October 25, 1966: (from left) Tony Ridenour, Leonard Bates, Robin Forte, Dr. John H. Lawson, Isabel Rosenfeld. Photo by Bill Nehez; Courtesy of the Shaker Heights Public Library Local History Collection SHAKER LIFE | SPRING 2016 43 We held a number of meetings at the elementary schools, and some people were for it and some disagreed. I think I received about 200 or so letters from residents who were against trying to integrate the schools, and there were a lot of telephone calls. On the other hand, we had great support from the PTA committees and the various church leaders and community associations. In the meantime, a group of citizens who were interested in integration sent me a petition saying that they would be willing to volunteer their children to attend Moreland School, so we built that into the Shaker Plan. We then had several African-American families volunteer to send their students to the other elementary schools. That gave us a better racial balance at each school. The first day of school when we implemented the Shaker Plan in the fall of 1970, we had an administrator from central office on each one of the buses to make sure everything went smoothly. One of the major networks came and took pictures of what was going on and they ran it on the television that night. After that, I didn’t get any more telephone calls and we didn’t have a single problem. After we integrated the elementary schools, we did the same for the two junior highs. When we looked at test scores in the following years, the achievement of black students had increased significantly, and there was almost no difference between white and black students’ scores. A few years after we integrated, a study of the property values for all of the communities in Cuyahoga County came out, and despite what people were worried would happen, the properties in Shaker Heights appreciated higher than in all the other communities. A number of residents later told me, “Initially, we really didn’t favor what you were doing, Jack, but now we support it because our children are doing well and they are happy. They’ve met students they otherwise never would have met.”
Spring_ShakerLife_2016
To see the actual publication please follow the link above