In 1953, the
United States Supreme Court rendered its decision in the case
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka declaring state laws establishing separate schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. The Chester Board of Education technically met the requirements of integration; however, board policy allowed students to request transfers to schools outside their neighborhood. The board approved most transfers for white students but few for black students. As a result, in 1953, five elementary schools in Chester were almost completely black. Yet each of those five schools had white students living within its district that were allowed to attend all-white schools in other parts of town. From November 1963 to April 1964, the
Chester school protests were initiated by the
Committee for Freedom Now and the Chester branch of the
NAACP to protest the
de facto segregation of schools. In April 1964, almost nightly protests against the Chester School Board policy were marked by violence and police brutality.
George Raymond, president of the
NAACP Chester branch presented the school board with a list of 10 demands including teacher transfers, transportation of students to schools in other neighborhoods, hiring blacks for supervisory positions and hiring more black secretaries. Over six hundred people were arrested over a two-month period of civil rights rallies, marches, pickets, boycotts and sit-ins. A 1964 hearing from the Pennsylvania Human Rights commission reported findings from investigators sent into Chester schools that concluded there was "maintenance of all-one color schools, assignment of Negro teachers to all-Negro schools, inferior educational standards in nonwhite schools, failure to appoint Negroes to supervisory and administrative positions and gerrymandering of boundary lines defining school zones in order to perpetuate all Negro schools".
Recent history In 1994, Chester Upland was named by the state as the worst-performing school district in Pennsylvania. The district had a multimillion-dollar
deficit and its decision-making ability was taken over by the state. A for-
profit company,
Edison Schools, was hired to try to improve the struggling district's test scores in 2001. After four years it was determined that Edison was not successful in turning the district around. A number of incidents, including an allegation of sexual misconduct on the part of an Edison employee, and policies such as not allowing students to bring home books, led to the state's decision to break its contract with Edison. The district has regained local public control, but remains one of the lowest-performing in Pennsylvania. 72% of district students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, as compared to the state average of 33%. In recent years it has opened a number of selective-admission
magnet schools. ==Governance==