The Coalition's Response to the New York Times Article: “A Suburb Believed in Liberal Ideas. Then Came a Busing Plan,” (August 30)

Nationally the debate about school desegregation and busing has re-emerged in the context of the Democratic Party’s presidential debate. The New York Times has also extensively covered NYC’s own plans to desegregate its schools focusing on the debate and schisms amongst parents, rather than on the areas in which parents are working across race to promote integration.

Re: “A Suburb Believed in Liberal Ideas. Then Came a Busing Plan,” (August 30)

Nationally the debate about school desegregation and busing has re-emerged in the context of the Democratic Party’s presidential debate. The New York Times has also extensively covered NYC’s own plans to desegregate its schools focusing on the debate and schisms amongst parents, rather than on the areas in which parents are working across race to promote integration.

Maplewood and South Orange have bused children within district, and rezoned a number of times to address segregation at the elementary schools for many years. We acknowledge that despite these changes we have not achieved the desired outcomes from such efforts. In fact, the South Orange/Maplewood Community Coalition on Race demonstrated through demographic research distributed to our community that racial integration at our elementary schools is compromised consistently by changing residential patterns and demographics. The new space and evolving integration plans are part of our community’s effort to address pressing issues involving race—albeit not without debate—as new needs arise. This article rightly focuses on issues of racial justice, racial equity, the achievement gap, and concerns about discipline. And focusing on the problems is important because we cannot attempt to address them by white-washing the problems or plugging our ears.

But focusing on the solutions being proposed and the significant amount of community outreach, input, and buy in is important as well. Prior iterations of the forthcoming integration plan included neighborhood school pairing, with busing. This is already done in one of our elementary schools for over 20 years. But parent input requested a move towards controlled choice. Controlled choice would allow parents to rank schools and allow the district to ensure economic integration is achieved across the district.

The Coalition on Race has vigorously advocated for racially integrated schools as we believe this outcome will benefit all students in a range that includes academic and social skills. And we also believe that integrated schools and classrooms that serve all students equitably are critical to stable community integration. In service of those beliefs, our work over the years has included and will continue to include: advocacy for integrating schools and classrooms; opening access to advanced level classes to all students; providing and advocating for on-going, consistent, professional anti-bias and cultural competency training; strategic planning that puts special emphasis on racial equity and inclusion throughout the educational experience; providing the community—parents and district staff—with multiple achievement gap study circles, workshops and forums; and, advocacy for hiring practices that result in more teachers of color.

Maplewood and South Orange are racially diverse towns in a region of racially isolated communities, in a state and a nation that has seen growing racial segregation in both schools and residential patterns in the last forty years. We firmly agree that without racial equity in the schools, we cannot meet our mission of being a truly integrated community. We acknowledge that we as a community have not lived up to our values in this regard. Writing about the hard work of community organizing and incremental change is not always headline grabbing. But we believe that the community advocates quoted in the articles and the others who continue to work across organizations representing multiple stakeholders will succeed in advancing our integrated community because failure to all of our children is not an option for any of us.

Robert A. Marchman, Chair

Nancy Gagnier, Executive Director

South Orange/Maplewood Community Coalition on Race