By the time of widespread, court-mandated segregation in American schools, most schools were part of a school district - meaning multiple schools for children at two or three age ranges served by the same transportation system, superintendent, and attendance boundaries. To that end, desegregation efforts were typically about integrating the district, which set policy, rather than a school itself. As a result, it's difficult to see patterns at the elementary versus high school, per se.

That said, actual desegregation/integration efforts have typically been dependent on the age of the child involved in the lawsuit. For example, the first case related to school integration involved a five-year-old girl, Sarah Roberts, in Boston in 1848. Her father was frustrated he had to walk past better funded, all-white schools to take Sarah to her poorly insulated, all-Black school. His goal was to get her a seat at the school near her home, a common grammar school educating white children as young as 4 and as old as 16 or 17. He lost the case but was eventually able to persuade state-level policy makers to change state law, making de jure segregation illegal in all Massachusetts school. (De facto segregation due to housing policy, attendance boundaries, and other factors, though, endured.) Even though the Roberts lost, their case was cited in the majority decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, establishing the doctrine of "separate but equal."

The case that would nullify "separate but equal", Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka was decided in 1954. Rather than a case about a single child, the case that went before the United States Supreme Court was a collection of lawsuits. Each of those cases involved a Black parent suing a district, board of education, district superintendent, mayor, or governor. The NAACP leaders were thoughtful, strategic, and purposeful about which case they pursued and the nature of each case. The lead plaintiff in the case of Brown vs. Topeka, for example, was Oliver Brown, the father of a third grader, who like Sarah Roberts, had to walk past multiple better funded white schools to get her school. Brown was a successful small businessman and involved in his church, making him a defendant above reproach. Although the case involved the parents of multiple children denied admission at their neighborhood school, including Oliver's wife, Brown was made the lead defendant because of his gender and character. Cases related to segregation during the Civil Rights Era were typically about what the NAACP thought would bring a win, than a particular child at a particular school.

The group known as the Little Rock 9 were focused on integrating Central High School in Little Rock Arkansas in 1957, following Board. The Little Rock district had planned on integrating/desegregating quickly but community pushback meant they developed a plan that was much slower and met the bare legal minimum required by Brown. Basically, the district's white leaders made the call to drag their feet as long as legally possible to keep Black children from access the resources at the white schools. Again, the NAACP put pressure on the system where they felt they would be the most successful. The teenagers who became the Little Rock 9 were academically successful, articulate, politically-engaged students who could self-advocate around the pressures of the experience. The decision to focus the high school was a strategic one that positioned the students as the spokespeople for integration, rather than their parents. That level of involvement by students is much more difficult for younger children. That said, Ruby Bridges, who was six at the time of her integration fight, was a sharp, likely gifted, child. Her parents volunteered for a desegregation effort and as Ruby was their oldest child, their efforts were focused on her elementary school.

Finally, we often think about segregation in terms of the children, but it's necessary to take a moment to acknowledge one of the consequences related to desegregation efforts at both the elementary and high schools. Because integration often meant closing Black-only schools, the staff and faculty from those schools found themselves unemployed or underemployed. It was common, and legal, in the era for districts to dismiss women teachers who got pregnant or had children - which meant any Black woman who applied at a newly integrated school but had children was not likely to be hired. In some cases, Black teachers with multiple college degrees found they had to choose between unemployment or working as a hall monitor or teacher's assistant. In one of the more egregious examples, a number of Black male teachers in one community who worked as coaches and high school math and science teachers were offered jobs as coaches assistants or part-time jobs working under first-year, white teachers. Numbers vary, but some historians estimate that as many as 65,000 Black teachers lost their jobs following Brown. In more than a few, incredibly frustrating cases, Black teachers were hired to replace white teachers who had quit rather than teacher Black children. In most cases, the Black teachers' salaries were half or a third of the salaries of the white teachers they were replacing.