The radical, forgotten experiment in educational integration that changed my life
BY PETER THOMSON
In 1971, kids from Roxbury and Lincoln spent half the year attending school together in the city and the other half in the suburb. Fifty years later, I tracked down my fellow students to see how it shaped them — and whether something like it could work today.
Peter Thomson
The author of this piece, Thomson is the former environment editor at the public radio program The World and the author of “Sacred Sea: A Journey to Lake Baikal.” He lives in Boston.
Roberto Fortes
Retired attorney
“A shelter from the storm of my young life of always having to struggle to just be a kid and always having to be guarded.”
Sidetrack homework.
Image courtesy of Peter Thomson
This copy of “The Me Nobody Knows,” edited by Stephen M. Joseph, was read by students in Sidetrack.
Image courtesy of Peter Thomson
Peter Thomson, 63, right, and Roberto Fortes, 63, visit the Higginson-Lewis K-8 School in Roxbury in July 2022.
Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff
In July 2022, Roberto Fortes, left, visited the Higginson-Lewis K-8 School in Roxbury; Peter Thomson visited the Brooks School in Lincoln. Photos by Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff
The Sidetrack program was born amid tumult over attempts to integrate long-segregated schools. Boston’s Operation Exodus, above, in the 1960s, bused children from overcrowded Black schools to predominantly white schools with vacant seats.
In 1974, the Boston Public Schools were under court order to desegregate. On Sept. 12 of that year, a crowd watched as a bus carrying students returned to Columbia Point with windows that had been broken by white demonstrators. Above right, an officer pinned a demonstrator to the ground during a pro-busing demonstration in Boston on Dec. 14, 1974.
Photos by William Ryerson/Ted Dully/Globe Staff
“
O
n a steamy morning last summer, my old friend Roberto Fortes
and I stood on milk crates and squinted through the window of an
empty classroom at the Higginson-Lewis School in Roxbury. We had no interest in anyone or anything in the building that day. We were trying to picture ourselves inside. Because half a century ago, the room behind that window was our classroom.
Peter Thomson is the former environment editor at the public radio program The World and the author of “Sacred Sea: A Journey to Lake Baikal.” He lives in Boston.
Photos taken during Sidetrack by an unknown student (middle) and student teacher Nancy Striker Henderson (color images) show scenes from Roxbury and other parts of Boston. Many students were given cameras as part of the Open City elective.
Courtesy of Nancy Striker Henderson
In a post-’60s America only beginning its fitful effort to dismantle the legacy of legal segregation and reckon with the deeper original sin of slavery, Sidetrack dared to imagine a world without fault lines.
It was, as another Roxbury classmate recently put it to me, “revolutionary for its time.”
Too revolutionary, it turned out. The next summer, after the first year of what was supposed to be a three-year trial run, the plug was pulled. Sidetrack and its vision would get mired in suburban ambivalence and recede into history. We would all return behind those fault lines.
But that year continued to resonate for me — in what I did in school, where I’ve chosen to live, and the work I chose to pursue. In the ways I see the world and myself in it.
And half a century later I’ve dived into a deep reengagement with this early ’70s utopian experiment — tracking down and reconnecting with long-lost classmates like Roberto and unearthing Sidetrack’s history from long-untouched archives. Trying to learn how it happened, why it failed, and how it affected the lives of other students. And asking myself, could Sidetrack somehow become more than just a fading memory for a tiny group of people?
Because 50 years on, the work that it was part of is still unfinished business. The wave of school desegregation that began with the Supreme Court’s country-shaking Brown decision in 1954 has been replaced by a wave of resegregation. The hard-fought progress of the civil rights movement is hitting a wall and even being rolled back. In this time of Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and Trump, the deep divides that Sidetrack was hoping to bridge can seem no less deep and unbridgeable.
So I’ve found myself asking, was Sidetrack a missed opportunity to build an approach to school integration and racial bridge-building that could withstand the crushing pressure from all sides? Could something like it possibly take root today? Would it help?
SIDETRACK WAS A radical experiment grounded in a stark reality.
The Brown decision had ruled school segregation as government policy unconstitutional, declaring that “separate education facilities are inherently unequal.” But resistance to change was fierce — including here in Massachusetts, where Boston’s schools were notoriously segregated and the city would soon explode in white racist violence when a federal court ordered them to desegregate.
And another kind of segregation was surging. White families were fleeing cities for the suburbs while Black families were kept out through practices like exclusionary zoning and discriminatory lending. The segregation that had long been a reality in many cities was being magnified regionally.
This growing gap between cities and suburbs and the resistance to doing anything about it was the primary knot that Sidetrack’s founders wanted to start to untie.
Half a century later I’ve dived into a deep reengagement with this early ’70s utopian experiment — tracking down and reconnecting with long-lost classmates like Roberto and unearthing Sidetrack’s history from long-untouched archives.
Lincon fifth-grade teacher Carol Kellogg felt that while she and others professed concern about racism, they were basically “sitting out here in our cozy little suburb not doing a darn thing,” as she told Lincoln’s Fence Viewer newspaper at the time.
including Lincoln. But it carried an old-school air of condescension—whites were the benefactors, white culture was the norm, and the relationships between the communities involved were left largely unexplored and unchanged.
Kellogg had heard about experimental schools that were directly engaging the social challenges of the time and hatched an idea for a radical alternative to Metco: a full-on collaboration in which equal numbers of white and Black junior high schoolers from Lincoln and Boston would spend equal amounts of time in each community, learning together and building relationships in and out of the classroom. She imagined that they’d shuttle back and forth in a train car on the commuter rail line and that the car would double as their school while it sat on a little-used track in Lincoln — a sidetrack.
The train car idea proved a little too kooky even for free-thinking Lincoln. But the basic concept got traction. And the name stuck.
Organizers found partners at the Lewis School in Roxbury. And the Boston school department — eager to deflect the growing pressure to end its own segregationist practices — signed on. In early 1971 Sidetrack landed a three-year federal grant. The buses rolled that September.
The hand-drawn logo from the Sidetrack letterhead.
THAT FIRST RIDE is etched into my mind. Our bus lumbered out from under Lincoln’s deep tree canopy onto 128 and the Pike, off at Copley Square by the still-unfinished John Hancock tower, under the shadow of the thundering Orange Line elevated on Washington Street to scruffy Dudley Square and finally a few blocks more to the Lewis School, a hulking brick fortress surrounded by asphalt, where we’d meet our new classmates.
It was an adventure into uncharted urban territory.
The same morning, a dozen or so kids from Roxbury headed out to meet their new classmates in Lincoln, past forests, fields, and big houses — an adventure into equally uncharted suburban territory.
Halfway through the year, the classes switched places. A second group of Lincoln kids headed to Roxbury, and my Roxbury classmates rode out to meet us in Lincoln.
The commute, and the midyear swap, were key parts of Sidetrack’s 50-50 vision. “Everyone got to be a native,” my Lincoln classmate Stefan Senders remembers, and everyone “got to experience the real discomfort” of being an outsider.
My world changed that first day. Until then I’d never had a Black teacher or classmate, friend, or neighbor. And while my mom had dutifully told her kids about slavery, segregation, and the civil rights movement and had taken us to see just about every Sidney Poitier movie, the only Black people I’d ever really known were Tillie and Dora, the two women who used to cook for my grandmother at her big houses on the Cape and Beacon Hill.
But here I was, starting the school year in a neighborhood that was almost entirely Black.
Being an outsider here cut both ways. I was excited, eager for something bigger and more engaging than regular school. But I was also a 12-year-old whose curiosity about the world was way wider than his comfort zone. And I was unsure about fitting in with these new kids when I already felt like a misfit back home in Lincoln. This would be a big challenge.
I thought about that ambivalent 12-year-old me recently when I found a class photo taken at the end of the year. There was 13-year-old me, front and center amid my classmates, with a big smile. I was not the same kid. I was relaxed, comfortable, fitting in for the first time anywhere.
I wasn’t alone in feeling that way. “That was a cool trick,” Stefan remembers. In making us all outsiders, Sidetrack helped us create a community together.
Stefan is one of four Lincoln friends I’ve stayed in touch with ever since, and we all carry similar memories. He remembers Sidetrack as “transformative.” It “offered a completely different set of possibilities” than regular school, he says. “Self-teaching. The value of breaking out of community boundaries. The value of community itself. The stupidity of prejudice.” Stefan grew up to be a Fulbright program adviser at Cornell and a baker.
For John Linnell, now a musician, it was “a life-changing, head-expanding year.” For Wendy Burroughs, a wildlife educator and environmental activist, “those experiences changed the way I saw myself in the world” and influenced how she’d spend her adult life. And for Dan Spock, a designer of interactive museum exhibits on American history, it was “the first time I realized that not everybody was getting the same deal. It made me think a lot harder about inequality in America.”
I’d always known that Sidetrack was a foundational experience for every one of us five friends. But I never knew what it meant for the other students — the Lincoln kids who faded out of my life and the Roxbury kids I never saw again.
Fifty years on, I finally decided to try to find out. I unearthed a list of students, tapped into a still-strong network of Lincoln kids, and scoured the web for the kids from Roxbury.
Before long I’d connected with more than half of the Lincoln students and almost a third from Roxbury. The effort has revealed a remarkably consistent story among the two groups.
I found Roberto in California, now a retired attorney. We began a long conversation and finally met up in person when he visited Boston in July.
“Sidetrack rose as a breath of fresh air,” he wrote in an early email. “I was a seasoned veteran of racism in Boston and as a condition of life . . . [Sidetrack] was a shelter from the storm of my young life of always having to struggle to just be a kid . . . [I] loved the quirky classmates and teachers. The impact on my life was reaffirming that there are good people who care about injustice.”
Other Roxbury classmates told similar stories.
Sidetrack “is burned into me,” Tracy Steele said. “It was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had.” Today he’s a senior vice president at an IT company, still living near Boston.
I found Brad Singleton in Atlanta. He was probably my closest friend from the Lewis school. “Sidetrack opened the lens of my experiences,” he told me. “Even things I had done before, [I saw] in new ways . . . Things that I was not even aware of, I can track back to Sidetrack.”
Brad went on to Milton Academy and careers in the Marines and as a pharmaceuticals sales executive. He says he’s not sure Milton would have been an option if not for Sidetrack. It “was an opening to that opportunity.”
Then there’s Mark Vickers. “Oh, man,” he said when I found him, “Sidetrack was the best educational year of my life. It totally set a course for my life.”
Mark recently retired after decades as a Boston cop. The key to Sidetrack, he remembered, was the 3D experience of getting to know different kinds of people — classmates and others — “in the wild, in their native habitat.” It was “a foundation of understanding.”
Also, he said with a grin, “you guys got to see that Black people aren’t all scary.”
One Lewis kid named James had a keen eye for caricature, and he soon took to relentlessly mocking me and my crisp white upper-middle-class accent and obsession with everyone playing by the same rules. But it never felt mean. We mostly got along.
Roberto connected me with Robin Williams. Robin was one of three Lewis girls with big Afros whom I remember as always sharing some hilarious inside joke. Today she’s a grandma, surrounded by 12 grandchildren and a stream of neighbors and friends flowing through her Roxbury home.
Sidetrack “made me feel important,” Robin recalled when we met up. “It opened up my world. Everybody got along. It showed that we could do it.”
What we did was what Carol Kellogg hoped for: forge an unlikely community.
“We used to mimic each other’s accents and mannerisms and laugh with each other about the differences,” Lincoln student Leslie Reed remembers. “I remember it being funny and defusing tension.”
One Lewis kid named James had a keen eye for caricature, and he soon took to relentlessly mocking me and my crisp white upper-middle-class accent and obsession with everyone playing by the same rules. “Peetr — yew are not ver-y fair to-day!” was an almost daily refrain. I would fumble helplessly for a response. But it never felt mean. We mostly got along.
Race infused our interactions; it couldn’t help but have. But none of the classmates I’ve been in touch with recalls it as a source of friction.
Even when conversations inevitably turned to the topic of race itself, “I don’t remember any racial tension,” Leslie told me. “I remember that [those] conversations were youthfully honest, straightforward, and warm. I had the feeling that we were all in it together.”
Roberto recalls the same spirit. “I felt that we all knew we had a higher purpose, to prove that this integration thing can work.”
In our class, at least. I’ve learned that things were more challenging in the other class, the one that started the year in Lincoln.
“Our different cultures, values, social norms were quite different and quite hard-baked,” Lincoln student Ted Hibben remembers about that class. “The exchange was just too limited to create much common ground.” Another Lincoln student from Ted’s class shared similar frustrations, though the one Roxbury kid I spoke with from that class had nothing but fond memories.
For the kids in my class, the teachers were the key — Mrs. Godfrey and Mr. Hagenbuckle, whom we mostly called Marlene and John. They were “the force that drew us together,” Robin remembers. But no one I’ve been in touch with remembers either of them leading any formal conversations about race. In our class anyway, the adults rarely put their fingers on the scale or set bounds on what the kids could or couldn’t say to one another. They generally let us work things out among ourselves. And we generally did.
Sidetrack students find a piece of machinery in an abandoned building on the Boston waterfront while exploring the city.
Photo courtesy of Peter Thomson
“The barriers that Sidetrack broke down, totally destroyed — the benefits are just immeasurable,” said alum Mark Vickers (not pictured).
Photo courtesy of Peter Thomson
Brad Singleton slides down the railings of an escalator at a station on the old Orange Line on Washington Street.
Photo courtesy of Nancy Striker Henderson
Explore this class photo of one of the two Sidetrack cohorts
(Left to right) Alex Zevin, Aaron Jackson, and David Keevil enjoy a game of chess.
Photo courtesy of Peter Thomson
ABOVE: Martha Bayles was one of two teachers for the class that started the year in Lincoln.
LEFT: Teachers Marlene Godfrey, left, and John Hagenbuckle, who led the class that started the year in Roxbury, were “the force that drew us together,” said Sidetrack alum Robin Williams.
Photos courtesy of Peter Thomson
Race infused our interactions; it couldn’t help but have. But none of the classmates I’ve been in touch with recalls it as a source of friction.
In our downtime at Lewis, we’d play milk-carton hockey and explore the network of ventilation tunnels beneath the school, which we crawled into through a big vent in the back of the classroom. We also bonded over music — mostly theirs. Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Al Green, Sly and the Family Stone. Isaac Hayes’s “Theme From Shaft” is still the Theme from Sidetrack.
As for academics, well, memories are a mixed bag.
Robin remembers that Marlene and John “made [learning] so much fun.” I remember that they got me interested in writing for the first time. But Wendy Burroughs recalls the academics were “a bit of an afterthought.” And Ted Hibben has a starker memory of his class, the one that began the year in Lincoln — that “there was literally no teaching.”
I asked Martha Bayles about that. Martha was one of the two teachers in that class. I found her still here in Boston and still teaching, at Boston College. I’m pretty sure she’s the last member of the Sidetrack staff still alive.
She remembers there was often a big gap “between the level of achievement of the Roxbury and Lincoln kids.” So the teachers focused much of their time on one-on-one work with some students while assigning independent work to others. Martha says the process was “not unsuccessful,” but it was messy. It didn’t help that she came to Sidetrack with little classroom experience. In some ways, she says, she and other staff members “weren’t quite up to” the challenges of a program like Sidetrack.
The hit-or-miss academics led two Lincoln kids to leave the program early on, one from each class. For everyone else I’ve been in touch with, any academic setback seems to have been short-lived. But Sidetrack paid a price for the difficulties.
There was sometimes trouble outside the classroom too.
As the whole world would soon find out, most of Boston in the early ’70s was hostile to Black kids, and much of Roxbury in turn was not exactly friendly to white kids. Several of us were attacked outside school in Roxbury when we didn’t have teachers or Lewis classmates at our side: mugged, chased, hit. I was one of them. A bus some of us were riding on was pelted with rocks.
Looking back, one Lincoln student reflected on how powerful a lesson it was to suddenly be on the other side of the racial divide, targeted for the color of his skin. But the incidents drove another Lincoln kid from the program. And for some, the fear lingered long afterward.
There were incidents in Lincoln as well — harassment of Roxbury kids by “a small group of non-Sidetrack white students [who] believed it was their duty to let us know that we didn’t belong in Lincoln and want[ed] to fight,” Roberto remembers. Today he shrugs it off. “I could live with that,” he says. “We all had that self-preservation radar.”
IF THERE WERE SPOTS where Sidetrack hit the skids, though, the out-of-school electives were where it soared.
The electives were “the shining part” of Sidetrack, Dan Spock remembers. “They were the thing I looked forward to every day.” For Mark Vickers, “the electives was Sidetrack. We saw so many aspects of life, experienced in real time. Most people don’t do that much in a lifetime.”
There were a dozen or so electives to choose from every semester. Electronics. Drama. Computers. In Law and the Courts we visited police stations, courtrooms, and prisons and met with cops, judges, and inmates. It was a real-world crash course on the criminal justice system in all its lofty ideals and harsh realities. In Communications we visited WGBH, where decades later I’d go to work, and the Globe. In Pollution we dove deep into the growing environmental crisis not long after the first Earth Day.
Student Jackie Murphy wrote this poem about Sidetrack and the Open City elective; it was paired with images of students in a newspaper produced about the program. Pictured are students Cathy Darling and Nanette Shepard and teacher Maurice Page.
Image courtesy of Peter Thomson
Then there was Open City, a weekly adventure in urban exploration and orienteering. A subway ride to an unknown corner of the city just to see what was there. A blindfolded car trip to another unknown spot from which we’d have to find our way back to a place we knew, with an adult alongside only to keep us from getting into trouble. Later we’d scheme up ways to transmit what we’d learned to other kids — a slideshow, a board game, a chapter for a possible kids’ guide to exploring Boston.
For Ted Hibben, whose Sidetrack experience was decidedly mixed, Open City was a high point that gave him “a great sense of self-sufficiency.” I learned that there’s something interesting wherever you go and no need to be afraid of being “lost.” Open City also was where I bonded most strongly with Roxbury kids like Mark, Brad, and Tracy. Where we dug into adventures built around shared interests, figured out how to work together on creative projects, and pushed the limits of our different upbringings.
Which was ultimately why we were there. Sidetrack set out to dissolve the limits that had divided us up by race and class, history and geography. That told us what we could and couldn’t do with our lives, what problems and challenges we could and couldn’t solve or even recognize. In place of those limits, Sidetrack let us build connections that resonate 50 years later.
“The barriers that Sidetrack broke down, totally destroyed — the benefits are just immeasurable,” Mark Vickers says. “It should’ve been carried on. There would’ve been less problems in this world. The biggest problem is lack of understanding.”
SO WHAT HAPPENED?
By the end of the school year Sidetrack was gaining attention. A story in the Globe reported that a member of the Boston School Committee praised “pilot projects, [including] Operation Sidetrack . . . [that] have demonstrated the value of metropolitan school cooperation.” WEEI, one of Boston’s top news radio stations, ran an editorial declaring that “Sidetrack [should] become a model for true person-to-person relationships in this increasingly complex and diverse world.” And the Christian Science Monitor ran a laudatory feature story. “Hopefully,” it concluded, “Sidetrack will expand and other schools will adopt the idea.”
But in late July, the Lincoln Fence Viewer reported an important piece of news. “No Sidetrack in Sept.,” the headline read. “State Withholds Funds. Low Enrollment Cited.”
The program needed 50 students to be viable. It got its 25 from Roxbury but only 16 from Lincoln.
Lincoln school superintendent Randolph Brown told the paper that the low enrollment of Lincoln students was “evidence that much more needs to be done to prepare suburban families for such opportunities.”
In fact, opposition had surfaced in Lincoln as soon as Sidetrack had been proposed the year before. The critics’ language was infused with fear, suspicion, and insularity. And it bubbled over into outright racism. Notes from community meetings recounted residents complaining that “there were already enough blacks in the schools because of the Metco plan” and asking, “Why do you want to mix our children with city blacks? We moved here to get away from that element.”
The critics’ language was infused with fear, suspicion, and insularity. And it bubbled over into outright racism.
Lincoln was not as different from the rest of America as many of us liked to think.
There was a strong case for continuing. State officials and students themselves had praised the program. Testing suggested students were in fact roughly at grade level in basic subjects. And Brown told the Fence Viewer that Sidetrack was meeting a primary objective: Students were “more aware of prejudice and less glib about racial situations.”
Administrators were also working to iron out problems from the first year.
But negative impressions about a chaotic classroom and academic shortcomings, and all those lingering fears, resonated where they mattered most — with Lincoln parents and students who would sign up, or not.
Among those who lost faith was my own mom. My enthusiasm for Sidetrack, and the ways it had changed me, weren’t enough to persuade her to keep me in. She and my best friend Stefan’s parents sent us to private school for an academic catch-up year. We were two of the nine-student shortfall in Lincoln.
Administrators scrambled to salvage the program. They ran pilots of a couple of new models. They even tried to reboot the program in another town. None of these succeeded. Sidetrack, and its vision of transformational integration and real-world education, was dead.
I'VE BEEN HAUNTED BY Sidetrack’s failure ever since. By the failure of my town to make good on the promise of what it had created. And perhaps even its failure to make much of an impact beyond my small group of friends. If it left a bigger imprint on the world, I couldn’t see it.
But now I can. I see it in the teacher from Lincoln who’s spent much of her career focusing on the value of diversity. In the lawyer from Roxbury whose career has been informed by both the racism he was subjected to as a kid and the Sidetrack classmates who set out “to unlearn racist thinking.” In the civil engineer from Lincoln who says she’s far more likely to bring up race and economic inequality than most people she engages with. In the cop from Roxbury for whom Sidetrack was “a foundation of understanding.” In the white Lincoln kid whose reply to my query about the impact of that year was simply that he’s married to a Black man.
In 1974, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall issued a stark warning in a dissent to a desegregation ruling that would mark the beginning of the court’s long retreat from the revolutionary scope of the Brown decision. “Unless our children begin to learn together,” Marshall wrote, “then there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together.”
Three years earlier Sidetrack had embodied a hopeful yang to what would be Marshall’s ominous yin: If our children begin to learn together, then our people will learn to live together.
We did. Both.
Today, America is sliding backward on school integration. A 2019 study by the UCLA Civil Rights Project and the Center for Education and Civil Rights found that the percentage of “intensely segregated” schools, with more than 90 percent non-white students, tripled from 1988 to 2016, from less than 6 percent to more than 18 percent. The researchers found that typical Black and Latino students attended schools that were nearly 75 percent non-white, while schools for typical white students were nearly 80 percent white, even as the country’s total white population was falling toward 60 percent.
“Segregation has engulfed central cities,” the authors wrote, “spread far out into sectors of suburbia, and is now serious in our small metros and even our small towns.”
And yet reams of research have documented the academic and economic costs of segregation and the benefits of integration — not just for students of color but for white kids as well.
Harder to quantify but perhaps just as crucial are the social costs of segregation. The problem that Marshall warned us about.
More integrated schools alone won’t fix these problems, but they would help. And yet the options for creating these schools are limited.
The Supreme Court case in which Marshall issued his warning — Milliken v. Bradley — quashed the idea of mandatory cross-district integration. What it left on the table was strictly voluntary regional integration programs — things like Metco and interdistrict magnet schools. But decades later these voluntary programs remain few and far between. It’s been a steep challenge to build models that draw substantial numbers of white families while meeting the needs of students of color.
Photo by John Hagenbuckle, courtesy of Nick Buchan
ABOVE: Students caught a Metco bus at 7:20 a.m. in Roslindale, heading to school in Lincoln in 2019. George Rizer/Globe Staff
RIGHT: Students worked on a lab project in a sixth-grade science class at Engineering & Science University Magnet Middle and High School in West Haven, Conn., in 2017. ESUMS is an interdistrict magnet school. Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff
But what if there was a model that could work but had been forgotten?
Sidetrack “was kind of a ramshackle experiment,” teacher Martha Bayles remembers. But “maybe in her naive take, Carol [Kellogg] hatched a really interesting thing.” An attempt at a level playing field. Everybody getting their turn at being an outsider. And the experiential education electives, getting kids out into the community — “really an important part of it.”
In 2017 Brandeis professor and desegregation researcher Susan Eaton co-wrote a report on emerging approaches to building diversity in public schools. Among its themes were “equal access to learning . . . equal status and power in a school and classroom . . . opportunities to build relationships across racial categories, and develop critical thinking skills and empathy.”
Which sound to me a lot like the basic elements of Sidetrack.
When I called Eaton up, she told me she’d never heard of Sidetrack, but she quickly began using words like “fascinating” and “visionary.”
Eaton says Sidetrack’s 50-50 model of equal representation and equal time in each community — which avoids reinforcing that whiteness is the norm — resonates with our growing understanding of how “kids of color in predominantly white settings can face discrimination and harm, and how to work against those kinds of things.”
From left, Sidetrack students and teachers (back row, left to right) Alan Marsh, John Levey, and Arlette Onley; (front row, left to right) Marlene Godfrey, John Hagenbuckle, and, Ninetta Cottrelle.
Photo courtesy of Peter Thomson
And she sees a significant cultural shift that could prime the pump for something like Sidetrack today.
The biggest challenge to school integration programs has always been getting white families and communities to buy in. But 50 years after Lincoln’s school superintendent lamented that “much more needs to be done to prepare suburban families” for opportunities like Sidetrack, Eaton believes many may finally be prepared.
“I think that there’s more and more parents — white parents — who [understand] that their kids are being hurt by going to really segregated white school districts,” she told me. Even in our fractured society, Eaton says, there are people who “want to live in a society that’s cohesive, where there’s bridges back and forth between different communities, where there’s equal respect and equal opportunity.”
And at a time of growing understanding of the importance of real-world learning, Sidetrack’s experiential education component could also be a draw. Offering “something extra” like that is the core of the magnet school model, Eaton says — one of today’s few successes in voluntary integration.
Eaton believes that something like Sidetrack could work today.
But the original model can’t just be dusted off and snapped into place.
For one thing, America today is a dramatically different country. In the ’70s, the primary social rift was between Black and white. Waves of immigration have reshaped the country since, and income inequality has surged. So the student mix in any given area would be different. And there’d have to be deeper conversations between and within communities about their needs, priorities, and expectations.
Academics would have to be given more priority, and they’d have to be linked more tightly with the out-of-school electives. Fortunately, 50 years later we know much better how to make this happen. We also know more about how to integrate kids at different levels and with different learning styles into one classroom.
The model could even be decoupled from specific schools or communities. One of Sidetrack’s main strengths — it grew organically out of a single small town — was also one of its main weaknesses. The possible pool of white students was small. A Sidetrack-like program today could build on the magnet school model, drawing students from multiple communities.
Sidetrack briefly created a community in which kids from wildly different backgrounds connected with one another and began to see the world differently. It had grander ambitions, to be sure — “We were part of a progressive effort to change history,” Roberto remembers — and it fell far short of them. But our experiences are evidence that in a tiny but not insignificant way, it made a difference. And that another such effort might help today.
Because while Sidetrack failed to catch on, it certainly wasn’t a failure.
Metaphorically, the bridge was being used as it was being built. All agreed there is an ideal bridge form to reach the nirvana on the other side, and executing on it [in] real time did not work.”
— Ted Hibben
Ted Hibben as a Sidetrack student.
Tracy Steele and Nick Buchan.
Photo courtesy of Nancy Striker Henderson
Students walk down the hallway at Jeremiah Burke High School in November 2022.
Jessica Rinaldi/ Globe Staff
MARK VICKERS
Retired Boston
police officer
“Everything we did was an adventure, a wicked adventure; it was cool. ... It was a lot in those [few] months. Most people don’t do that much in a lifetime.”
BRAD SINGLETON
TRACY STEELE
STEFAN SENDERS
ROBIN WILLIAMS
“[Our teachers] Marlene and John were like the force that drew us together. I remember learning in a good, healthy way. They made it so much fun.”
WENDY BURROUGHS
Wildlife educator and environmental activist
“My memories from that year of school remain vivid. I was not a particularly analytical 12-year-old but as I reflect I come to understand that the experiences we navigated during that year were profound. [They] changed the way I saw myself in the world.”
LESLIE REED
“On our last day together, we had a picnic in Lincoln. As the Roxbury kids were getting onto the bus and we were saying our final goodbyes, everyone was in tears. It had been an incredible year for each one of us. I can’t imagine that happening on the last day of any other seventh- or eighth-grade class.”
NAT PRIEST
ALAN MARSH
JOHN LEVEY
ARTHUR CHAMPENY
MELVIN ASHLEY
ALAN FIELD
Valerie Phillips
CAROLYN HUNT
CAMILE DARLING
ED BROWN
JACKIE MURPHY
JAMES CLARK
ARLETTE ONLEY
NINETTA COTTRELL
NICK BUCHAN
“Sidetrack helped me strongly embrace from an early age the ideal that all races are created equal and are, given an equal footing, equally capable of all things.”
BRAD SINGLETON
Marines, pharmaceuticals sales executive
“Sidetrack opened the lens of my experiences and even things I had done before ... were seen in new ways. Things that I was not even aware of, I can track back to Sidetrack.”
TRACY STEELE
Senior vice president at an IT company
“The experience is burned into me. ... It made such a big impression on me at a young age. ... [It] was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had in my life.”
STEFAN SENDERS
Fulbright program adviser at Cornell and a baker
“It was such a trusting experience; there was an assumption of resilience and a deep belief in the power of hope.”
ED BROWN
ALAN MARSH
Louray Barton as a Sidetrack student.
One of my fondest memories is of me leaning my head on the window and watching the change of scenery as we were driven to Lincoln. ... I would gaze up and watch the tree tops as we drove by. I remember [the] long driveways, huge yards, and pretty homes. I’ve always been drawn to architecture, so that may have been how that appreciation was fostered.”
— Louray Barton
“
John Linnell as a Sidetrack student.
It was a deep and life-changing experience . . . Some of us were much better suited to it than others. [It was] very chaotic, often unstructured, and I’m sure I missed out on some valuable ‘core’ education. But for me it more than compensated in a million ways.”
— John Linnell
“
Dan Spock as a Sidetrack student.
[It was] the first time I really realized that not everybody was getting the same deal. It made me think a lot harder about inequality in America, because I saw it so starkly.”
— Dan Spock
“
The kernel of the idea sprang in 1970 from an unlikely source — a fifth-grade teacher in Lincoln named Carol Kellogg, who’d grown disenchanted with the complacency of her wealthy, white, and largely liberal town. She felt that while she and others professed concern about racism, they were basically “sitting out here in our cozy little suburb not doing a darn thing,” as she told Lincoln’s Fence Viewer newspaper at the time.
Yes, there was Metco, a new initiative to bus a few Black kids from segregated and underfunded schools in Boston to better-funded ones in the suburbs,
A letter dated August 25, 1971, from Carol Kellogg to parents includes bus, teacher, and curriculum details.
Image courtesy of Roberto Fortes
ABOVE: The main intersection in Lincoln, circa 1971.
RIGHT: Heath Street in Roxbury is pictured in the foreground and downtown Boston in the background in November 1972.
Photos by Max Mason via Lincoln Town Archives; Edward Jenner/Boston Globe
Detail from Roberto Fortes’s final report card, signed by teacher Marlene Godfrey.
Image courtesy of Roberto Fortes
Editors: Brian Bergstein and David Scharfenberg Designer: Heather Hopp-Bruce Producer: Abbi Matheson
This was the first time since then that we’d been back there. It was the first time we’d seen each other since we were classmates in a radical experiment in integration and experiential learning called Sidetrack.
We were 12-year-old seventh-graders when we met in that classroom in the fall of 1971. I was a shy white kid from Lincoln, Roberto an outgoing Black kid from Roxbury. Our hometowns embodied the divides that defined America — white and Black, suburban and urban, rich and poor.
Sidetrack created a new world for both of us. A 50-50 world. Its two classes would be roughly 50 percent Black, 50 percent white, 50 percent urban, and 50 percent suburban. Half from what was then the Lewis School, half from the Brooks School in Lincoln. We’d spend half the year in gritty, redlined Roxbury and half the year in bucolic, two-acre-zoned Lincoln, 15 miles away. Even the teachers would be 50-50 — two Black, two white, two male, two female. And the kicker: In Sidetrack we’d spend three half-days a week out of school, exploring the wider world. For an entire school year, we would learn together, explore together, and try to figure out how to live together.
Martha Bayles was one of two teachers for the class that started the year in Lincoln. Photos courtesy of Peter Thomson
The Sidetrack program was born amid tumult over attempts to integrate long-segregated schools. Boston’s Operation Exodus, above, in the 1960s, bused children from overcrowded Black schools to predominantly white schools with vacant seats. William Ryerson/Globe staff
In 1974, the Boston Public Schools were under court order to desegregate. On Sept. 12 of that year, a crowd watched as a bus carrying students returned to Columbia Point with windows that had been broken by white demonstrators. Above right, an officer pinned a demonstrator to the ground during a pro-busing demonstration in Boston on Dec. 14, 1974.
Photos by Ted Dully/Globe staff and Globe staff
In 1974, the Boston Public Schools were under court order to desegregate. On Sept. 12 of that year, a crowd watched as a bus carrying students returned to Columbia Point with windows that had been broken by white demonstrators. Above right, an officer pinned a demonstrator to the ground during a pro-busing demonstration in Boston on Dec. 14, 1974. Photos by Ted Dully/Globe staff and Globe staff
ABOVE: The main intersection in Lincoln, Mass., circa 1971. Photo by Max Mason via Lincoln Town Archives
BELOW: Heath Street in Roxbury is pictured looking toward in the foreground and downtown Boston in the background in November 1972. Edward Jenner/Boston Globe