November 30, 1993|By Michael Raphael, INQUIRER CORRESPONDENT The Associated Press contributed to this article
For more than a decade now, the Merchantville school board has petitioned commissioners, state boards and superior courts – almost anyone who would listen – to get its high school students out of Pennsauken.
But yesterday Pennsauken school officials cried victory when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal by a North Jersey school district that was trying to move its high school students out of a predominantly black high school to a majority white school system.
“It can only help our case,” said Joe Finely, attorney for the Pennsauken Board of Education. “It certainly stands for the same principles and arguments that we made in the Merchantville-Pennsauken case. It bodes well for our case. Obviously, it’s precedent for the lower courts.”
Merchantville’s elementary school students, of which 94 percent are white, have been attending Pennsauken High School since 1972, when the borough’s own high school closed. Pennsauken High School is 43 percent minority.
Ten years later, Merchantville decided it was time to get out of Pennsauken and send the borough’s students to Haddonfield.
The state Board of Education and Superior Court didn’t see it that way. First, in 1985 and then just last year, Merchantville was ordered to keep its students in Pennsauken. The second suit is currently on appeal to the state Board of Education.
An attorney for the New Jersey Board of Education, which is expected to rule on the Merchantville appeal by the end of the school year, said the Supreme Court decision was relevant.
The high court declined to act on the eight-year-old suit brought by Englewood Cliffs – a predominately white school district. It asked to send its students to a nearby majority-white Tenafly school instead of the nearby 92- percent-black Dwight Morrow High School in Englewood. Englewood Cliffs students have been attending Dwight Morrow since 1965.
Englewood Cliffs argued that its students were being denied their constitutional rights by being forced to attend the majority-black school. The court upheld a New Jersey Superior Court decision that called the district’s demands “white flight” from Dwight Morrow.
“Parents should have the freedom to decide where their kids go to school,” Englewood Cliffs school board president Ilana Plawker said.
The decision parallels the decade-old effort to end the Merchantville- Pennsauken partnership. Even with the apparently pro-Pennsauken decision, both sides continued to proclaim imminent victory.
