Pasadena Superintendent Wants to Phase Out Busing

More than 30 years after Pasadena schools began busing students to comply with a federal desegregation order, the new superintendent has designed a plan to eliminate what he calls busing’s “dated structure” in the troubled district.

Declaring his intention to end busing over the next five years, Supt. Percy Clark Jr. has been working to redraw the district’s school attendance zones, a vestige of 1970s integration efforts.

“We are busing students without any intended consequence,” he said. The 23,500-student district is 85% nonwhite, yet 2,300 students are bused to schools outside their neighborhoods.

“At one time, [busing] was centered around desegregation--that if we would bring black and white youngsters together, something would happen educationally. And that hasn’t happened,” Clark said.

Next month, the Pasadena Board of Education will vote on the “Creating Quality Schools Initiative,” which includes redistricting--the redrawing of school attendance zones to create neighborhood schools.

The plan calls for reopening closed campuses, changing grade configurations at some schools and creating more magnet programs. There also are plans to build another elementary school in the district’s northwest area, where half of the student population is concentrated.

But for some in the community, the proposal raises fears that an end to busing will bring the return of a racially segregated district.

“It basically means that the conservatives have won the battle to keep black kids and white kids from going to the same school,” said Joe Hopkins, publisher of the black newspaper Pasadena Journal.

“We already tried neighborhood schools. It was called segregation,” said Maurice Morse, a 39-year veteran of the district who was called as a witness in the 1969 desegregation case that brought busing to the city’s schoolchildren.

Morse taught in one of the district’s first integrated classrooms. But as hard as she fought for integration, she now reluctantly admits that “busing was a failure.”

Board members are hoping to find a solution that will address community concerns.

“We are trying to raise the bar at all schools in the district,” said board member Peter Soelter. “We want to have an excellent school in every neighborhood.”

Clark is just the man to lead the district in its efforts, Soelter said.

“He was chosen by a 7-0 vote,” he said. “I think that’s a pretty clear mandate for moving forward.”

Clark also has the track record to persuade the board that the initiative will be successful.

“Dr. Clark has a proven record of leadership,” Soelter said. “He’s actually gone out and done what we’re trying to do.”

During Clark’s 14-year tenure as superintendent of the Lawrence Township School District in Indiana, test scores climbed and the school year was extended. He created a math and science magnet school and an elementary campus dedicated to international studies.

Pasadena officials hope that neighborhood schools will shorten commuting times for students and increase parental involvement, factors that Clark says are needed to boost achievement.

He also hopes that the district will become more attractive to some of the 8,000 students who now attend the more than 30 private schools in the area.

“I do expect that we will have more diversity in terms of white students,” he said.

In 1970, about 3,000 white students left the school district in anticipation of the desegregation order. That year, whites made up 53.7% of the district’s student population, down from 75% in 1961. Black students represented 32.8% in 1970, and Latinos made up a little more than 9%.

Since the 1980s, the number of white students and black students has steadily declined as the number of Latinos continues to increase. Today, the district’s student population is 52.1% Latino, 28.5% black, 15.4% white and 4% Asian.

The demographics bear little resemblance to the city as a whole. According to the 2000 census, Pasadena is 53.4% white, 14.4% black, 33.4% Hispanic and 10% Asian. (The census allows people to choose Hispanic as their ethnicity in addition to selecting race, so the total count equals more than 100%.)

“It’s no longer simply a matter of how many white kids and how many black kids,” said Bill Bibbiani, the district’s director of research and testing, who has been charged with redrawing the attendance zones. “It hasn’t been that simple for quite some time.”

Still, attracting more white students is exactly what the district needs, some say.

“If we could get more white students in the district, it would increase the diversity,” said Nancy Dufford, who is white and has two children in public schools.

Parent Roberta Martinez said she placed her son in public school because she wanted him to “experience greater diversity” than was offered in private schools.

The superintendent’s plan, she said, “will add to the diversity in schools, and help reconnect them with the larger community.”

The district has its own reasons for wishing for a return of private school refugees, or at least for preventing more students from leaving in the first place.

Soelter said returning students will be a welcome byproduct of the district’s improvement efforts.

“We just want to increase enrollment to increase revenues,” he said. California schools receive funding based on the number of students in attendance.

Although the district was released from the court order at the end of 1979, it has participated in voluntary desegregation since, receiving about $1.5 million yearly from the state to help cover the cost of busing. But new legislation has lifted the requirements for getting those funds, said Bibbiani, the district’s research director.

Pasadena schools will continue to receive the $1.5 million, but without the same stipulations for its use. Through the elimination of busing for desegregation, Clark said, the district hopes to save about half of the $8 million it currently spends on busing each year.

“It will certainly be better spent on reading, writing and arithmetic than on a 45-minute bus ride,” Clark said.

The district will hold two public meetings in early February to present and explain the plan to the community. Despite Clark’s charisma, there are still those who will be a tough sell.

Morse questions whether magnet schools will be enough to keep the district from resegregating, though she acknowledges that the district remains far from integrated today.

She said that in the early 1970s, magnet programs became a haven for the white students who remained in the district. Her recollection matches that of Del Yarbrough, president of the Pasadena branch of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

Yarbrough worked for the school district nearly 30 years, from the mid-’60s to the mid-’90s, serving in several capacities, from teacher to principal.

“We may have had integration in the schools, but segregated classrooms,” he said.

Hopkins fears that will happen again. He expects that resegregation will be the inevitable result of neighborhood schools, because he says Pasadena neighborhoods are still divided along racial lines.

“And where there are white kids, there will be better schools,” Hopkins said. “It’s called institutional racism.”

Clark says the plan is not a return to the past, but a vision for the future.

“Now is a historic time,” he said. “I am incredibly respectful of the warriors who really challenged segregation in schools. [But] to stay with a dated structure is not working in the best interest of the children.”

Morse, who was on the search committee that brought Clark to Pasadena, said she supports the superintendent even though she doesn’t necessarily agree with him.

“Maybe they can make it work, but I’ll have to see,” she said, with hope in her voice. “I want to believe, but they’ll have to show me.”