Joyce Seals and her husband, Dr. Eugene, raised their eight children in a two-story home on North Fifth Street, a few blocks east of downtown.
Under open enrollment, adopted by the Saginaw School District in 1975, they had the option of sending their offspring across the river to Arthur Hill High School. Instead they stuck with their alma mater, Saginaw High.
That’s why the former mayor, now back as an anchor member on the Board of Education, felt mixed emotions on March 15 when she joined a unanimous vote to remove the choice option. This will transpire when a portion of Saginaw High is converted to a middle school in conjunction with the planned opening of a unified Saginaw United in fall 2024.
Open enrollment will continue for elementary schools, but families with sixth, seventh and eighth graders eventually will be required to keep their children on their own side of town. The rule will not affect East Side pupils already enrolled at Thompson Middle.
Superintendent Ramont Roberts says the intent is to ensure that two middle schools will feed pupils to the new Saginaw United, under construction at the current SASA arts and sciences riverfront site near the west foot of the Genesee Bridge.
With Saginaw’s demographics, the Thompson Middle populous will remain integrated and the new Saginaw Middle, like the current Saginaw High, will remain basically segregated.
“It’s a bitter pill to swallow,” Seals said, of the prospect of informing East Side parents that in effect, their students are not eligible to attend an integrated school, only a segregated site. “I went around and around about it, but this is a step we need to take.”
Other board members also lacked enthusiasm. The measure passed with none of the usual discussion, and no citizens spoke, neither in opposition nor in support.
Seals knows school segregation from her early childhood in the Mississippi of the 1950s, and she feels the spirit of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling by the 1954 Supreme Court is ultimately being carried out seven decades later.
“When they get to the ninth grade, all will be together” at Saginaw United High, she notes.
The unified high school is the top item in a $100 million school bond issue that voters approved during the 2020 presidential election, adding about 7 mills to district annual property taxes. Most homeowners face increases of at least several hundred dollars per annum, and tenants also are paying via rent increases.
School leaders during the 1970s approved open enrollment as a compromise desegregation plan to avoid federal school busing mandates that caused unrest in Metro Detroit, and most notably in Boston. This immediately became a one-way street in Saginaw, with hundreds of Black families sending their children from the East Side across the river, but only a handful of Whites doing the same from the West Side to the East Side.
East Side schools since then have become even more segregated than buildings in the South that gradually were forced to integrate by the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision at the U.S. Supreme Court that wiped out “separate but equal” standards.
Meanwhile, a plan to convert another portion of the vacated Saginaw High to a one-stop center for various local agencies remains up in the air.
A preliminary outline called for the school board, the City Council and the County Board of Commissioners to contribute $750,000 apiece in federal pandemic relief funds (ARPA for the city and county, ESSER for the schools) to convert half of Saginaw High into a one-stop center for agencies that now force people to visit an array of locations. The schools separately would use about $2.5 million from the bond issue to convert the other half into the repurposed middle school.
However, the multi-purpose center concept has fallen apart, with neither the City Council nor the County Board taking action. The three bodies were slated to gather for a liaison meeting at 5:30 p.m. March 16, at district headquarters, but the session has been postponed until March 23.
Superintendent Roberts and the school board are preserving at least a portion of the Arthur Hill building by serving as SASA’s relocated home. The Saginaw High plan has included the multi-purpose center as a concept to avoid razing two of the four wings.
