It was a long-ago autumn when 10 dignified children, eyes straight ahead, walked into my all-white elementary school in Ohio amid whispers and stares. They were “those new kids.” Polite people referred to them in those days as “colored.”

Their presence was the long-delayed result of the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme court ruling, which struck down racial segregation in the schools.

In a 5-4 vote, the court last week decided that schools in Seattle and Louisville, Ky., couldn’t base school assignments on “diversity” quotients when that was code for “racial.”

Did the ruling turn that landmark decision on its head? No. The ruling, frankly, is the least of our public schools’ worries. As Portland school officials pointed out, most districts balance school populations based on how many students receive subsidized lunches. The division between the haves and have-nots is the deepest, and it often includes a racial component.

Despite attempts to engineer a bridge over this divide, it has grown. In schools with high African-American and Hispanic enrollment, for example, the dropout rate now tops 50 percent.

Yet there was great value in mixing student populations long ago to reflect the real-world ethnic, racial and cultural mix. I learned that early in the fifth grade.

It wasn’t only the childish and cruel comments directed at the transfer students that reflected entrenched bigotry; it was the “robins don’t mate with the crows” comment from a substitute teacher.

My music teacher changed my life. The day she returned our poems (written as an assignment to produce lyrics for a Halloween school musical), she pretended that a poem had been turned in anonymously. She read it aloud in a sing-song voice. She added her own words to make it ridiculous. She hinted that a tall, handsome and dark-skinned transfer student named Sherman wrote it.

Although he said he hadn’t, she did nothing to stop the jeering. I did nothing to stand up for him. I didn’t announce that it was my poem; that the teacher had lied. I didn’t protest. It wasn’t in me then to so openly defy authority.

That first experience with betrayal, disillusionment and regret was a revelation. I

didn’t speak up then, but I have since.

Edicts and rulings alone can’t change how people feel about each other. But they can lead to life-changing events that do. I wish I could apologize to Sherman. He was much braver than I.

Theresa Novak is the Opinion page editor at the Corvallis Gazette-Times.