Prometheus 6

A Successful Plan for Racial Balance Now Finds Its Future Uncertain
By JOSEPH BERGER

WHITE PLAINS

For 18 years, this city of 55,000 has maintained racially balanced schools without the white flight that has followed integration plans in places like Boston and Canarsie, Brooklyn.

But in June, the Supreme Court rejected school assignment plans in Louisville and Seattle that, like the one in White Plains, are also based explicitly on race. And there are fears that should a court turn down White Plains’s plan in the future, white families may abandon some of the neighborhood schools. That is not a fear restricted to White Plains, as dozens of other cities are having to reconsider similar plans.

“The demographics in some of the schools might change dramatically, and I don’t know how parents in those schools would feel about the demographics,” is the discreetly worded warning from Laurette Young, who administers the White Plains plan.

As in most cities, housing in White Plains, the Westchester County seat that has sprouted skyscrapers among its suburban patches, is identifiable by race. The southern end is dappled with tree-shaded homes inhabited mostly by white families, while the northwest has housing projects populated by black families and aging apartments crowded with Latinos.

Under a strict neighborhood zoning plan, children of those northwestern black and Hispanic families would be assigned to the Post Road School, but so would children from adjoining middle-class white enclaves, and it is not clear how many would attend if they were reduced to a tiny minority.

Conversely, school officials believe the south end’s Ridgeway School would be stripped of the ethnic palette that residents have long prized.