From serial and the New York Times, this is the fifth and final episode of Nice White Parents.

From serial productions, I'm Klanajafi Walt. This is Nice White Parents, a series about the 60-year relationship between white parents and the public school down the block, a series that was meant to be told in four episodes.

And yet, I'm still talking.

I never expected to make a fifth episode. I'd already gone back to the beginning of the school, and all the way through the present day, 60 years in one building, I felt like I'd seen all the various ways Nice White Parents will participate in public education, and the limits of that participation.

I understood that Nice White Parents might opt into certain integrated schools under certain circumstances, but they, we, we're not going to make way for a fully integrated, equitable school system.

Because an equitable school system, would likely mean the schools our kids go to, would get less money, not more.

Our kids might get less access to the most experienced teachers and the best facilities, so of course we were not going to make way for that. And nobody was going to force us.

White Parents will stand in the way of truly equal schools, the end. That's how I plan to end this.

I mean, let's keep trying, but basically, the end. Have a nice day.

But then, something big happened. In the very same school system I've been looking at for years.

New York City is broken up into a bunch of school districts. The school I've been focusing on, IS-293, Nathan Hale, SIS, BHS, whatever you want to call it, that school is in District 15.

And just recently, after I finished my reporting, District 15 rolled out a diversity plan to integrate its schools.

And it was a real plan, not just for a few curated schools, but every single middle school in this one district that on its own is larger than the entire school system of St. Louis.

This new diversity plan upended middle school admissions, replaced the old system with one that would break up racial segregation and concentrations of wealth and poverty, would commit all the schools to the kind of anti-racism initiatives they had in place at BHS, and actually integrate the schools, all of them.

I confess, I completely missed this when it happened. Two years ago, in 2018, when I started to see flyers for meetings to talk about a new diversity plan, I waved it off, such were the depths of my own cynicism.

Over the years, I was reporting this story. A growing number of white people in the district and across the city were starting to talk about school segregation, school inequality, forming discussion groups and book groups.

But I was skeptical any of that would turn into action. So then flyers meetings a diversity plan. I just thought more people talking about diversity.

I never expected an overhaul, a large scale plan that would address the problems I had seen persist in this district for half a century.

One that seemed to go through without any huge raucous battle or protests or boycats. How'd they pull this off? Could this be a model for school systems across the country?

Because I ignored the district 15 diversity plan as it unfolded, I was left having to backtrack to understand how this came about. I didn't even know who started it.

Miriam Nunberg, that was the name I kept hearing, talked to Miriam. When I did, Miriam started telling me how she got involved in all this. And I began to hear a very familiar story.

Miriam is white. When her kids were little, people on the playground started warning Miriam about middle school, telling her, you think choosing an elementary school is difficult. Just wait until you get to middle school.

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