Pennsauken High School will become a segregated institution if students
from predominantly white Merchantville are allowed to leave the district for Haddonfield, according to attorneys for the Pennsauken Board of Education.
Pennsauken’s attorneys last week responded to last month’s judicial recommendation that the long-standing relationship between the two communities be severed. The recommendation, by Administrative Law Judge Bruce Campbell, was the latest round in a 10-year-old legal sparring match started by Merchantville. In a 156-page brief filed June 1, Pennsauken attorneys said such a move would go against all efforts to maintain integrated public schools.
“Such a scenario,” the brief stated, “would lead to the specter of re- segregation by allowing more whites to be added to the all-white Haddonfield High School at the expense of the fully integrated and diverse Pennsauken High School. The state of New Jersey simply must not sanction such a development.”
State law requires any school district seeking to end a sending-receiving relationship to prove that there would be no adverse affect on the finances, educational programs or racial composition of the receiving district.
Basing their arguments on the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that prohibited segregation, along with the recent New Jersey case of Englewood v. Englewood Cliffs, Pennsauken’s attorneys say Pennsauken High School would suffer if Merchantville students attended Haddonfield.
In a case similar to the Merchantville-Pennsauken rift, former state Education Commissioner Saul Cooperman three years ago overturned a judicial recommendation that Englewood Cliffs be allowed to transfer students out of a high school in Englewood. That decision, according to state education official Maureen Keller, was handed down because Englewood Cliffs’ leaving Englewood would have had a “negative racial impact” on Englewood.
But that case, Campbell said, has little bearing on Merchantville- Pennsauken. In his recommendation, Campbell wrote that Haddonfield, not Pennsauken, would be most affected racially because of the increasing number of minority students from Merchantville. Allowing Merchantville students to attend Haddonfield would actually do more to integrate Haddonfield than to segregate Pennsauken, he said.
Pennsauken’s enrollment is 30 percent minority. About 90 percent of the Merchantville students attending the high school are white. Haddonfield’s enrollment is about 94 percent white.
Merchantville officials refuse to comment.
State Education Commissioner John Ellis has until Aug. 3 to rule on Campbell’s recommendation.
If either party is unhappy with Ellis’ decision, it can be appealed to the state Superior Court’s appellate division. Officials from both sides refuse to speculate how far they will take the appeals process.
