Justices OK End to Norfolk, Va., Busing : Say 14-Year-Old Transport Plan Can End in Fall

The Supreme Court today said school officials in Norfolk, Va., next fall can end the cross-town busing that for 14 years has been used to racially desegregate the city’s elementary schools.

The court turned down an emergency request aimed at postponing the local school board’s Neighborhood Elementary Schools Plan, called by opponents a tool of “resegregation.”

Still pending before the justices is a formal challenge by some black parents to the plan, but the court may not even consider that appeal until October.

Only Justices Thurgood Marshall and Harry A. Blackmun voted to block the planned end of busing. Justice John Paul Stevens voted to speed up the court’s consideration of the formal appeal and postpone action on the emergency request until that consideration.

In another case, the court let stand a decision forcing changes in the boundaries of two Little Rock, Ark., area school districts to promote racial desegregation in their schools.

The justices at the same time left intact a part of the same ruling that obligates the Arkansas Board of Education to help pay for the desegregation efforts.

Cross-town busing of young children to racially balance Norfolk’s 35 public elementary schools has been part of a court-ordered desegregation plan there since 1971, even though the school system was declared totally integrated in 1975.

The city school board voted in 1983 to abandon busing for racial balance but postponed putting that decision into effect for several years. It now is to take effect at the start of the 1986-87 school year.

School Closest to Home

Under the plan, children will be allowed to attend the elementary school closest to their home.

About 57% of the city’s elementary school pupils are black, and the racial composition of the 35 elementary schools ranges from 80% to 23% black.

Under the neighborhood schools plan, 10 of the elementary schools will become at least 96% black.

Controversy over the plan gained national prominence in 1984 when the Reagan Administration urged a federal appeals court to allow a halt to the cross-town busing.

The U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, upholding a federal trial judge’s ruling, said the school board could go ahead with its neighborhood schools plan.

William Bradford Reynolds, then head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said the plan is a legal effort to stem white flight from the schools and to increase parental involvement in education.

Reynolds said the legal principles advanced by the Justice Department in the Norfolk case could apply to “many, many other school districts around the country.”