Throughout recent hearings, residents have voiced philosophical desires for students to share lunch and homework with children from different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. Worries abound about a lower quality of education at Ruffner and Lake Taylor, which would draw students mostly from predominantly black and low-income areas. Lose the middle class and the school loses political power as well as parents who are better educated and families that stick around from year to year. Those things money can't buy. Orfield also warned that there is no worse time to segregate students than in middle school.
Adolescence is when children develop stereotypes.
Also, middle schoolers are acutely affected by peer pressure. In 1958, local schools shut down over a similar issue. But then, the protest was by whites opposing integration. Four years after the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision declared segregated schools unconstitutional, Norfolk shut down its public schools rather than allow black students to learn alongside whites. But busing continued until 1986, when the School Board ended it for elementary schools, citing white flight.