A rare Englewood schools story

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The Monday paper is among the smallest of the week, but The Record found room for a story about Englewood (on map above), only the fourth story about that city in October.

An interview with the new schools superintendent appears on L-2, the second page of the Local section, conducted, edited and condensed by Giovanna Fabiano, the Englewood reporter, who I knew as a hard worker and one of the better writers before I left in May 2008.

Although The Record has daily education coverage, the interview is the first mention in at least a couple of years of the city's segregated schools and some of the factors that created them, according to Superintendent Richard Segall, including redlining by banks and the presence of two big, expensive private schools that lure away virtually all of the white students, especially in the elementary and middle school grades.

The interview also goes into a little detail about what is being done to integrate the high school (not a new story), but more importantly, the elementary grades, which have been ignored by The Record for years.

Malcolm A. Borg, chairman of the North Jersey Media Group, owner of The Record, lives in Englewood, and presumably his children, who now run NJMG, grew up there. I do not know whether Jennifer and Stephen Borg attended public or private schools.

I think of Englewood, where I lived in an apartment from 1979-2007, as a plantation, with the rich white families such as the Borgs living on the hill and the blacks and Hispanics living down below, mostly across the tracks that bisect the town.

During the time I was at The Record, the newspaper never analyzed the social, religious and political forces that brought about segregated schools in the 1980s. However, I did read that story in the New York Times' New Jersey section. Instead, Record editors and reporters confined themselves to covering endless hearings, whether in court or before the local and state Boards of Education.