Changes in County Add Concerns on Integration

Until 15 years ago, most Orange County public schools had remarkably similar student bodies. The students were virtually all white and all from middle-class families.

Now, however, the county’s demographics have changed so markedly that at least one school district, Westminster elementary, has been pressed by state administrators to spell out its “integration policy.”

The potential to order busing for desegregation exists if individual school districts, by their own guidelines, try to keep a school from having overwhelmingly “minority enrollment.”

Nevertheless, state officials said Thursday that while Orange County is becoming more cosmopolitan in its student mix, no school district in the county--including Westminster--is considered “segregated.”

Westminster School District, for instance, is considering a newly worded integration policy that would declare a school “segregated” if it has 25% more of an ethnic group’s representation than that group’s districtwide average.

The district formed a committee earlier this year to revise its integration policy after being prodded by state Department of Education officials.

“There are no state criteria to determine racial isolation or segregation, but we suggest to districts that their policy have criteria that is measurable,” said Reuben Burton, manager of the state Education Department’s Office of Inter-Group Relations.

Burton said his office had suggested to Westminster that its integration policy use a “measurable” specific, such as a percentage, to determine when a school has an imbalance of any racial or ethnic group.

He added that California law requires each school district to have written “integration policies.” The law, however, does not give figures or percentages to define when segregation exists. A district is allowed to make its own definition, Burton said.

“A district can even change its old percentage in its definition (of segregation) if it wants to,” said Burton. “That way a district could escape having to desegregate a school.” He added, however, that the state would not encourage that.

Burton, in a telephone interview from his Sacramento office, said no Orange County school district is in any trouble with the state over racial or ethnic balance.

“We don’t have any problems with segregated schools, and we don’t anticipate any,” said Gil Martinez, assistant superintendent for instruction in the Orange County Department of Education.

Still, the changing demographics of Orange County make segregation and integration more than a hypothetical issue.

In the past 15 years, a declining white birth rate has resulted in fewer white students in many Orange County districts. A vast increase in immigration from Mexico and Southeast Asia has simultaneously brought the county a rapidly expanded minority-student enrollment.

Westminster schools have 55% white students, 22.5% Asian, 18% Latino, 2.5% American Indian, 1.8% Pacific Islanders and 1.2% black.

The district borders the county’s two largest school districts, which, like Westminster’s, have burgeoning minority-student growth and shrinking numbers of white students.

Garden Grove Unified, the county’s largest school district, with 36,426 students, has dropped from 78% white students in 1977-78 to 51.7% during the current school year. The current Garden Grove enrollment shows 25.9% Latino students, 18% Asian, 1.4% black, 1% Samoan, 0.7% Filipino, 0.2% Indian and 1.1% in other groups.

“The district had 59.1% Anglo students in 1982-83, and 54.7% Anglo in 1983-84,” said Alan Trudell, spokesman for Garden Grove Unified. He noted that each year the white majority has become smaller.

In neighboring Santa Ana Unified, whites are already the minority. That district is the county’s second largest, with 36,300 students. This school year Santa Ana Unified has 71% Latino students, 13% white, 11% Asian, 4% black and 1% Pacific Islanders.

“We haven’t had any racial or ethnic issues (such as segregation) in our district,” said Anthony Dalessi, Santa Ana’s assistant superintendent.

“We have three fundamental schools, which were once accused of being havens for white flight, but the (ethnic) enrollment in those schools is now 50-50.”