Integration Plan Shuts Out Some : ‘Magnet’ Schools Inaccessible to Students Whose Movement Would Further Racial Imbalance

For aspiring computer jocks like 14-year-old Shawn Sanders, Gompers Secondary School is the place to go. Gompers, a San Diego school district brochure claims, features an advanced computer curriculum “designed by teachers and scientists, which is not available at most district schools.”

The courses also are not available to Shawn--because of his race. As a white student at Woodrow Wilson Middle School in East San Diego, Shawn is forbidden to apply for the prestigious “magnet” program at Gompers because his departure would further tip the racial scales at Wilson in favor of minorities. Wilson’s enrollment is predominantly Indochinese, black and Latino.

In fact, Shawn and white students like him at 34 schools in the city are not allowed to apply for any of the city’s 46 magnet programs.

“If they say this child is too stupid to get in, that’s one thing,” said Shawn’s mother, Sally Farris. “But they are saying the kid’s too white to get in.”

March is magnet season in the San Diego Unified School District, the month when school officials begin to mix and match 24,000 students in a court-endorsed effort to integrate the schools of this racially segregated city.

Viewed as a whole, the district’s magnet program appears to be a logical and somewhat successful attempt to bring together white, black, brown and yellow children who might never study with one another, and to correct what the California Supreme Court in 1976 called “the harms inflicted by such segregation.”

But each year, the magnet program’s labyrinth of regulations leaves behind an unknown number of frustrated students, both white and minority, who are denied access to schools in the name of the larger goal of integrating the school district.

This year, for example, black parents are battling school officials over a Feb. 25 district memo saying that some minorities would be denied access to magnet programs at Lincoln, San Diego and Hoover high schools and Keiller Middle School.

Piper Knight, a 15-year-old ninth-grader at Gompers, is trying to switch to San Diego High’s International Baccalaureate program. The specialized curriculum there would allow Piper, who has studied Spanish for the past nine years, to earn an international diploma available at just 300 high schools around the world and possibly achieve advanced standing in college.

But Piper, a black who lives outside the San Diego High School district, is ineligible because school officials are trying to attract whites and neighborhood minority students to the school’s magnet program.

“Just because of my color and where I live doesn’t mean I should be excluded from that school,” she said.

“What they’re doing is they’re going to exclude a whole group of black kids. Not just black kids, Hispanic kids too,” said Gladys Knight, Piper’s mother.

School Supt. Thomas Payzant said that the Feb. 25 memo, written by Assistant Superintendent for Community Relations and Integration Services George Frey, contains some inaccuracies that make the policy limiting entry to magnet programs seem more sweeping than it really is.

Under pressure from the Committee for the Education of Black Children and a community group at Lincoln, school officials are considering whether they can at least allow minorities from outside the Lincoln community into Lincoln’s new Preparatory School for Humanities, Language and Health Professions, Payzant said.

But the magnet program’s administrators admit that they cannot accommodate everyone if the city is to comply with a 1977 court order to integrate 23 “minority isolated” schools.

“What we’re attempting to do is deal with it in as fair a way as possible, realizing that not every kid can be served,” said Dorothy Smith, who represents Southeast San Diego on the school board. “Under our present resources and our present space, not every kid can be served.”

“The basic policy is built on trying to give people the most options and flexibility without in any way having a negative impact on the racial balance at the sending or receiving schools,” Payzant said.

Trustee Larry Lester has opposed the rules of the magnet program since he joined the school board five years ago, because they require “distinctions based upon an arbitrary characteristic, which is race. In my opinion that is unconstitutional and both logically and morally unsound,” he said.

In 1982, Lester proposed changing the program to allow students of all races to attend any magnet program after Kimberly Sam, a Chinese-American sixth-grader at Marcy Elementary School, was denied permission to transfer from her school. School officials said that Kimberly’s transfer would upset the racial balance at Marcy.

Lester’s proposal was defeated 4-1 by colleagues who said his plan would destroy the court-ordered integration efforts begun in 1977.

Developed in 1977 after Superior Court Judge Louis Welsh ordered the school district to integrate the 23 schools, the magnet program has grown to include 46 schools--all but a few of them in minority areas. It complements the district’s other major integration program, the Voluntary Ethnic Enrollment Program, under which 7,535 minority students and nine whites are bused to regular schools.

Named because its offerings are designed to attract students to unfamiliar parts of the city, the magnet program offers special courses in everything from aerospace to dance to foreign language. Many schools are “total school magnets,” which involve all students in their specialized programs, while others are “school within a school” programs for a select group of students.

The program has achieved varying degrees of success. Gompers’ high-powered math, science and computer program, for example, has a waiting list that sometimes approaches 2,000 students. Lincoln High School, however, attracted only 38 neighborhood students and 86 students from outside the community to its medical magnet program this year--far below its goals of 90 neighborhood students and 110 from outside the community.

The assignment of the 24,000 students involved in the program is guided by priority rankings developed by the school board in 1982 to determine which students may transfer, which schools they may leave and which schools they may attend. In general, students may transfer if they will improve the racial balance of their new school without hurting the racial balance at their old one.

The nine-step list for minorities and seven-step list for whites gives top access to students continuing in a magnet program from one grade to the next; a student in the Spanish magnet at Spreckels Elementary School gets first crack at a similar magnet in Correia Junior High School and later Point Loma High School.

Students living in the neighborhood around the school have second-level clearance. The lists work down to those who apply after the deadlines and are given the smallest chance of getting in.

The district’s goal is a 50-50 mix of white and minority students in the magnet program, but in most cases that goal has yet to be reached. Nine of the 23 minority-isolated schools cited in the l977 desegregation order have been integrated.

Still, 15,470 minority students and 8,889 whites--about 21% of the children in the district--are in a magnet program.

Whites in 34 “minority isolated” and “minority imbalanced” schools--all of which are at least 66.1% minority students this year--may not apply to any magnet program. Minority students in schools with large white populations are allowed to apply anywhere, but are given such low priority numbers in the magnet selection process that they also are prevented from leaving.

Such rules have sparked Farris’ and Knight’s dissatisfaction, along with some strange situations.

At Lincoln, which has dozens of openings available in its medical magnet program, 22 minority children are on a waiting list to get in. Coordinator Mel Weisenberg cannot accept them without first adding white students because they would tip the racial balance of the program beyond the allowable 60% minority-40% white limit.

“The whole thing’s kind of crazy,” Weisenberg said. “Those are the rules of the magnet game and you have to live with them the best you can.

“If I accept kids without regard to color, I could end up with 80% minority,” he added. “And I have done that in the past and I was called on the carpet and told to keep my ethnic balance in line.”

In Gompers’ advanced classes, the students who live outside the Southeast San Diego neighborhood--most of whom are white--far outnumber students from the neighborhood-virtually all of whom are minority children. The result is that the program, which was established as an integration tool, is highly segregated.

For example, there are no neighborhood children in accelerated junior high math classes at the school, which includes grades 7 to 12. Senior high advanced placement courses contain less than 10% resident students.

Minority parents have long complained that their children have far fewer magnet programs from which to choose. Only 11 magnet schools accept minorities from outside the neighborhood where the school is located; whites may choose from almost any school in the city.

“Majority kids have a lot more options in the magnet program,” said Mary Gilliland, coordinator of the program.

That is little comfort to Farris, whose son is one of the district’s white students without choices. “If the first question they ask you is ‘what race are you,’ that fits the definition of discrimination,” Farris said.

Searching for alternatives, Farris was advised to list a false address or a Latino-sounding surname for her son, she said. She rejected those ideas, but now says: “I regret that I played the system straight.” Other friends told her to put Shawn in a private school.

Farris said she is considering two options: moving or suing the school district for reverse discrimination. Hoping to rally support for a class-action suit, she has contacted the American Civil Liberties Union--the same group that won the suit to integrate the district in 1977.

“We’ve fought so many wars because of discrimination and now someone here can say ‘because you don’t live here or because you’re white, you can’t go,’ ” Shawn said. “I find it amazing.”