WWW.SHAKER.LIFE | SPRING 2021 43
Learning from the Past
The District is no stranger to overhauling its practices to improve outcomes
for all students. In fact, Glasner’s efforts to eliminate racially segregated
classrooms and achieve educational equity bear a striking resemblance to the
District’s efforts to integrate elementary schools in the early 1970s.
“It was becoming evident that something would have to be done to
change the racial mix at Moreland and at the almost all-white schools,” then-
Superintendent John Lawson reflected in a 1971 issue of the Mini Journal,
published by the Ohio Department of Education Office of Equal Educational
Opportunity. “The statement of philosophy of the Shaker Heights Board of
Education and administrative policy require that the moral values of students be
developed and that they be prepared for responsible citizenship. It was felt that
this could best be accomplished in racially mixed schools.”
The change Lawson referred to was The Shaker Plan – a plan to
desegregate the District’s seven elementary schools. The Plan, originally
proposed in February 1970, called for mandatory reassignment of students
in the top three grades at the former Moreland Elementary School (now the
Shaker Heights Public Library Main Branch), which was predominantly Black, to
one of six other predominantly white elementary schools.
Critics of The Shaker Plan feared that mixing Black and white students
would lower the quality of education and result in an increase in discipline
problems. They also worried that teachers would not be adequately prepared
to teach in a desegregated setting.
In May 1970, the Board of
Education adopted a modified Shaker
Plan: Reassignment of Moreland
students was no longer mandatory,
but voluntary. Some 200 families
participated in the program in its first
year with more joining in the second,
with many white families sending their
kids to Moreland. And, according
to Lawson, the District did not
experience the outcomes so feared by
its critics.
Lawson concluded his piece in the
Mini Journal with words that still ring
true at the District today: “This debate
should not be over whether we are
going to provide integrated education
but how and when. We must insure
sic that the debate about means does
not obscure the end being sought. The
American dream of equality cannot
be realized in separate schools and
neighborhoods.”
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