted a racially balanced school district I would have moved into one,” an Irondequoit man said when Urban-Suburban was first developed. In other cases, this level of excitement was not necessary—a school board’s lukewarm pledge to take a desegregation proposal into consideration, rather than a positive vote to act on it, had the same effect.2

A number of small desegregation programs did take place. They were voluntary pilot programs, intended to build goodwill and demonstrate success on the way to further, unspecified advances in desegregation. And they did have success—great success, in some cases, illustrated by long wait lists for enrollment and strong academic achievement for white and non-white students. What they did not have was stable funding to sustain them. Local dollars are guarded jealously and state and federal funding is inconstant, ebbing and flowing according to shifting politics. From the creation of Urban-Suburban in 1965 to the Great Schools for All initiative starting in 2013, desegregation initiatives crossing district lines have all run into the same problem: In a system where all education funding runs through individual school districts, how can interdistrict partnerships be sustained? Only Urban-Suburban, which will be discussed separately in chapter 7, has managed a permanent solution. Other programs, no matter how promising, have either run aground or failed to launch all together. This failure to thrive has left proponents dejected and contributed greatly to the community’s learned helplessness when it comes to addressing racial and socioeconomic injustice.

Today the concept of a metropolitan school district covering all of Monroe County is discussed chiefly as a means to achieve racial desegregation. In the years before the Civil Rights era—or, perhaps more significantly, the years before the Great Migration hit Rochester—the same idea was thoroughly aired for a different set of reasons. In 1941, RCSD assistant superintendent Harold Akerly called for countywide schools as the most efficient way of spending taxpayer dollars. “Equality of opportunity in education cannot be afforded to all children in a natural community or metropolitan district so long as it is broken up into one larger and several small administrative units,” he wrote.3 The local Council on Post-War Problems in 1945 likewise gave its full endorsement to a metropolitan school district. Among the benefits it listed was a final severing of the fiscal relationship between the city of Rochester and its coterminous school district. Then as now, the former was responsible for education taxation and the latter for education spending. “However well disposed and statesmanlike may be school authorities and city officials, this dual responsibility has been and will continue to be a source of friction for all concerned,” the committee wrote.4

Of equal importance were the highly dynamic and closely related issues of student enrollment and school buildings in different parts of the county. The swelling suburbs had a surplus of students and a shortage of facilities; the city had gleaming new schools but not enough children to fill them. Rochester school board member Rachel Lee wrote in 1947: “People with children move out of cities, leaving half empty school buildings. Just over the lines they immediately start assembling bricks, stones and flags for more buildings. That is not the solution. The solution is to remove the lines, utilize the existing buildings, reduce the disproportionate investment in building materials and put the money into . . . a richer, fuller and more attractive educational program for all the children of the larger community.”5

If school officials seemed unusually open-minded, it was because a major political upheaval was already under way. Before World War II, a “school district” most often referred to the enrollment and taxation area of a single, independently administered school building. As the regional population grew, academic standards rose, and transportation options improved, those districts came under increasing pressure to expand their tax bases by joining together into larger amalgamated districts where relatively distant elementary schools could all feed into a single secondary school. The central school districts now ubiquitous throughout the country are the result of this process. The first in the Rochester area was the Brockport Central School District, approved by voters in 1927. From 1932 to the early 1970s, the number of school districts in the United States fell from about 128,000 to about 20,000.6

Occupying a middle ground between the rural and urban districts were several free school districts in new parts of the city, the bane of several generations of city and RCSD leaders. From 1901 to 1926 the city annexed parts of the outlying towns of Brighton, Gates, and Greece, adding substantially to its physical and economic footprint. Because the annexations could only proceed with an affirmative vote from the residents in question, the city was obligated to offer various enticements. One was a promise that those residents’ children would be able to attend city schools without paying taxes, hence the term free school districts. The city rued the deal almost before the ink was dry. Areas that had been semirural and sparsely populated were shortly bristling with development, and with that development came hundreds of school-age children entitled by law to a no-cost education. A 1931 report called the annexed tracts “parasite districts” and stated that they were costing RCSD $113,000 a year. The towns in question said the city should keep up its end of the bargain; the city complained that the value of the land taken had long since been paid back in free education. The city tried amending its charter and filing legal challenges, but it was to no avail. By the time the state legislature finally rescinded the annexed districts’ tax-free status in 1975, the annual cost to the city had risen to about $800,000 a year for 1,700 students.7

The desire to shed this financial burden was a main impetus for city political leaders’ fervent wish to separate RCSD from the city and instead grant it financial independence. Rochester-area assemblyman Homer Dick repeatedly introduced legislation to that effect in the 1920s. Crucially, it would have amended the state law declaring the city school district boundaries to be identical to the city line. The director of the Bureau of Municipal Research, Earl Weller, helped draft a similar bill in 1929, but neither the Dick legislation nor the Weller legislation was ever seriously considered in Albany. School districts in cities with fewer than 125,000 residents got autonomy in 1950, but the state legislature did not extend the same rights to larger cities like Rochester despite the urging of then-City Manager Robert Aex and Deputy Commissioner of Education James Allen, among others.8

As late as the early 1960s, when suburban centralization was not yet complete and most of the county population was still living within city limits, RCSD was the unquestioned educational gold standard. RCSD at that time allowed suburban students to pay tuition to attend its schools, and in 1956 more than 1,800 students did so. One of its most compelling attractions was Edison Technical and Industrial High School, which offered an array of cutting-edge technical training programs even while stuck in an aging facility. Throughout the postwar years the majority of the school’s students came from outside the city or from parochial schools rather than from RCSD. Superintendent Howard Seymour in 1958 proposed granting Edison autonomous status with its own power of taxation, a way to expand its financial base and more seamlessly recruit suburban students. A committee studied the question and concluded that the state law on school boundaries would not allow it. Instead Edison changed its admission standards, allowing female students for the first time and revising the entrance requirements in a way that desegregation advocates argued was intentionally discriminatory against Black prospective students.9

At about the same time, students from some city-adjacent areas of what is now the East Irondequoit Central School District still attended Franklin High School. RCSD warned that it would soon run out of space for the non-resident students and urged Irondequoiters not to delay in centralizing and building their own high school. The Times-Union, on the other hand, urged consideration of a joint arrangement between Irondequoit and RCSD that would accommodate students across the city line. “This is a situation ideally suited to taking the first steps toward handling our joint problems on a metropolitan scale,” the editors wrote in 1952. “City and town boundary lines are the root of endless troubles and frustrations. The place to begin obliterating them is here.” But though the East Irondequoit parents recognized that centralization was likely inevitable, they found their current arrangement at Franklin too good to relinquish. “We realize that a city high school—and this has been proven time and time again—can give our children a far better education than a small town one can,” one leading opponent of East Irondequoit centralization wrote. “Also, Rochester schools have the highest standards.”10

A referendum on building a new high school in East Irondequoit was defeated by twenty percentage points. That vote took place in early June 1954, after years of debate and less than a month after Brown v. Board of Education was decided. At about the same time, word continued to spread in the Black communities of Sanford, Florida, and Greenville, South Carolina, about the factory town on the shore of Lake Ontario where a better life could be had. East Irondequoit residents shortly reconsidered their stance and Eastridge High School opened its doors in 1958. It ended up as one of the last major events of the school district consolidation movement that swept Monroe County and the rest of New York in the twentieth century, with only large cities such as Rochester excluded.11

It is interesting to contemplate how the course of public education in Rochester would have been different if a version of the Dick or Weller legislation had passed, breaking the bond between district and city lines and throwing the city school district into the mix during the dynamic period of centralization. From the perspective of Monroe County’s single-building districts, RCSD was a model of efficiency and scale and would have been an ideal nucleus for centralization. In hindsight, the failure of the Dick and Weller bills represents an incredible missed opportunity. The two major obstacles to Rochester-area metropolitan schools in the twenty-first century are racism directed at Black and Hispanic families living in the city of Rochester and—even if that could be overcome—the need to negotiate simultaneously with eighteen independent school districts. If RCSD had been emancipated from the legal restriction on its borders in the 1920s, it could have been a dominant force in the wave of school district mergers, potentially creating a single district that included inner-ring suburbs or even the entire county. In such a scenario, assimilating the Black students entering school during and after the Great Migration would have been the collective responsibility of the wider community, not just the city. Cooperation and centralization in education could have led to breakthroughs in other areas as well, chiefly housing and transportation.

There was, in the years before the Great Migration, a growing conviction that the Rochester city limits could no longer serve as the horizon line for community planning. This included not just schools but also housing and transportation policy, sewer lines, water supply, and public safety. Greater regional cooperation, though frightening for many, seemed inevitable. “The automobile has made it possible for [residents] to live in the suburbs, but to earn, and to spend, their money in the city,” the Democrat and Chronicle wrote in 1940. “It is high time the government of the area was extended to fit the area’s actual scope.” In fact, the morning newspaper was a standard-bearer for the idea of tearing down the lines that divided. The growing wealth in the suburbs, it argued, had been subsidized by city residents in many ways:

They could not enjoy their prosperity if they did not live close to the city; and most of them do everything but pay direct taxes in the city. . . . In return for what they have drained out of the city in tax funds to build up their own facilities, they now, as part of [a metropolitan school] district, should contribute their share in tax money to . . . the poorer city districts. This suggestion and these arguments may shock some of our suburban residents. Both are based on facts, however, and simple justice. . . .

Some day the government of the county and that of the city will be merged. Until then, the metropolitan area should adjust its governing and tax support for specific functions to its actual condition.

A metropolitan school district is an immediately necessary step.12

The social dynamic between the city and suburbs had shifted considerably by the mid-1960s, when RCSD for the first time was giving serious consideration to racial segregation. Still, those who debated Herman Goldberg’s proposed desegregation measures remembered the postwar faith in metropolitan solutions. Both proponents and opponents of desegregation used the idea for their own purposes.

When Goldberg released his suite of desegregation plans in 1967, he was also looking further into the future—and farther into the county. “It has become clear that the adoption of any plan must be accompanied by increased participation by all school districts in the Rochester metropolitan area,” he wrote. He included a map showing that nearly the entire county was within a fifteen-mile radius of downtown Rochester. Goldberg ultimately did not suggest a metropolitan solution, he later explained, because to have “offered a plan that included immediately projected full involvement of all the suburbs would have bordered on affrontery [sic]. . . . Just precisely because we did not demand suburban involvement, we may feel the people in the suburbs, through their school boards, will participate reasonably in the future.”13

This hope for reasonable participation was misplaced. A 1966 survey showed strong opposition to a metropolitan school system among what researchers called the “contented” majority in the suburbs, who would oppose such consolidation even if it lowered their taxes—despite the fact that the majority of them could not name their own school district’s superintendent or school board president. Nonetheless the Rochester school board, in receiving Goldberg’s plans, seconded him: “The board realizes that the desegregation of the public schools is not a problem of the city alone and ultimately should involve metropolitan or suburban school districts.” They were echoing, in part, state education commissioner James Allen, who had been at Gates Chili High School a few weeks earlier for a speaking engagement. There, he had said that legislation allowing large urban districts to merge with neighboring suburban districts was a necessary step toward solving school segregation.14

The Democrat and Chronicle, though sympathizing with the objective, called a metropolitan district “the most astronomically remote of all possible plans, [requiring] state legislating, county concurrence and years of red tape.”15 That analysis from the typically conservative editorial board gives a clue to the reason for the otherwise paradoxical popularity of a metropolitan school district among desegregation opponents, in particular School Board president Louis Cerulli and his allies. On one hand, a countywide school district would certainly provide the greatest degree of integration. On the other hand, the Democrat and Chronicle and Cerulli correctly gauged that, even before white flight had fully taken effect, the logistics of creating such a district would prove nearly insurmountable. “If this [Goldberg] plan is so necessary for all of us to live together as a black and white community, then we suggest an absolute ‘must’ is a metropolitan school system, so our friends from the lily white suburbs can share alike with us city dwellers in quality integrated education,” one skeptical white city parent wrote in a 1971 letter to the editor. Indeed, Cerulli went even further than Goldberg, saying that he would have preferred a plan for a full metropolitan system. As Jerome Balter observed at a school board meeting: “Dr. Cerulli says the way to eliminate imbalance in the schools is by adopting a Metropolitan School Plan which would involve the entire county, but that he is unequivocally opposed to involuntary busing. Could it be that Dr. Cerulli has some super-secret method of transporting students which he would approve for the larger geographical area of the Metropolitan Plan? Or is the Metropolitan Plan merely a smokescreen for avoiding his responsibility?”16

If it was a smokescreen, it worked. Those who opposed busing in Rochester were never put to the test on their purported support for a larger countywide district. Indeed, after the opportunity to institute significant desegregation measures in RCSD passed by—and as many of the more conservative white parents relocated to the suburbs—enthusiasm for countywide schools fell off markedly. Cerulli’s promotion of a metropolitan solution did have one significant impact, though. The 15-Point Plan that the school board adopted in 1967 contained little of consequence in terms of forcing desegregation but did discuss the establishment of a “voluntary cooperative federation of school districts in the region to discuss and plan ways of reducing racial isolation in Monroe County as well as other matters of mutual concern.” This resulted, eventually, in the creation of the Monroe County Educational Planning Committee in 1970 and the publication of a major proposal in 1971.17

The concept of metropolitan planning for education already had many local antecedents. Most immediately, the Bureau of Municipal Research in 1969 decried the lack of effective metropolitan planning and governance structure and argued that Rochester-area students were being shortchanged as a result. Money was disbursed and spent haphazardly and without reference to either student need or the ability to pay; students in urban and rural schools had significantly less access to high-quality education than did their suburban counterparts; and regional planning was piecemeal and inefficient. “It is now generally realized that the tendency to relate urban problems and solutions exclusively to older jurisdictional boundaries is at the heart of our inability to take effective action to combat them,” the authors wrote.18

This research served as a foundation for the 1971 Monroe County Educational Planning Committee report. Importantly, though, the report dismissed out of hand the idea of a true countywide school district. “The practical headaches of administratively effecting such a merger in Monroe County, when added to the vehement arguments against the loss of local control which would result, ruled merger or consolidation out as a viable alternative,” the Educational Planning Committee wrote in 1971. At the same time, the committee concluded that some degree of centralized decision-making and authority was necessary. It thus proposed the concept of a federation, using as a model metropolitan Toronto as well as the Twin Cities in Minnesota. That meant “decentralized districts for educational functions relating to neighborhoods and districts and a community-wide educational agency for central functions, including financing,” as the 1969 report put it. This community-wide agency would be a new, combined version of the existing Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES), a regional educational planning unit prescribed in state law but excluding Rochester and other large urban districts. There are two BOCES in Monroe County, one on the east side and one on the west side. They provide certain special education and career education programs as well as professional development and other services districts might find too costly to offer on their own. The proposal would have combined the east- and west-side BOCES and, crucially, would have included the city of Rochester after an amendment to the state law barring its participation.19

The federation model would have gathered every Monroe County district into a single, strengthened BOCES-like entity known as the Educational Council, a twenty-seven-person decision-making body with proportionate representation from all area school districts. Second, rather than permitting districts to contract with the council for services as they pleased, the model would put the council in charge of financing and providing all special and vocational education, transportation, and capital planning, along with some other programs, to all schools in Monroe County. The use of the council’s special education program and other BOCES-style services, in other words, would become mandatory rather than supplemental. For the proposed council to have true authority, it would need to control its own budget. The model proposed funding its operation by having the state direct specific categories of aid to the federation rather than to its component districts, and also by a countywide educational income tax of about three-tenths of 1 percent.20

Don Pryor had just been hired by the Bureau of Municipal Research, and the 1971 plan was one of his first assignments. “We really thought we had something,” he said fifty years later. “We all felt we had come up with something that had a chance to significantly change the way educational issues got addressed in this community, and also something that was politically feasible with a real chance to be implemented.” The committee that created the plan included representatives from RCSD as well as several suburban school districts, the Monroe County School Boards Association, the University of Rochester, the Catholic diocesan schools, and the state government. It would require, among other things, state legislation changing the structure of BOCES and permitting a redirection of state aid.21

Some desegregation plans in Rochester have faltered under a hailstorm of opposition. The federation plan, by contrast, “just kind of died a sad but natural death,” Pryor said. After it was published in August 1971, it never received any further attention in the newspapers. No rallies or public forums were held, and legislation was never introduced in Albany. “I think a lot of the participants tried to rally support in their own spheres of influence, and I think a fair amount of that happened,” Pryor said. “[But] the kinds of things that would have been necessary to build a fire under this really didn’t happen. . . . It just kind of died.” Half a century later, the 1971 plan remains the closest thing Rochester has seen to a fully developed concept for metropolitan educational planning.22

A less considered metropolitan proposal came in May 1983, when RCSD was facing a particularly painful $6.1 million budget gap. Rather than find more cuts to close it, the school board approved the unbalanced budget and forwarded it to the city council. Superintendent Laval Wilson supported the board and said that rather than suggesting further cuts he would petition the courts to dissolve the city school district altogether, leaving the surrounding suburban districts to take up the task of educating Rochester children. “There is no purpose in having a school district if you lose all those programs,” he said. It was essentially a political ploy for additional funding; Wilson admitted he had given no thought to the specifics of the notion. But just mentioning the concept led to anxiety around Monroe County. “It’s an expression of the very deep, obvious concern and frustration they are feeling,” Greece superintendent David Robinson said. “There is going to have to be some kind of redistribution of resources so that all students can benefit equally. . . . [But] local communities are very jealous. They identify very closely with their schools.” The Democrat and Chronicle editorial board dismissed Wilson’s idea as “last-ditch, last-resort thinking” but nonetheless affirmed the essential inequity in question. “The folding of the city school district into the suburban districts is, of course, something that should have happened long ago,” the editors wrote. “It simply isn’t fair or equitable to saddle the city children with an inferior education, which is exactly where Rochester is headed.”23

The uprising in July 1964 in the Third and Seventh Wards came just as the Rochester City School District was beginning to take its first, tentative steps toward intradistrict desegregation. That progress set off a battle that continued into the 1964–65 school year and beyond. The most immediate impact of the riots on education in the city, though, began shortly after the violence subsided. Herman Goldberg met with Dean William Fullager of the UR College of Education as well as professor Dean Corrigan, a staunch advocate of integrated schools, to consider the educational roots of the uprising and “design programs relevant to the needs of the city schools.” Corrigan was named an official liaison between the district and the university and helped establish a task force that eventually morphed into a wide-ranging initiative and funding mechanism called Project UNIQUE.24 “We believe that our responsibility in Project UNIQUE is to show that children from different educational, cultural, racial, and ethnic backgrounds can learn effectively together,” Director William Young said. “Our major responsibility then is to show what changes in schools are needed, and what minimum staff is needed, to make quality integrated education a viable reality.”25

During the short period in the late 1960s when the federal government was substantially investing in desegregation, Project UNIQUE was Rochester’s main funding vehicle. In May 1967, it received $1.7 million in federal Title III funding for a slate of nine programs. Several of them took aim at the teaching profession, such as the creation of an urban education major at UR and a program intended to help Black paraprofessionals and other partly trained people gain their teaching credentials. Others sought to strengthen school-community relations, including via paid outreach positions at city schools and a “community resources council.” The idea that got the most attention at the time was a demonstration classroom on the fourth floor of the downtown Sibley’s department store, where shoppers could peer into lessons through a one-way mirror. Georgianna Sibley, the grand dame of Rochester’s industrialist-philanthropic class, invited the children up to her top-floor executive suite and took them onto her lap as she explained how a department store runs.26

The grant also included money to greatly expand the number of students attending suburban schools through Urban-Suburban. Indeed, at the outset, Urban-Suburban was seen as an extension of RCSD’s experiment with open enrollment, not as a categorically different initiative. It was run through the same administrative department, and early media coverage did not always differentiate the two programs. And though Urban-Suburban was not originally envisioned as two-way, it did face pressure at different times to enroll suburban students in the city. In 1979 the state education department made $50,000 in needed funding contingent on the acceptance of a small number of white suburban children in city schools. For the program to continue to accept only outbound minority students, one state official said, would “result in something like a ‘raid’ on the Rochester School System.”27

Many of the Project UNIQUE initiatives went by the wayside after federal funding expired a few years later; others hardly managed to launch. The most important of them, and the longest lasting, was the creation of the World of Inquiry School in September 1967. Housed at first in the eighty-year-old School 58 building off West Main Street, it was designed as a “laboratory,” with students of different ages grouped together as “families” and learning through hands-on projects and individualized instruction. The school had no report cards and no assigned textbooks, but rather frequent parent conferences and books on a variety of subjects from which students could choose freely. “There will be a great deal of flexibility,” Principal William Pugh said. “A child learns by inquiring into the world around him, not by sitting in a chair in a straight row and having a teacher tell him something.”28

The school was the city’s first formal attempt at a magnet school, intended to draw middle-class families from both the city and the suburbs. “The school’s neighborhood is metropolitan Rochester, but it is located in the inner city,” Project UNIQUE officials wrote. The desegregation pitch worked. Interest for the inaugural 1967–68 school year exceeded school capacity by May 1967, before the district even began soliciting applications. The initial racial composition was about 60 percent white and 40 percent nonwhite, roughly equivalent to the district-wide demographics. About twenty suburban children enrolled and another fifty or so went onto a waiting list.29

There were only around 125 students at World of Inquiry in its first year, about a quarter of the planned final enrollment. Expansion proved elusive, though, as federal funding lapsed and other district priorities pressed for attention. The teachers union protested a proposal for constructing a new home for the school with room for 800 students, saying it would be “an affront to an already aroused black community,” unfairly leapfrogging larger, majority-Black schools for badly needed renovations.30 Indeed, the school’s small size made it a target for criticism as larger-scale desegregation efforts foundered. After the school board rejected Herman Goldberg’s reorganization plan in 1970, FIGHT president Bernard Gifford called for a picket in front of World of Inquiry until it could be closed altogether. “[World of Inquiry] at one time symbolized hope of things to come, and now it only symbolizes a gigantic fraud and a big lie,” he wrote. The school managed to stay open through the turmoil of open enrollment, reorganization, and white flight, but it remained in what were expected to be temporary quarters for more than a decade after it launched.31

“There was stuff falling apart—it was a somewhat decrepit building,” said Thomas Warfield, who began at World of Inquiry in third grade in 1969. Warfield was born into a prominent musical family, and it was no surprise that he found a home at the experimental school. He credited his music teacher there, Geraldine McFadden, with pushing him to become a professional singer. He wrote a play about Daniel Hale Williams, a pioneering Black heart surgeon. He remembered learning about political systems by having an “anarchy day”—students built forts with their desks—followed by “dictatorship day.” “I felt like the teachers there, the nurturing they did—it wasn’t just about teaching us stuff,” he said. “It just taught me about being part of humanity. . . . We really were being prepared for an integrated world.”32

Well into the 1980s, World of Inquiry was one of the few RCSD schools that appealed to suburban families. Patricia and James DeCaro moved to the Rochester area from England in 1980 and landed in Pittsford because they wanted a big house with a garden. But, Patricia DeCaro recalled: “We had overheard young school kids talking about what kind of special car their mom or dad had, and what kind of special clothes they had, and that’s not what we wanted our kids to be a part of, frankly.” Instead, they heard through a friend about World of Inquiry and enrolled their son and then their daughter there. “[My parents] knew that if the academics were lacking in any way . . . they were able to make up for some of that at home,” their daughter, Tate DeCaro, said. “But the thing they couldn’t make up for at home was being around different kinds of people.”33

World of Inquiry students in the mid-1970s were consistently above district, county, and national norms in reading and math; maintained above-average attendance; and “indicated a more positive attitude toward school and learning in general . . . and were more accepting of others with diverse backgrounds.” As a result the school had about a thousand children on its annual waiting list, almost half of them from the suburbs. When federal desegregation funding vanished in the 1980s, RCSD took World of Inquiry into its own budget. The district stopped enrolling suburban students, not wanting to eliminate spots for city families in one of its most popular programs. By 1995 there were around 30 suburban students in city schools, down from about 150 at the peak of the magnet school experiment. Beginning in 2008–09, the school was grown out from an elementary school into a K–12 program; the first cohort of twelfth graders, in 2014, had the highest graduation rate in the district. Its waiting list in 2021 was more than twice as long as that of any other school, both for primary and secondary placement. And yet, though World of Inquiry is less racially homogenous than the majority of RCSD schools, it no longer stands apart from the district either in terms of funding or as a magnet to suburban families.34

As programs persisting largely on federal funding, World of Inquiry and Urban-Suburban were at perpetual risk of closure throughout the 1970s, when spending on school desegregation was hardly a priority. They both held on long enough, though, to transition over to more stable local funding sources, and both still exist today, though in somewhat different forms. Two other notable interdistrict programs were not as lucky: the Brockport Center for Innovation in Education and the Metropolitan World of Inquiry School. Both grew out of earlier, successful models, showed promising results, and then went under because of the vagaries of state and federal funding streams. Both provide valuable evidence in favor of intentionally integrated, cross-district schools—and a warning that popularity and academic success alone do not guarantee that programs will continue.

The Brockport Campus School opened in 1867 as one of New York’s four “demonstration schools,” where teachers in training could try out the latest in instructional innovation under the watchful eyes of their professors. The students did not belong to a traditional school district but rather attended by choice, a factor that later would become critical. In the early 1960s, the school, under the leadership of Principal Andrew Virgilio, developed a satellite campus in the city of Rochester, where students lived, student-taught at RCSD schools, and received their own instruction from both SUNY Brockport professors and RCSD educators.35 That existing relationship became important in 1965, when Herman Goldberg was looking for partners outside the city to help slow galloping racial segregation. At the same time, the Campus School—renamed the Center for Innovation in Education—had just opened a gleaming new facility and SUNY Brockport had a new, forward-looking president in Albert Brown. A trial summer program in 1966 was a success, and the two sides agreed to continue during the 1966–67 school year with about 35 students from Rochester’s School 20. City enrollment at the Brockport Center for Innovation in Education rose to about 120, more than half the total student body, by the end of the school’s fifteen-year experiment with desegregation.36

Gian Carlo and Maria Cervone’s father worked at the college, so they both attended the school starting in kindergarten. They recalled classmates from the city bringing in Jackson 5 records to play during lunchtime. “Those were just my classmates and we just grew up together,” Gian Carlo Cervone said. “We did not grow up really even knowing there was any kind of racial problem. . . . It wasn’t until I left the campus school in sixth grade [that] suddenly all this sort of ugliness came into the picture that really had not been part of our world.” There were significant numbers of students whose parents were migrant farmworkers—both African Americans and, increasingly, people from Mexico and Central America—and also refugees from Vietnam and Southeast Asia. “I view it as a beacon in the western part of the county, showing what you can do with integrated education,” said Norman Gross, the director of Urban-Suburban.37

An important feature of the Center for Innovation in Education was a teaching corps that was dedicated to integrated education and trained to implement it. The school was a site for observation and hands-on training for both student teachers and veterans from the Rochester City School District. “A teacher who would choose to be in this type of school had to be different to begin with,” Jeannette Banker, a longtime teacher and administrator at the school, said. “They had to be past the stage where they wanted to stand in front of the class and have the kids say ‘yes’ and ‘no.’”38

Terry Carbone graduated from the teaching program at Brockport in 1969 then taught at the Center for Innovation in Education from 1973 to its closure in 1981. She grew up in the rural area between Rochester and Buffalo but drew inspiration from her grandmother—perhaps the only subscriber for miles around to Ebony magazine. “I want my grandkids to know there’s different people than just white farmers,” Carbone recalled her telling incredulous family members. If the predominant mode of teaching diversity in those days was “multicultural education”—lessons focusing on easy-to-grasp aspects of nonwhite cultures without plumbing the harder questions of racism and differing perspectives—the Center for Innovation in Education embraced difference. “That’s not to say that things didn’t happen,” Carbone said. “[But] we were a family that got along; we were a problem-solving classroom. . . . There’s a philosophical mindset difference that has to occur, and it’s much deeper than, ‘Let’s just get all the kids together.’”39

In 1976 New York state decided to close all eight of its campus schools, seeking to direct higher education funding away from the K–12 programs. The Brockport school escaped closure when Gross succeeded in obtaining federal funding. That lasted until 1981, when Urban-Suburban saw its grant cut by $1 million, leaving it unable to maintain support. The news came in late August, just a week before the 220 students and thirteen teachers were set to return. “It was a death,” Carbone said. “I remember literally throwing files from our research into a garbage pail. We had to clear out the building, clear out the kids. It was as if we didn’t exist.”40

On the other side of Monroe County, a similar program met the same fate. The Metropolitan World of Inquiry School, funded through Urban-Suburban’s federal grant and operated by the east-side BOCES, opened its doors in September 1973 in rented space in Webster’s Schlegel Road School. It had only secured the needed funding and state approval to open in August, less than a month before the first day of school, yet still managed to enroll nearly three hundred students in its first year, mostly from Rochester, Webster, Penfield, and West Irondequoit. The academic program was patterned on the original World of Inquiry school in the city. By the terms of the grant, both the student body and the faculty were 40 percent minority.41

“We’re demonstrating that a quality educational program in an integrated school is a feasible project coupled with the open classroom concept—and it’s a more effective way of educating people,” Principal W. McGregor Deller said during the first year. That echoed the experience of people involved in the city World of Inquiry school, as well in as the elementary schools in the 19th Ward during the short-lived implementation of open classrooms there from 1970 to 1972. Parents reported that their children were taking more interest in school than they had before. “The situation is real at this school,” a teacher said. “When it’s successful we all vibrate and when it goes wrong we all care deeply.” Federal policymakers, though, were unmoved. New funding guidelines prohibiting transportation for desegregation threatened the school’s federal Urban-Suburban funding stream after its first year, then ended it completely in 1975. “There’s so much bull to it,” Norman Gross complained. “Proven successful programs are disqualified while questionable ones are funded.”42

The school lasted for a third year on last-minute, bare-bones funding from the state legislature. It was moved from Webster to the Karlan School in West Irondequoit and its enrollment was cut dramatically, from three hundred students to fifty. Then the state funding dried up as well, and after a failed last-ditch effort to merge the Metropolitan World of Inquiry with the temporarily revived Center for Innovation in Education in Brockport, it closed its doors for good. Gross blamed Congress, the Nixon and Ford administrations, and “opportunists who make political capital of the emotional term ‘busing,’” while the Times-Union noted the lack of local and state money. “Racial integration is not a popular topic these days,” the editorial board wrote. “But bridges must be built. . . . The urban-suburban transfer program and the suburban World of Inquiry are small voluntary efforts which threaten no one. They should be encouraged and expanded, not cut back or eliminated.”43

World of Inquiry in its original form, the Center for Innovation in Education in Brockport, and the Metropolitan World of Inquiry represent the only three experiments in Rochester with intentionally integrated schools drawing students from across district lines. None of them lasted. World of Inquiry exists today without the metropolitan component; the others thrived briefly before closing. That common fate illustrates the challenge of obtaining reliable annual revenue outside the traditional school district funding mechanisms of local property taxes and regular state aid. But the three programs had much in common from a programmatic and structural viewpoint, as well. Perhaps most significant was the development of innovative pedagogy. In this, they are similar to the 19th Ward elementary schools that were reorganized from 1970 to 1972 according to Goldberg’s plan. All the schools used open, ungraded classrooms, where students could advance at their own pace and teachers could focus closely on a certain developmental stage. All of them stressed experiential learning as opposed to traditional recitation of lessons. “It wasn’t one-curriculum-fits-all; far from it,” Terry Carbone said of the Brockport school. “You started with a topic and kids dove into it with their style of learning and interests.”44

Although the three programs were noteworthy for their commitment to racial integration, students and educators there did not recall explicit attention in the classroom to race per se. “There wasn’t really talk about Black and white,” Thomas Warfield said of World of Inquiry. “I don’t remember any discussion or anything to do with race. . . . It was sort of like everyone was the same.” At Brockport, Carbone said: “We actively downsized the multi-cultural approach of, ‘Let’s talk about Hispanic kids; let’s talk about Asian kids.’ . . . [That] was too shallow. It goes really to your soul, to believe that difference was OK.” The cause was aided, of course, by the fact that every student and adult in the buildings had actively signed up for a racially integrated experience. “The ones who were there were the ones whose parents wanted them to have a broader experience,” Jeannette Banker said.45

Two other projects from the period are worth mentioning, though neither got off the ground. The first grew from one of Herman Goldberg’s 1967 desegregation plans—the idea of creating “educational parks” in existing city and county parks. The board never seriously considered the idea because of the tremendous cost involved in building seven brand-new school campuses. The plan did, however, plant the seed for a different cross-district initiative proposed by Greece school board president John Woods. Whereas Goldberg had sought to create seven educational parks within city limits, Woods wanted to build just one, in Genesee Valley Park, that would pull students from not only the city but also the suburbs. It would be run by RCSD with heavy involvement from suburban school districts, the University of Rochester, and local industry, and would serve as a “regional educational research laboratory,” with teachers from all over Monroe County rotating through it. “Lest we forget it, Rochester is our city,” Woods wrote. “This can be accomplished by proving . . . that one large superior educational center is workable and a natural solution to de facto segregation.”46

Woods embarked on a tour of the suburban school districts seeking their support—as well as a financial ante. Part of his idea for funding the park was for all the districts, including RCSD, to pool their federal Title I money, intended to fight poverty. “I didn’t feel Greece deserved to have the Title I money,” he said in a 2019 interview. “I didn’t feel we had the underprivileged people who deserved it, but it came to us anyway because of the way it went.” Other towns felt similar pangs of conscience, including Brighton, which spent its $23,000 allotment in 1966–67 on a remedial reading program. “Actually we have felt guilt spending it on this program,” school board member William Dieck said, “because many of the participants are not, strictly speaking, ‘underprivileged.’” The following month Greece took the first step, with its school board setting aside $50,000 of its own Title I funds for Woods’s plan. Other districts gave bland statements of interest but said their federal funding was already committed elsewhere.47

Apart from that tepid buy-in, Woods faced serious obstacles on two fronts. First, Greece in February 1967 had voted against joining Urban-Suburban after 2,500 residents attended a school board meeting to protest the idea. The board repeated its ‘no’ votes the following two years, each time hearing massive opposition. “[The opponents], by their howling, vulgar cat calls and general offensive behavior, showed the rest of Greece and the world what bigotry and white racism is all about,” one aggrieved resident wrote. “You couldn’t help but get the uneasy feeling these people would have been more at home in the Roman Colosseum, cheering as the lions chewed up the Christians.” Any further hint of busing or cooperation with the city, then, was sure to set off alarm bells, and Woods’s proposal did just that. The school board had voted to set aside the $50,000 in Title I money only with the understanding that it could be retrieved later for another use if the park did not come to fruition.48

An even greater roadblock was the Rochester school board, which needed not only to set its Title I money aside but also to assume the massive obligation of designing and operating the educational park. Herman Goldberg called Woods’s idea “most commendable,” but the board’s conservative majority did not share his assessment. “Let him propose what he wants to; he’s not going to tell us how to solve our problems,” Louis Cerulli said. Faust Rossi was the only board member to endorse the plan, but added: “If the federal government were to say that it would build an educational park at no cost to the city, there still would be three members of the board who would not agree to it.” Indeed, the proposal languished until April 1968, when Greece redirected its $50,000 to a regional summer school program. RCSD’s elected leaders had squandered “an opportunity undoubtedly they will never receive again,” Woods said. “All that was asked of them was vision and leadership and cooperation. They could not supply one of these.”49

The Woods Plan was hotly debated at the time and amply covered in the newspapers. By contrast, another potentially momentous idea was never made public. Evidence of it exists in the papers of state education commissioner Ewald Nyquist in the New York State Archives in Albany. In February 1970, just as the Rochester school board was rejecting Herman Goldberg’s most ambitious reorganization plan, the superintendent was having separate discussions with Brighton school superintendent John Bennion, the chairman of the Monroe County Educational Planning Committee Task Force on Reducing Racial Isolation. Goldberg reported on those discussions to Nyquist: “This letter will confirm the discussion which we had several weeks ago . . . concerning the possibilities of building a new school to be operated jointly by the [Rochester and Brighton] school districts.” He asked the commissioner’s staff to “explore ways in which the legal and financial hurdles to such a joint venture might be eliminated,” and to help secure full state funding. Nyquist responded three weeks later, telling Goldberg that his staff had held “a series of meetings to evaluate your proposal” and inviting him and Bennion to Albany for further talks. “While there are many obstacles which would have to be overcome, discussions of the possibilities would certainly be in order,” he wrote. “Certainly we will do everything we can to assist you.”50

There the correspondence ends. No further detail exists as far as the proposed structure or governance of the jointly operated school. Goldberg apparently was counting on significant state funding, which certainly would have been a hurdle in the conservative-leaning legislature. At any rate, the idea never saw the light of day. The only possible hint comes from Bennion, writing a year later in a report on his task force’s activities. He described at length a potential “regional demonstration school project” which, he said, “would be a model ethnic mixture of the children of Monroe County and provide a facility where new educational concepts could be refined and demonstrated.” It had been developed in 1970 by a committee including Brighton school board president Herbert Elins but had floundered, partly due to “a lack of general interest among the school districts of the county, and partly to the lack of facilities and funding.” Brighton High School student Peter Essley may have been referring to the same thing when he wrote in April 1970: “We hope our parents will support steps toward cooperation which may eventually lead to the construction of a joint school somewhere near the city line.” In his May 1971 report, Bennion suggested attempting to graft the concept onto the Brockport Center for Innovation in Education. That, perhaps, was a fallback plan after the joint venture with RCSD collapsed.51

It is, of course, impossible to assess what the impact of the Brighton-Rochester school might have been. Goldberg asked Nyquist to keep the idea secret because of the “very delicate situation”; had it become public, that delicacy would surely have been on full display. As the Brighton Teachers Association wrote in 1970, though, in a statement of support for integration: “We can think of no community in a better position to exercise leadership in such a situation. We are a residential area dependent on the well-being of the city; we have a liberal community in Brighton of some size; and we have a school board that has in the past been sympathetic and sensitive to the problems of the city and its schools.” There would have been daunting political obstacles in Brighton but also in Rochester when the anti-reorganization board took office. More important than the school itself, though, would have been the funding mechanism that the two parties and the state agreed on. That problem has vexed every single interdistrict program contemplated in the Rochester area. Indeed, with the exception of Urban-Suburban, it has never been solved.52

Rochester during the 1980s and 1990s flung itself into the burgeoning education reform movement, which will be discussed in detail in chapter 8. Concomitant with this trend was a broad retreat from the concept of integration as a goal and from federal funding to support it. For that reason there was little discussion of interdistrict cooperation in the two decades after the Brockport Center for Innovation in Education closed in 1981. The lessons of the various metropolitan programs had largely been forgotten by 2005, when Tom Frey and Bryan Hetherington paid a visit to Fairport superintendent William Cala.

Frey’s belief in the importance of integrated education had not waned since his time on the Rochester school board. Since then, he had been a state assemblyman, the Monroe County executive, and a member of the state Board of Regents. Hetherington, a lawyer with the nonprofit Empire Justice Center, had just finished work on an unsuccessful legal challenge to socioeconomic segregation in Monroe County in the case Paynter v. New York (discussed in chapter 8). They wanted to propose a new project with Cala, who in 2003 had made Fairport the first new district to join Urban-Suburban in thirty-five years.

That project came to be known as the Regional Academy. Its design was similar to that of the Metropolitan World of Inquiry, but on a grander scale: a fifty-fifty mix of urban and suburban students in a school that eventually would serve grades PK–12 on two campuses. The elementary school would be in the city, possibly at the Strong Museum of Play, while the secondary school would be on the Nazareth College campus. Students would be chosen through a blind lottery, including students with disabilities and those not speaking English as a first language, and no more than 40 percent would be living in poverty. It would be a nonpublic school, technically speaking, “operated under the direction of Nazareth College,” and students would not take Regents exams.53

“It was setting up a voluntary program—it’s pretty hard to argue against a voluntary program,” Cala said. He retired as Fairport superintendent in June 2006, then served a year as the interim superintendent in Rochester after Manuel Rivera departed. Beginning in 2008 Cala took a faculty position at Nazareth and began to spend the majority of his time on the Regional Academy proposal. There were thirteen working groups with more than 150 participants, including several suburban superintendents as well as Rochester superintendent Jean-Claude Brizard.

It was an impressive showing of support. Behind the scenes, though, progress was minimal. “It seemed to make some people in the suburbs upset, because they define themselves on the quality of the schools. That’s why you live there and pay taxes there,” Hetherington said. “There was some personal buy-in from suburban superintendents, but at the end of the day it was always: ‘I don’t know how I’m going to get this by my board.’” Cala recalled more overt opposition. After months of attempts, he, Hetherington, and Frey were invited to present the idea at the suburban superintendents’ regular business meeting. But several of the school leaders walked out of the room before the presentation began, Cala said, and none were willing to sign a letter in support of the concept.54

As always, funding was an issue. Cala held out hope for a separate stream of state money but never made any progress toward achieving it. Draft state legislation for the academy provided for state and federal aid following students from their home districts, as at charter schools. The suburban districts were dubious and unwilling to sacrifice their own budgets. “It wasn’t enough that it was just no big drain on their resources; some of the suburban superintendents felt we had to figure out a way for absolute fiscal neutrality,” Hetherington said. “From a financing perspective, that became really challenging.”55

The Regional Academy also required enabling legislation, with Assemblyman Joseph Morelle as the point person in Albany. Morelle’s office drafted the bill and had been helpful in building local support, but the legislation never reached the Assembly floor. As Cala tells it, Morelle spiked the plan out of spite in response to implicit criticism in an essay Cala published around the same time. According to Morelle, important legal points about funding and control were never fleshed out fully enough to merit introducing the bill. He said that Cala was overambitious in insisting that the school would operate outside the traditional state assessment system rather than simply focusing on diversity. “Frankly, I didn’t want to take on everyone in the world,” he said in 2020. “I wasn’t interested in being the poster child of making an academy that brings everyone together, and also let’s tell the state that all their positions on assessments are wrong.” Hetherington also recalled that Cala’s firm stance against most forms of standardized testing “ended up alienating some of the people who needed to be involved.”56

Morelle, who in 2018 was elected to serve the Rochester area in Congress, was correct about remaining fundamental questions, including how an independent school would accept state funding from public school districts, and what governance role Nazareth would play. In any case, by the time Frey died in 2017 the Regional Academy was no closer to accepting students than when they first discussed the idea twelve years earlier. Like many other such concepts, the Regional Academy died quietly. “Poor Cala—he tried everything,” said Malik Evans, the Rochester school board president at the time and a supporter of the project. “But if you ask me whatever happened to it—I don’t know. It just went away.”57

In another sense, the Regional Academy idea lived on indirectly. In September 2011, Cala gave a talk at Third Presbyterian Church, a congregation with a history of commitment to social justice in education. At about the same time, the church book club read Hope and Despair in the American City by Syracuse University professor Gerald Grant. It compared the public schools in Syracuse, New York, and Raleigh, North Carolina, which has a countywide school district, and concluded that the same solution was needed in northern urban areas. Energized, the church organized a group called Great Schools for All and received grant funding for a three-day, eleven-person visit to Raleigh and Wake County, where Raleigh is located, in 2014. Mark Hare, a former Democrat and Chronicle columnist and one of the main Great Schools for All boosters, summarized the group’s findings: “Integration has dramatically improved results in Raleigh, and helped build a community consensus that public schools are one of the county’s best assets, not its chiefliability.” Raleigh was not perfect, he conceded; teacher pay was too low and achievement gaps persisted. Still, he concluded: “Wake County is struggling forward, while Rochester is just struggling.”58

Impressive as it found the metropolitan system in Wake County, Great Schools for All did not advocate for the same thing in Rochester. “I think most of us around the table would jump at the countywide option if we felt there was any opportunity to make that happen,” said Don Pryor, one of the group’s leaders. “But with the politics, we didn’t want to waste time on that. We felt it was just a sinkhole and we didn’t want to go down it.” Instead, the group pushed for the creation of a network of interdistrict magnet schools, each with a limit of 50 percent of students in poverty. Like the magnet schools in Wake County, each school would have a particular curricular focus, such as the arts, language immersion, or science and technology. Each of them would be jointly administered by two or more school districts and would have diverse faculty and staff.59

Like the Regional Academy, the Great Schools for All plan attracted a great deal of interest, at least conceptually. In a May 2016 scientific survey, 81 percent of urban parents and 66 percent of suburban parents said that they would consider sending their children to a socioeconomically diverse magnet school outside their current school district. A majority also said they would consider a school where their children would be in the racial minority. On the other hand, 93 percent of suburban parents said they were satisfied with their child’s current school, and about two-thirds thought that their current school was already diverse enough. Several suburban superintendents expressed interest but wanted RCSD to take the lead, Pryor said.60

After seven years without tangible progress, the Great Schools for All organizers cast themselves increasingly as “connectors, to bring people together to understand the value of integrated schools,” rather than as school architects, as co-convener Lynette Sparks put it. Notably, they did not attempt to draft, or even fully think through, enabling state legislation, including details of governance and funding. “Over time it became clearer and clearer that . . . there would be no impetus on the legislative side to take action until school districts bring a proposal forward,” Pryor said.61

In other words, the legislature was waiting to hear from school districts—at least several of them, if not all of them—while the suburban districts in turn were waiting for RCSD to lead. And though the Rochester school board did pass a resolution in favor of Great Schools for All in June 2017, its administration and elected leaders have not made the project a priority. That is in part because those leaders keep changing. In 2018, for instance, RCSD superintendent Barbara Deane-Williams floated the idea of a downtown elementary school drawing half of its enrollment from suburban students whose parents were commuting into the city anyway. It was never discussed in public again, and nine months later Deane-Williams resigned. As Cala said about the Regional Academy: “Every time [we] would meet at district office, they’d have a new administrative team. . . . Every time we showed up we had to start from ground zero.”62

The Great Schools for All leaders never quite gave up. In 2017 they attracted more than six hundred people to a talk by the investigative journalist and desegregation advocate Nikole Hannah-Jones. The organization is part of the umbrella children’s advocacy group ROC the Future and attempts to nudge it toward considering racial and economic segregation. But, Sparks said: “They told us in Raleigh, ‘You’re embarking on a 20-year project,’ and they were right. . . . People in Rochester, in my experience, have a hard time even imagining an integrated setting.” Indeed, the Regional Academy and Great Schools for All both received significant, favorable media attention and community support, but neither has approached even the short-lived success of the Brockport Center for Innovation in Education or the Metropolitan World of Inquiry.63

“You can’t even mention the words ‘metro’ or ‘regional’ without the hair on the back of the necks of suburban people going berserk,” William Cala said. One case above all illustrates his point: the 2003 Monroe County executive race between Bill Johnson and Maggie Brooks.

It was the first election for the office without an incumbent. Either Johnson, the three-term Democratic Rochester mayor, would become the first Black person ever elected as executive, or Brooks, the Republican county clerk and a former television reporter, would be the first woman. Each spent more than $500,000 on advertising, making it the costliest county executive race to date. Johnson campaigned on a promise of fiscal reform and said that it was unrealistic to suggest that the county could continue to balance its budget without increasing tax revenues. Brooks countered with a narrow conservative platform of keeping taxes flat and streamlining government—but also succeeded in refocusing attention on a point Johnson had made the previous year in his 2002 State of the City address.

Pointing to low student achievement in the city schools and fiscal crises at several levels of local government, Johnson in March 2002 elaborated on an idea he often had touted in the past: consolidating levels of government, up to the point of a full metropolitan government. “Can we afford the luxury of maintaining thirty local municipalities and eighteen school districts in a compact, urbanized county?” he asked. “Yes, school and municipal consolidation carries intense—often painful—emotions. But the pain of fact-finding and reasoned discourse is negligible compared to the pain of non-competitiveness and stagnation.”64

The possibility of a metropolitan school system in particular had been discussed in a series of hearings sponsored by Monroe County legislator Christopher Wilmot in 1996. More generally, metro government was a sore spot between Johnson and county executive Jack Doyle, who opposed it. After Johnson’s speech, Doyle convened a series of public hearings on the idea—and advertised them as discussions of a proposal by Johnson for “the elimination of all towns, villages and suburban school districts and their replacement by a single, giant, city government.” Johnson had not in fact made any specific proposal or stated that eliminating all lower levels of government would be required. He boycotted the forums, accusing Doyle of seeking political gain from stoking fears and “trying to shut down any open dialogue of what consolidation could bring to this area.” Furthermore, as he later said about school districts in particular: “The county executive has no power to bring about consolidation. If I’d been elected, almost invariably we would have had a Republican-controlled Legislature. And even if somehow I’d gotten around that and got a bill to Albany, there was a Republican-controlled Senate and a Republican governor. And even if I had some magical powers and I could overwhelm all the Republicans, it was a permissive referendum that had to come back, and any one of the 18 towns could have killed it.”65

No matter how hard Johnson tried to center his county executive campaign on fiscal reform, he could not escape questions about his metropolitan designs. “I said: ‘Look, it’s never going to happen,’” he said. “Then [people] would say: ‘I hear what you’re saying—but if you could, would you?’” After he released a television ad stating that he was “not talking about consolidating schools or eliminating towns and villages,” local Republican leaders held a press conference to say he was being disingenuous. Two weeks before the election, the Republican party released a television ad that caused a sensation and would later serve to define the campaign. It showed a Pac-man character roaming through Monroe County, gobbling up towns, villages, and school districts and stating that Johnson would seek to create a single school district and municipality.66

For observers in the city, the fixation on possible political “amalgamation” had an unmistakable racial underpinning. They pointed as well to Doyle’s comment that the city would be in much better condition if it had “a mayor that looked like me.” Their conviction was only sharpened in September 2003, two months before the election, when right-wing radio host Bob Lonsberry was fired after referring to Johnson as a “monkey” and an “orangutan” on the air. “He would have never said that kind of stuff if he didn’t think there was an audience for it,” Johnson said at the time. He also recounted party leaders urging him to drop out of the race, saying that a Black man could never win a countywide election.67

Whatever role race and metro government–related fears played in the election, the final result was a blowout. Brooks beat Johnson by thirty points, including winning in every suburb except Brighton. “I guess tonight says it clearly,” county Republican chairman Stephen Minarik said on election night. “Bye-bye metro government; bye-bye one school district; bye-bye Bill Johnson.” It was Minarik who thought up the Pac-man ad, which won him a national award from the American Association of Political Consultants. Rochester City newspaper editor Mary Anna Towler—a veteran of the desegregation campaign of the late 1960s—called it an “anti-city vote based not only on Johnson’s skin color but the fear of hordes of black and brown school children and welfare recipients crossing into the towns.”

“That sentiment will be hard to overcome,” Towler wrote. “It’s emotional and it isn’t easily influenced by facts. And in the time it takes to overcome it, the community will become more polarized and more segregated, and the city will become poorer.” A generation later, it is still common in Rochester to hear mention of Bill Johnson’s plan for a countywide school district—the desegregation plan that never was.68

In reviewing the various cross-district schools and programs over the last fifty years, one thing is clear; students, parents, and educators loved them. The Brockport Center for Innovation in Education and the two World of Inquiry schools were consistently oversubscribed and energized the teachers who led them. Indeed, even projects that failed to launch, like the Regional Academy and Great Schools for All, nonetheless generated a great deal of preliminary interest before petering out. Their failure, then, had nothing to do with their appeal to parents or their likelihood of academic and social success, but rather stemmed from the hostility of the state education law to any model outside the established funding paradigm. Who will run it, and who will pay for it? In the absence of generous federal funding, the questions have proven insuperable—except for one instance. That is Urban-Suburban, whose greatest achievement over more than fifty years may be its very survival.