While redrawing the lines that determine what schools children attend, Anne Arundel County Superintendent of Schools Mark Bedell is confronting the area’s history of segregation and discrimination.

“The problem that we have is we are still operating in a segregated county,’” Bedell said in a speech March 4. “What I’ll say is, ‘I’m not interested in perpetuating historical practices.’ If that means I get run out of here, so be it, but God, let’s try to do the right thing for once.”

The state will not grant funding requests for building additions or new schools if there are empty seats in the district. The county’s student population is growing unevenly, giving the district “no choice” but to redistrict.

In the past year, Anne Arundel’s population surpassed 600,000, and the school district gained 683 students. Schools are often a reason people give for moving to the county and the majority of schools in the district recently received at least four stars in Maryland’s ranking system.

Bedell, who sometimes jokes he would not have taken the job if he knew redistricting was on the horizon, said the district is still collecting feedback and has not made recommendations yet.

During previous rounds of redistricting, initial maps were drawn by committees made up of parents, educators and elected officials, which allowed for some voices to be overrepresented.

“You know what hurts me? ‘I don’t want this community with that community. You can’t come out into my community.’ Historically, that’s been the setup here, and we’ve been OK with it,” Bedell said at a Feb. 19 Board of Education meeting.

For much of Anne Arundel’s history, the county’s schools were segregated.

Before starting fourth grade in the 1960s, Lyndra Marshall’s mother told her she would be changing schools, leaving her attentive and loving teachers at Lothian Elementary School for a longer commute to Tracy Elementary.

Her experience is similar to what some students did at the start of this academic year, but Marshall was not welcomed at her new school. Teachers at the integrated school neglected Black students. When Marshall, her nine siblings and other Black children in Anne Arundel County arrived at their new schools, students and parents hurled bricks and screamed at them to go back where they came from.

After the U.S. Supreme Court ordered schools to integrate “with all deliberate speed” in 1955, Anne Arundel schools chose a gradual approach, integrating at the elementary level over 12 years.

Changing schools was disruptive. Wiley H. Bates High School in Annapolis, where Black students went, shut down in 1966 after 30 years. Its largely Black staff lost their jobs or took demotions.

“It didn’t make any sense to us because we were getting a very good education, all of our teachers were Black teachers, and they were sticklers for you getting a good education” Marshall said.

Marshall grew up to be a historian, leading the county’s oral history project that chronicled the civil rights movement in Anne Arundel. Bates is now a legacy center, dedicated to remembering the school and preserving Black culture and heritage.

Carl Snowden, former director for Civil Rights at the Office of the Attorney General, was devastated at age 9 when he learned he had to change schools and would never attend Bates High School.

He went to George Washington Carver Elementary in Gambrills, a segregated school for Black students, even though Davidsonville Elementary, a white school, was significantly closer to his home. When the district started integrating, he was bused to Annapolis Elementary. Years later, Snowden was one of four students expelled from Annapolis High School after organizing a protest calling for the hiring of Black administrators and teaching African American studies.

In the decades since Snowden’s graduation, Anne Arundel has opened dozens of schools, and the population has quintupled, forcing the school system to redistrict multiple times.

“There’s a historic reason why certain communities are predominantly Black versus white,” Snowden said. “My recollection is that every time there’s been a redistricting effort, race has always played a major factor — never spoken loudly, but always the subtext for everything.”

Marshall and Snowden both finished their educations and became community leaders despite the barriers they faced, but both say Black students still face similar barriers with racism and de facto segregation.

Black families historically have not had equal access to housing. Anne Arundel County, like many areas in the country, used redlining, a discriminatory practice in which financial services are withheld from neighborhoods that have significant numbers of minorities, leading to unequal access to housing and wealth-building opportunities.

Last month, a video using racial slurs to describe students circulated at Crofton High School, according to Principal Greg Ryan’s Feb. 28 letter to families condemning the video and urging parents to help with an investigation.

Anne Arundel launched the second phase of the latest redistricting process last month, focusing on the southern half of the county. The first phase, which dealt with the northern half, took effect this fall. About 6,400 students changed schools at the start of the year, and two new schools — Severn Run High and Two Rivers Elementary — opened.

The second phase began with the release of three redistricting maps — called scenarios — created by a New York-based consulting firm using population data.

At this stage, the scenarios are a tool for collecting feedback. Bedell will take the input and create a recommendation for the board. His recommendation may include multiple maps and could look entirely different from the initial scenarios. The board may also create a new map.

However, after the scenarios were released, some communities began voicing concerns about maintaining community ties.

In the Severna Park cluster, 724 people from the Jones Elementary School community signed a petition demanding students not be redirected from Severna Park Middle School to Severn River Middle School.

Davidsonville parents started an online petition that had 566 signatures as of Thursday. In the photo paired with the petition, a young boy holds a piece of printer paper with a message written in a child’s handwriting: “Don’t send me to another school!”

“For the sake of our children, their education, the community bonds we’ve built, the safety of our children and the value of our neighborhoods, we implore you to reconsider the proposed alteration of district lines,” the petition states.

On the Mayo Peninsula, a group of parents calling themselves “One Mayo” issued a statement a few days after the scenarios were released.

“Bottom line: it is unacceptable that any scenario would illogically break up our neighborhoods,” they wrote.

For Bedell, the bottom line is schools must be balanced, which means some communities will have to face changes.

“There is going to be some compromising that has to be made in order to balance this system so we can take it from being a really good system to a phenomenal system,” Bedell said.

Have a news tip? Contact Bridget Byrne at bbyrne@baltsun.com or 443-690-7205