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A Doomed Crusade for More Diverse Schools

One man tried to make a
difference. One New York Times reporter was
listening.

By Peter Applebome

RYE BROOK, N.Y.

Dick Hubert’s one-man campaign to desegregate,
however slightly, the Blind Brook school
district thudded to its inevitable close at
10:55 p.m. Monday, at the end of a long school
board meeting.

The auditorium where the meeting took place was
virtually empty. The board members, so animated
earlier about the cost of glue sticks and the
intricacies of earth science curriculum, seemed
to make a point of looking as uninterested as
possible as he read his statement.

“At this point, there is nothing more for me to
add to this dialogue,” Mr. Hubert concluded.
“The United States will be a majority nonwhite
country in the adult lifetime of the children
in your care. The only question is: How well
will you have prepared them for being citizen
leaders in this society?”

The board members barely looked up. He left the
building and walked out into the cold rain.

Mr. Hubert, a 70-year-old retired television
journalist who runs a small video production
company, may not have made the most adroit case
for his argument that Blind Brook, which is
wealthy and 93 percent white, should make it a
priority to merge some services and build links
with its neighboring school district in Port
Chester, which is largely poor and working
class and 80 percent minorities.

He is not a parent, so he is not considered
much of a stakeholder in school matters. And
anything that even hints at a merger of a
wealthy school district and a poor one
virtually anywhere in America is dead well
before its arrival.

Still, as we near the beginning of the Obama
administration, Mr. Hubert, in one small
Westchester school district, did briefly rouse
a dog that had long ago stopped barking.
Outside the ancient desegregation battles of
the South, do we care at all if we’re a nation
of school districts that exist in their own
racial and demographic silos? Blue votes aside,
nowhere is the answer more of an emphatic “no”
than here in our enlightened corner of Obama
Nation.

Blind Brook is a tinier island than some — only
1,527 students. But it’s part of a pattern we
accept seemingly without a thought — Garden
City and Hempstead on Long Island, Bronxville
and Mount Vernon in Westchester, on and on,
rich schools/poor schools nearly as segregated
by income, race and class as the schools that
used to be segregated by law in the South.

Mr. Hubert, who has been a periodic gadfly in
the past at school board meetings, first raised
the issue at a meeting in October. He termed
Blind Brook one of the most segregated
districts by class and race in the country and
characterized his neighbors as hypocrites
willing to vote for Barack Obama but not to let
their children go to school with the Obamas of
tomorrow.

A board member, Lawrence D. Engle, shot back,
“To the extent that your comments infer that
this district practices segregationism, I am
offended, and I will not countenance that
affront.” Mr. Engle added, “You should be
ashamed.”

That set off weeks of angry letters back and
forth in the local newspaper, Westmore News,
with a rare note of support for Mr. Hubert and
many more taking him to task.

However virtuous Mr. Hubert’s concerns, one
lesson surely was that if the topic devolves
from race to whether someone is racist, that’s
likely to stop the conversation before it even
starts.

But that aside, it’s not easy to see many roads
out. Rich districts won’t be merging with poor
ones, no matter how much this region’s
stratospheric taxes are exacerbated by our
crazy quilt of boutique school districts, each
with its own layers of administration and
bureaucracy. School officials in Port Chester
(Blind Brook officials declined to return phone
calls) say that because kids are so busy and
school schedules are so different, the idea of
merging much that goes on in neighboring
districts may be unrealistic. And Donald K.
Carlisle, the Port Chester schools
superintendent, while applauding, in the
abstract, the idea of looking for creative ways
to bring together diverse school populations,
said he wasn’t entirely sure that kids were so
divided these days.

“I think there are opportunities that exist
already — sports, malls. Kids mingle more than
you think,” he said. “I have a lot of faith in
this generation of kids, particularly in areas
of race or discrimination. Sometimes I think
it’s the adults who need to find ways to build
bridges more than the kids.”

For his swan song on the issue Monday, Mr.
Hubert, a former Amherst College trustee,
played his hole card, a letter from Amherst’s
dean of admissions, Thomas Parker. It said, in
effect, that in the emerging multicultural
world, colleges are looking for students who
can negotiate racially diverse settings and
that those who don’t will be at a distinct
disadvantage in the admissions process.

It’s true that students need to adjust to a
multicultural world. It’s not really so obvious
that, particularly with university endowments
being pulverized, kids from rich, white suburbs
will be at some kind of disadvantage in
admissions.

The truth is that, now as then, the real losers
in education’s rigged game are those in the
less demographically desirable districts,
forever cut off from the social and
intellectual capital that’s the birthright of
the kids born on second and third base. That’s
the real reason Mr. Hubert’s doomed little
crusade matters way beyond Blind Brook and why,
alas, there’s no evidence that it’s likely to
do better elsewhere than it did here.

— Peter Applebome
New York Times
2008-12-17


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