By Ann Doss Helms
ahelms@charlotteobserver.com

As a child, Stan Frazier attended all-black schools.

As a high school senior, he experienced the turmoil of full-scale desegregation at West Charlotte High.

Now he's wrapping up a 35-year education career, retiring as principal of an eastside elementary school where most students are black or Hispanic. It's the kind of school that increasingly dominates Charlotte's landscape, as the conversion from desegregation to neighborhood schools plays out and white families shift to the suburbs.

For more than five decades, Frazier has watched his native city grapple with race, culture and education. He doesn't offer easy solutions.

Frazier has been hailed for beat-the-odds success in an elementary school where most children were poor and minority. But when a new superintendent asked him to try a high school, the task proved overwhelming.

A couple things he's sure of: Schools must work with police, churches, neighborhood groups and businesses to have any hope of breaking racial barriers and overcoming the obstacles of poverty.

And to do that, everyone must understand the city's history.

"We have so many newcomers who don't have a clue about this city," says Frazier, 57, who retires this week as principal of Albemarle Road Elementary. "To talk about things, you have to have a history, a culture."

The great divide

Frazier's father, a World War II veteran, bought a home in northwest Charlotte's University Park and sent his kids to the new black elementary school there.

Frazier remembers when a third-grader at the top of the class was sent to a white school - and returned before a year was up. Word was that she hadn't succeeded.

"Something had been drained from her," Frazier recalls. "It was like the life had been sucked out of her."

While Frazier moved through middle and high school in the 1960s, adults were fighting school segregation in court. Sending a handful of black students to white schools wasn't enough, proponents of desegregation argued. Eventually the U.S. Supreme Court agreed, forcing Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools to create a busing plan.

Frazier was part of West Charlotte's Class of 1971. White students arrived his senior year. Frazier recalls some sense of triumph: finally white students were coming to black schools, instead of black students always being the ones who were bused.

But mostly, he remembers a senior year that still feels like unfinished business. He uses words like "fog" to describe that turning point in his life: "Teachers were so afraid to do something wrong they didn't do much of anything right."

The closest thing to real integration, he said, was on the football team. "Even when there were fights, the football players would band together," he said. But when the season ended, "you got the great divide."

Rich and poor

Frazier followed an older sister into teaching, earning his degree from Johnson C. Smith University and starting his career as a kindergarten teacher.

He became an assistant principal at Eastover Elementary, in one of Charlotte's most posh neighborhoods. It was desegregated by busing black students from a low-income neighborhood to the majority-white school: "You had the rich rich and the poor poor."

The school had gotten into trouble when people found out it had an all-black class of "kids with problems," he said. It also had only two clubs: An all-white safety patrol and an all-black Right Moves for Youth. Frazier and the principal created more clubs, from jogging to chess, so kids could mingle based on their interests.

"The parents loved it," he said. "Each kid had a chance to shine."

In 1998, he was promoted to principal of Merry Oaks Elementary, where many of the students came from impoverished homes and didn't speak English well.

Louise Woods, who represented Charlotte's east side on the school board at the time, says she thought the school was too challenging for a new principal. But she says Frazier won her over with his insistence that the children of Merry Oaks deserved every opportunity the Eastover kids had.

Frazier says he worked to keep good teachers and students. The neighborhood was a transient one, he said. He hit the streets, visiting all-black apartment complexes and all-white neighborhood association meetings, trying to sell all families on their neighborhood school. A new building helped rally community pride.

The children did well on state tests, and Frazier built a reputation as a dynamic, effective leader. In 2003 he went to the White House to talk about academic success with impoverished minority students. In 2007 he was named CMS' principal of the year, based on his work at Merry Oaks.

A new challenge

But by then, Frazier had switched jobs.

Peter Gorman had been hired as superintendent in summer 2006. That fall, he launched his first big push for change, demanding that principals at four high-poverty, low-performing high schools boost achievement. Shortly afterward, he removed one of them and asked Frazier to step in mid-year as principal of Waddell High.

It's rare for a principal to jump from elementary to high school, let alone one of the state's most challenging high schools.

Waddell had opened in 2001 amid political controversy about its southwest Charlotte location. None of its first three principals had stayed long. Families fought for more desirable assignments in south Charlotte schools with higher scores, more white students and less poverty.

Frazier stepped up with high energy and hopes. Reality was a shock, he said. Trying to keep a high-profile presence at sports and other activities, he says, he found himself working 16-hour days.

Worse was the way gang culture pervaded his new school. He recalls a student who came to him after school, afraid to go home because a gang planned to "beat him in" to membership.

Frazier took him home - driving his Jaguar, which he realized belatedly may have been a mistake. He watched as neighborhood teens in black T-shirts glared. One pointed his finger like a gun at the luxury car passing through.

He talked to the teen's mom, who was working and had little time or ability to shield the student and his three younger siblings.

The student "came back with his (gang) colors the next day," Frazier recalls.

Frazier says now he's glad he tried the job. But after a year, he told his bosses he wanted to retire. He ended up staying on, with a midyear transfer to Albemarle Road Elementary.

Now, two years later, Frazier is retiring for real.

He recently wrote a historical novel, "Maroons," about a secret society of slaves who fought for freedom. He figures retirement might give him time to bring more historical heroes to a younger generation.

"History," Frazier says, "is now."

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