Hurting by Trying to Help

Does riding a bus to school alter a student’s classroom experience? Does it alter the classroom? Those are important questions for Los Angeles city school officials studying possible changes in the time that students spend on buses.

A team of Times reporters has looked at the effect of the city’s Permit With Transportation program--colloquially known as PWT. The student transfers appear to have integrated many predominantly white schools in the San Fernando Valley. They have not resulted in as many minority students as possible taking college-preparatory programs. They have taken students out of some environments that their parents considered unsafe or unsound. And it appears, too, that true integration occurs in random ways on random campuses.

Nearly 24,000 minority students ride buses voluntarily every school day in Los Angeles. Most are black, and most travel from South-Central Los Angeles to junior and senior high schools in the Valley. The rides are long. School District Bus 3015, for example, picks up its first students at 6:35 a.m. in Gardena. Twenty-nine miles and 57 minutes later it reaches Madison Junior High School in North Hollywood.

School board member Rita Walters has proposed that bus rides take no longer than 45 minutes--a proposal that would knock some West Valley schools out of the program and place more PWT students in Westside schools. Times reporters concluded that students have adjusted to the long rides, and that they and their classmates seem to benefit from their presence. It could be that shortening the bus rides would be disruptive without improving the situation in South-Central schools.

Students enroll in the program to get out of segregated schools, to attend safer schools or to be challenged academically. The perception that Valley schools are better than those in inner-city neighborhoods rankles administrators in South-Central schools. But as one parent said, “If it takes my daughter an hour every morning and an hour every night to go to a school where I know the (white) power structure pays attention, then she’ll ride a bus.”

Are the transfer students challenged academically? Some say yes, acknowledging that they get C’s for work that got B’s and A’s at their former schools and that they are learning more. Yet last year students who were enrolled in the PWT program took 10% fewer college-preparatory courses than Valley students did.

Students in the Permit With Transportation program need even more attention from counselors and teachers to help them understand what is available to them. But even with its drawbacks, even though it does not answer the larger school-integration question, the program offers an opportunity to students that should not be curtailed just to shorten bus rides. The students involved should be allowed to maintain the stability that they have finally achieved in their educations.