Several years ago, nearly a century after the Dearings were expelled from their home there, Piedmont opened its exclusive school district up to kids who do not live within city limits. Now the district is seeking 200 Oakland students to enroll in its schools. When explaining this decision to The San Francisco Chronicle, the Piedmont school district’s superintendent, Randall Booker, cited the desire for more diversity in both the student body and the faculty.Piedmont’s decision is perhaps motivated not only by good will or a desire for desegregation. The reality is that while Piedmont has gotten wealthier — a friend who grew up there and whose parents still live there described the transition as “a town of lawyers that turned into a town of tech C.E.O.s” — it also has gotten significantly older. In the 1990 census, 14.6 percent of Piedmont’s residents were over the age of 65. In 2020, that number had jumped to 21.5 percent.A generation that normally would have put their kids through school and then retired and eventually moved out of one of Piedmont’s 5,000-square-foot mansions has decided to stay put. And there certainly aren’t high-rise apartments being built all over Piedmont, so young families who may want to move there for the schools tend to get shut out of an absurdly competitive real estate market.As a result, the overall enrollment in Piedmont’s schools dropped to 2,464 last year from 2,692 in 2017. Before this school year, school funding in California was largely determined by a school’s attendance. But starting this year, that same funding will rely on a combination of enrollment and attendance figures. As a result, a rapidly declining population could lead to fiscal devastation, even in a place like Piedmont. The 200 new Piedmont students, then, solve two problems: lack of diversity and underenrollment.Piedmont’s situation was created in large part by California’s Proposition 13, the 1978 law that essentially freezes property tax values at the date of purchase. The owners of a house in Piedmont purchased in, say, 1980 for $700,000 will pay only a few thousand dollars a year in taxes, even though their house may now be worth over $4 million. This not only has placed a hard cap on the amount of tax dollars that can be raised for services like public education, but it’s also resulted in neighborhoods that never turn over, especially in wealthy-homeowner areas.To date, there has been almost no resistance to the plan to open up the district from Piedmont parents, many of whom see the need to boost enrollment and diversify the student body. This certainly is atypical for a city like Piedmont. Recently, the wealthy town of Darien, Conn., floated an idea similar to Piedmont’s, proposing that it allow 16 students from nearby Norwalk, a more diverse, working-class city, to enroll in the local kindergarten. (The proposal was ultimately voted down.) By comparison, the Piedmont plan is much more ambitious. The 200 students who live outside of the city would constitute roughly 8 percent of the Piedmont student body.On the surface, it seems like rich white and Asian parents doing what’s been asked of them by diversity and school desegregation advocates while also trying, in their way, to abide by the standard progressive politics of the Bay Area. Plus, nobody really disputes the positive effects that integrated schools have on both white and minority-group students. There’s also the moral imperative for towns that have been built on histories of racist violence and discrimination. They can reckon with their pasts by passing substantive policies that would help share some of their amassed wealth, especially when it comes to public schools.