School Integration, Crowding: Solutions in Conflict?

The Los Angeles school district has thousands of black students concentrated in predominantly black schools in South-Central Los Angeles, evidence of what the NAACP calls “continuing acts of segregation.”

Meanwhile, in rapidly growing areas near downtown Los Angeles, the school system has even more Latino and Asian students in badly overcrowded schools operating year-round--evidence, Latino organizations say, of unequal treatment of these minority students.

“We have two problems that collide: overcrowding and segregation of the schools,” said Westside school board member Alan Gershman. “The things we need to do for the one (overcrowding) may have serious implications for the other.”

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last week to allow a new desegregation trial in Los Angeles leaves school officials with a difficult decision. Should the district move quickly to relieve the overcrowding by enlarging schools in Latino neighborhoods, thereby placing more Latino students into what already are predominantly minority schools? Or should it move cautiously because such steps could be considered “acts of segregation” during a court trial?

The conflict between segregation and overcrowding has not only divided the city school board. It also divides leaders of the black and Latino education communities.

National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People officials and black education leaders say in interviews that the main problem in Los Angeles is segregation of black students and that the only remedy is mandatory busing of white and black students.

This year, the district is busing 57,000 students each day for voluntary integration and to relieve overcrowding, a greater number than at the high point of the mandatory busing program in 1980.

But NAACP attorney Joseph Duff calls the voluntary integration plan “window dressing” because white students are not bused into predominantly black schools in South-Central Los Angeles.

By contrast, Latino education leaders say they are opposed to further busing and instead favor the building of new and enlarged schools in East Los Angeles and other Latino areas.

“Hispanic parents want quality education in their own neighborhoods,” said Rosalinda Lugo, vice resident of the United Neighborhoods Organization, which has been active in school matters. “Traditionally Hispanic parents have not wanted their children bused out of the neighborhood. We have different priorities in education than does the NAACP.”

In 1981, when the NAACP filed a new suit in federal court complaining of segregation in the Los Angeles district, the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice charging that the district spent more in Anglo schools than in Latino ones.

While the desegregation suit sought busing of students between different areas of the city, the legal defense and education fund’s complaint, which is still pending, sought a fair “allocation of resources” across the district.

“The quality of education in the Hispanic community needs to be improved tremendously,” Eastside board member Larry Gonzalez said. “Hispanic parents are demanding new and better facilities for their children, a better quality of instruction in the classroom. But busing kids out of the neighborhood is not going to solve any problems.”

Officially, the school district disputes both complaints, saying it has not deliberately segregated the schools or sought to confine Latino children to the most crowded schools. But in recent weeks, school board members have said they are focusing their full attention on remedying the overcrowding problem, which has been worsening each year.

However, after the high court Monday turned down an appeal from the district that would have squelched the NAACP suit, the desegregation issue is back at the top of the agenda.

Much has changed in the Los Angeles school district since 1967 when the first desegregation trial was held in state court. White students were then in the majority, making up nearly 55% of the district’s 641,000 students. Black children were the largest minority, accounting for 22% of the enrollment.

This year, however, the white and black enrollment combined is in the minority. Among the 579,000 children, whites account for 18%, while blacks make up 20%. Latinos, meanwhile, make up 52% of the total, while the Asian enrollment has topped 8%.

But while the numbers have changed, the NAACP says the essential facts of segregation have not.

“The Brown vs. Board of Education case (of 1954) said a segregative school system is inherently unequal and discriminatory, and it still applies today. Nothing has changed,” said Raymond Johnson Jr., president of the local chapter of the NAACP.

The Los Angeles school district “has not taken any affirmative steps (to remedy segregation) and has perpetuated a scheme to continue segregation. That will be our main contention,” Johnson said.

Scope of the Trial

For the last four years, attorneys for the NAACP and the school district have parried in federal court over the scope of the trial. The civil rights group wanted to present evidence going back to the mid-1800s to show a history of segregation in California; the school district wanted the case limited to events after 1981 when the state court case ended.

Under the terms of Monday’s Supreme Court ruling, the trial, which will not begin until next spring at the earliest, will cover the years from 1969 to the present.

The NAACP must show that the school district or other government agencies created segregation in the Los Angeles school district. Merely showing that some schools have a high percentage of black students will not suffice.

“We can show a strong background of intentional segregation (before 1969) . . . and we will focus on patterns of segregation since then,” NAACP counsel Duff said.

As evidence, he cited a school district move in the late 1960s to enlarge several largely black schools in south Los Angeles.

“Those are acts of containment,” Duff said, noting that the overflow students could have been bused to predominantly white schools. “Enlarging a minority school in a situation where you have underutilized white schools is an act of segregation.”

The NAACP officials are less clear on what they foresee as a solution to the segregation problem.

“We can look at the demography and be realistic,” said Duff, noting that the dwindling number of white students in the city school district would make full integration nearly impossible.

‘General Remedies’

“At this point, we have only stated general remedies,” he said. “You could have some redistribution of students, change some of the class sizes and make sure that black students aren’t being tracked into lower-level classes.”

But NAACP President Johnson insists that the solution to segregation must be desegregation.

“I feel you can effectively desegregate by going to the white schools and making a fair and equitable distribution of students. That is, white students going to black schools and black students going to white schools,” he said. “You may not have the full number of white students participating like in 1969, but that doesn’t say it can’t be done.”

As to how such a plan would affect Latino or Asian students, Johnson said, “I honestly don’t have an answer to that yet.”

Jerry Halverson, attorney for the Los Angeles school district, predicts the NAACP case will go nowhere.

“They tried to prove it (intentional segregation) in 1969 and failed, and they tried again in 1981 and failed,” he said. “I have no reason to believe they can succeed this time.”

Halverson also questioned the likelihood of achieving any significant desegregation in a district in which minority students account for 82% of enrollment.

“We have only 40 schools (out of 618) with more than 60% white students,” he said, most of which are concentrated in the west San Fernando Valley or near San Pedro.

Metropolitan Desegregation

In reply, both Duff and Johnson said a metropolitan desegregation plan “remains an option” as a way to bring in more white students from other school districts outside the city. Though the federal courts have generally frowned upon metropolitan plans, Duff and Johnson noted that the case will include the State of California as a defendant, which could allow a judge to bring in other school districts as a way to remedy the city’s problem.

Meanwhile, the immediate city school problem--overcrowding--has temporarily been put on hold. “All we can do now is proceed with extreme caution,” school board member Gershman said.

Caution was not what school Supt. Harry Handler had in mind when he proposed on Sept. 30 a sweeping plan to cope with the swelling enrollment in the city’s school system.

He sought quick approval of a 10-step plan that would have, among other things, put all 618 schools in the district on a year-round schedule. Under the current arrangement, it is largely the schools in the swelling Latino neighborhoods where students attend class throughout the year.

Handler also proposed that the district revise a series of integration formulas--rules that grew out of the state desegregation trial that ended in 1981--so as to put more Latino and Asian students into schools that were closer to their neighborhoods.

While intended to create stable “integrated” schools, the formulas forced many Latino children to be bused past nearby schools to distant facilities in West Los Angeles or the San Fernando Valley.

Plan for More Spaces

Handler’s proposal to revise the formulas would have created more seats--a total of more than 37,000 spaces--as well as shorter bus rides for Latino students. But it would have also resulted in fewer schools meeting the 1981 formulas for integration.

Board members Roberta Weintraub and David Armor, who represent the San Fernando Valley, said in reaction to the Supreme Court decision that they would now oppose this part of Handler’s plan because it could be used against the school district in the court case.

Any overcrowding relief plan that “tampers with those formulas . . . is virtually out of the question at this point,” said Armor, a newly elected board member who makes his living as a consultant in desegregation cases.

But Handler reiterated that the board cannot choose to do nothing.

“We must move forward to address our housing problem because it is here, it is real and it is not going to go away,” Handler told the school board on Thursday.

Unless some changes are approved by the board, the district will not have space for the 14,000 additional students it expects next year, he said. By 1990, the school district will have 635,000 children, he added, and unless changes are made, 55,000 of them will not have a classroom seat.

THE DESEGREGATION CASE Aug. 1, 1963--Original complaint filed by parents of Mary Ellen Crawford and several others, under the co-sponsorship of the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP. The suit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, was brought against the Los Angeles City Board of Education as a class action on behalf of “all Negro and Mexican American pupils.” Oct. 28, 1967--Trial sessions begin. May 2, 1969--Trial sessions end. Feb. 11, 1970--Superior Court Judge Alfred Gitelson rules that the board operates segregated schools, and he gives initial order to integrate. May 18, 1970--Board files notices of appeal. March 10, 1975--Court of Appeal rules in favor of board. July 1, 1975--State Supreme Court agrees to hear ACLU appeal. June 28, 1976--State Supreme Court upholds Judge Gitelson’s ruling, but reverses a portion of the initial judgment that defined desegregation in terms of specific racial/ethnic percentages. The board is required by the latest ruling to take reasonable and feasible steps to alleviate the harms of segregation regardless of cause--and demonstrate meaningful progress in that task. March 18, 1977--Proposed integration plan submitted to Superior Court. March 23, 1977--Hearings on integration plan begin. Feb. 7, 1978--Judge Paul Egly issues order approving implementation of district plan as first step toward desegregation. May 19, 1980--Egly calls for expansion of mandatory reassignments to grades 1-9 in September, 1980, and 1-12 by 1983. Dec. 19, 1980--Court of Appeal upholds Proposition 1, which was approved by California voters to stop mandatory integration. March 16, 1981--Board votes to end mandatory busing program as soon as possible. April 20, 1981--Board orders return of 7,300 students to neighborhood schools as three years of mandatory busing end. Sept. 10, 1981--Judge Robert B. Lopez approves implementation of board’s all-voluntary desegregation plan for the two-year period, Sept., 1981-June, 1983.