Japanese School Achieves an Uneasy Peace

FOR three years, the board of the Daycroft School tried to leave its Greenwich campus. Finally, overcoming community opposition, the school has a new resident, the Japanese Educational Institute of New York, and through a compromise worked out by town planners, the historic buildings on the campus will be preserved.

The institute, which bought the Daycroft property in 1989, will create the first Japanese-language elementary school in Connecticut and plans to bus about 370 fourth through ninth graders from throughout the metropolitan region to the lower Lake Avenue campus beginning in late summer. The school's purpose is to help Japanese children maintain the scholastic levels of their peers so they can return without difficulty to their home schools in three to five years. The Japanese Government sponsors about 85 day schools and 146 weekend schools in the United States for the children of Japanese executives.

But the establishment of the Japanese school in Greenwich was not a smooth endeavor. The dispute that took so much time and money, and provoked such bitterness, was believed by some to be rooted in racism. "There's no doubt about it," said Robert F. Harper, a Daycroft School trustee.

The chairman of the Daycroft board, Al D. McCready, agreed. "This Committee to Save Lower Lake Avenue had much less to do with lower Lake Avenue and a lot to do with this particular transaction of Daycroft selling to the Japanese," he said.

But that interpretation is disputed by the citizens groups who banded together to oppose the school.

The leader of the Committee to Save Lower Lake Avenue, Susan Morton, said that her group's concern was the granting of a zoning variance to allow the Japanese school to operate in a residential zone and "certainly not motivated by racism." Ms. Morton, who lives across the street from the school, dropped her objections when the compromise was reached.

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