In our letters section last week, Greece resident Murray Stahl objected to my recent comments about suburban sprawl's impact on Midtown Plaza. Sprawl didn't kill Midtown, he said; city schools did. Families left when Rochester tried to integrate its schools in the 1960's and 70's.

I can argue with some of Stahl's statements, but his concern about city schools underscores Rochester's challenge. And Stahl's point is given new importance as the Duffy administration considers requiring many of its employees to live in the city. Among the early objections to that idea: the employees won't want to send their children to city schools.

First, a counter to Stahl's history lesson: Not every middle-class family left the city because of school integration. Our family and many others stayed, sent our children to public schools, and saw them go on to top-notch colleges and productive careers.

More important, the flight to the suburbs - in Rochester and other cities - began long before the days of school integration. It was fueled by a host of government policies - highway construction, loan guarantees, taxes - that favored suburban development. Some of those policies, by the way, were blatantly racist. At one point, FHA regulations specified that houses getting loans be in neighborhoods "occupied by the same social and racial classes." (See Kenneth Jackson's book, "Crabgrass Frontier.")

Redlining by the real-estate, insurance, and banking industries compounded the problem. The result was residential segregation in the North that concentrated poor, predominantly African-American residents in inner-city neighborhoods. And school district boundaries created economically and racially segregated schools.

The purpose of Rochester's integration efforts was to give the city's poorest children access to the same schools that middle and upper-income students attended. There was - and continues to be - ample evidence that such children did better in integrated schools than in schools where most children were poor.

There is no doubt that some Rochesterians moved out of the city as a result of the integration plan. Murray Stahl's family wasn't the only one.

When our children were growing up, we were one of five families with children on our block. Today, the houses on our block are the same: well-built, attractive, middle-class houses with hardwood floors, nice yards - one block from an excellent public school; within easy walking distance of a library, a YMCA, museums, shops, churches. Yet there is not one family with children on our block.

And according to the State Education Department's records, at the elementary school in this almost exclusively white, middle-class neighborhood, 63 percent of the students are African American, and 60 percent of them get free or subsidized lunches. I'd bet that there are so few children from our neighborhood in that school that if children weren't bused in from other parts of the city, the district would close it.

What has happened?

Some families moved out. Others stayed but send their children to private or parochial school.

I am convinced that at its core, the problem has been one of perception, not quality. But I am also convinced that in many of Rochester's schools, perception has grown into reality. The vast majority of students in nearly all of Rochester's schools are poor. To turn those schools into high-achieving institutions is almost impossible.

As Murray Stahl notes, the people moving back into the city are, for the most part, not families with children. The reason, unquestionably, is schools.

Jean Claude Brizard and Bob Duffy have a lot on their plates. But at some point, somebody has to address this issue: Given the high poverty rate in the Rochester school district, what can be done to attract middle and upper-income families back to the city - and to its schools?

It's a big week in national politics. Our news staff will be posting our comments on our website every day - and we want your comments as well. Go to our news blog section.