PS 321

New York, like many deeply segregated cities, has a terrible track record of maintaining racial balance in formerly under-enrolled segregated schools once white families come in.

Schools like PS321 in Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood and the Academy of Arts and Letters in Fort Greene tend to go through a brief period of transitional integration in which significant numbers of white students enroll, and then the numbers of Latino and black students dwindle.

Okay, so did you get that? The way to fix under-enrolled segregated schools full of black and brown kids is not to send more kids who aren't black and brown to them.

Those kids and their families will only muck things up.

And many feel both at once.

This year, our local elementary school, PS321, decided to no longer hold its graduation ceremony here in our sanctuary.

The official reason was that a public school shouldn't hold graduation in a religious building That's legitimate.

But upon inquiry, the principal told me that the desire to change venues stemmed from discomfort about Israel and therefore about us.

Despite a relationship in which we provided after-school care for PS321 students for 50 years and hosted graduation for 20 years, despite the fact that hundreds of our families are also 321 families, This decision was made without anyone at the school reaching out to us as neighbors to talk about their concerns or to see whether their assumptions about us were right or to even tell us that they were severing this tie.

That made many of us feel lonely and misunderstood.

PS321 is a beloved neighborhood institution and I am hopeful that we will continue the conversation and break down assumptions.

We probably all know about the Park Slope food co-op boycott.