“It was easier for me than it would have been if I was black. I didn’t have to worry about being the angry, black woman. Instead, I was just the naggy white woman. And that’s different.” Cara Detwiler, a white teacher at Johnnycake Elementary

At the committee’s October meeting, the fifth-grade teacher took the microphone.

“No one is talking about the fact that there is no diversity change north,” she said, adding that the school would remain 94 percent minority.

Detwiler, a native of Catonsville, didn’t expect enthusiasm for integration, but she hoped parents and teachers on the boundary committee might at least have a conversation about it. As a white teacher, she was aware that she was in a unique position to force such a discussion.

“It was easier for me than it would have been if I was black,” Detwiler said. “I didn’t have to worry about being the angry, black woman. Instead, I was just the naggy white woman. And that’s different.”

For years, the Title I label — stamped on schools with predominantly poor students — hung over Johnnycake like “a black cloud,” Principal Bre-Anne Fortkamp said. It carried the same stigma as the words “inner city,” a place stereotyped as poor, chaotic — inferior.

Fortkamp, who is white, knew that the test scores at her school were lower than those at schools on the other side of U.S. 40. But she had attended some of the best schools in Baltimore County herself — Riderwood Elementary, Dumbarton Middle and Towson High School — and had tested horribly. She believed that “kids are not test scores.”

As a principal, she took pride in other numbers — such as the more than 95 percent of families who responded on end-of-year surveys that they felt welcomed at the school and believed their children were getting a good education.

“All the same reasons people are afraid to go into neighborhoods were the same reasons people didn’t want Johnnycake. And it was very black and white.” Johnnycake Principal Bre-Anne Fortkamp

As much as they didn’t want to believe it, parents and staff who represented Johnnycake in the redistricting discussions had no doubt that their school was confronting racism.

“All the same reasons people are afraid to go into neighborhoods were the same reasons people didn’t want Johnnycake,” Fortkamp said. “And it was very black and white.”

The Johnnycake children did have struggles, said Gary Budd, a fourth-grade teacher. Some had lost family members to violence. Some had to wake up early to feed younger siblings and were cranky from lack of sleep.

But Budd, who is white, said he could relate.

“These are good kids who might have had some rough times in their lives,” he said. “We all have a common denominator: life.”

That was most clear to Sanford, who felt he had much in common with the parents from south of U.S. 40 who wanted their children to have the best educational advantages. He moved to his neighborhood for a better life, and Johnnycake was a part of that. He believed his twin boys had received an excellent education there, which had helped them gain admission into a competitive middle school.

Jeff Sanford, whose twin boys attended Johnnycake, was a member of a volunteer committee involved in the redistricting of Catonsville-area schools in 2015.

He felt he played as much a role in his children’s education as their teachers. There were homework checks every day, pop quizzes ahead of vocabulary tests, and his children weren’t allowed to bring home Cs.

He could have spent more money on a bigger house on the other side of U.S. 40, he said, but he chose his smaller, ranch-style home so it would be easy to take care of when he got older.

He had his sons’ academic careers planned out, all the way through college.

“I want them to do better than me”, said Sanford, who drives a tractor trailer for the U.S. Postal Service. “I tell my sons, ‘I expect nothing but greatness from you.’

“I think anybody who loves and cares about their kids holds them to that standard.”

Yet now he stood listening to other parents, and what he heard them saying was that he wasn’t good enough, that his standards for his children were inferior.

“All they saw was a black man whose kids go to Johnnycake,” he said. “They thought, ‘You’re black, I’m white, I can do things you can’t do.’ Maybe — but your kids can’t do things my kids can. I would put my two kids up against anybody on that side of 40.”

Sanford felt it as a blow to his entire community. The redistricting process had shown Sanford and his fellow parents that their children — the ones they saw as smart and full of potential — were seen only as liabilities.