Opinion ID: 500653
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Opening of Commerce Middle School

Text: 121 In 1973, in conjunction with the closing of the High School of Commerce, located in Southwest Yonkers a few blocks from the downtown area, the Board opened a new Commerce Middle School (Commerce Middle). Its student body consisted of junior high school students who theretofore had attended Gorton, a combined junior and senior high school located in the southern part of Northwest Yonkers. The initial enrollment in Commerce Middle was 53% minority. 122 Prior to deciding on Commerce Middle's attendance zone, the Board had been presented with a number of proposals that would have avoided this creation of yet another predominantly minority school in Southwest Yonkers. These proposals principally involved Emerson, a combined elementary and middle school in Northwest Yonkers located about 1 1/2 miles north of Gorton. Emerson then had a middle school minority population of 8%. One proposal was to assign to Commerce Middle the middle school students from Emerson who lived in the southernmost part of the Emerson attendance zone. There was strong opposition from white residents, however, to any relocation of white students to form an integrated Commerce Middle, opposition that the Board perceived as grounded principally in racial concerns. The Board was also well aware that transferring Gorton students to the proposed new Commerce Middle without reassigning students from any other school would have a distinctly segregative effect: memoranda assessing this alternative noted, Commerce may become an all-black school; Commerce could be all black; Commerce becoming basically a black school; Racial Distribution--all black. It decided to assign to Commerce Middle no students other than those from Gorton. 123 It also rejected proposals to reassign the Gorton junior high school students--41% minority--to Emerson instead of to Commerce Middle, a course that apparently was both feasible in terms of Emerson's capacity and consistent with repeated proposals from school officials and community members to convert Emerson from a combined elementary and middle school to an exclusively middle school. The Board declined to reassign Gorton students to Emerson, on the ground that tensions would be created, apparently a reference to racial concerns, for in 1973, one-third of the Emerson's middle school minority students were transferred to Burroughs 124 in response to race-related concerns of the Emerson community regarding the presence of minority students at the school. According to [school administration officials], this transfer was effectuated for the purpose of insuring the safety of minority students who had been enrolled at the school in light of altercations which had occurred between students at the school and the Emerson community's opposition to the attendance of minority students at Emerson. 125 624 F.Supp. at 1481. 126 After opening Commerce Middle as a 53% minority school in 1973, instead of expanding Commerce Middle's attendance zone northward to draw in any predominantly white neighborhoods, the Board redrew the zone boundary farther south, thereby reassigning to Commerce Middle students from Longfellow and another predominantly minority school. Commerce Middle's minority population thus increased to 70% in 1974 and to 77% in 1975. In 1976, the school was closed as part of the Board's response to the City's fiscal crisis.