Vista Schools Tackle Touchy Subject of Busing to Maintain Self-Imposed Integration

It is just after 8 a.m. at Santa Fe-California Elementary School, the oldest, most overcrowded and only predominantly minority school in Vista.

Upward of a thousand students are lining up on the playground so they can be led to class by their teachers.

The students at Santa Fe-California may not know it, but they are at the center of a community debate--low-key at the moment but potentially bitter--over the merits of neighborhood schools versus busing to achieve racial and ethnic balance.

Proud of its rural history, Vista is now confronted by an urban educational dilemma: Schools in the older, run-down central part of the city are increasingly Latino and black, while new schools in the burgeoning suburbs are overwhelmingly Anglo.

Foes of Busing Adamant

Parents have expressed adamant opposition to busing for integration, but school officials worry that both minority and Anglo students are being short-changed by the emergence of a “separate but equal” school system in this hilly part of North County.

“If you have the same facilities, but you have a racial and ethnic imbalance, is that equal education?” asked Rene Townsend, assistant superintendent for instruction. “Brown vs. Board of Education (the 1954 Supreme Court decision) says it is not. What we’re discussing is a fundamental issue about what is equitable.

“We can’t just say that we have impacted (heavily minority) schools, so we’ll just give them more programs and stuff. I think balanced schools provide the best education for all children.”

Caught in the middle of the controversy is Santa Fe-California, which has the lowest socioeconomic ranking and the lowest reading achievement scores of any school in the Vista Unified School District.

Despite its overcrowding and its problems, the school, which dates from 1951, retains a loyal following, and parents are angry over the specter of their children being uprooted.

“This is our school,” said Cindy San Miguel Zimmerman, who attended Santa Fe-California and now has two children there. “Why can’t my children go to a school that is just down the block? Why is that so bad? I don’t think students at other schools get a better education.”

In a district with 33% minority students, Santa Fe-California is 56% minority (46% Latino, 5% black, and 5% Asian, Filipino, Samoan and “other”). Nearby Bobier Elementary is 48% minority. Enrollment at both schools is up sharply from last year and still rising.

A school board policy adopted in 1979 calls for all schools to be within 20 percentage points of the 33% districtwide figure. This school term, Santa Fe-California became the first school to fall outside the plus-or-minus-20 leeway.

School board members are faced with either fulfilling the board’s self-imposed commitment to integration--even if it is painful politically--or deciding to alter or ignore it.

When a similar situation arose in neighboring Oceanside, which has North County’s only major school system that is predominantly minority, board members there chose not to adhere strictly to their own guidelines. Now, it is Vista’s turn.

Vista school board member Marcia Viger hopes for the best, but fears the worst, as the busing discussion heats up.

“The neighborhood school is right up there with apple pie and mom,” Viger said. “I wish we could solve our problem without making a furor. That’s not good for the children. I don’t want the parents to enter into a debate that will make the children feel they have to leave their school or that one school is not as good as another.

“I just hate making these things public,” she said. “but we’ve had such intense growth, we’ve got to face it head-on.”

The issue also highlights a fact of political life in North County: the lack of minorities in elected office and other decision-making roles.

In a school system where one of every three students is a racial or ethnic minority, there are no minorities on the school board or the parent-run District Advisory Committee or among top school administrators. Of 661 teachers, only 50 (7.5%) are minority.

“At the district level, we have not been very successful in finding minorities and getting them involved,” Townsend said. “We would like to find them, to hear their voice, but we just haven’t been able to.”

Like many North County school districts, Vista is struggling to accommodate a surge in enrollment because of residential sprawl. Vista schools closed in June with 12,000 students and opened in September with 14,011.

The school board envisions opening at least one new school a year for the foreseeable future to cope with the boom-town growth brought on by new subdivisions, where homes sell from $125,000 to $200,000.

The groves that once made Vista the world’s avocado capital are giving way to housing projects like the 3,500-home Shadowridge community.

At the same time, high-density rental housing in older areas is providing shelter to increasing numbers of low-income residents, including Latinos and blacks.

Opponents Were Strenuous

Last spring, as the school board prepared for the opening this fall of a new elementary school, officials devised a plan to bus Santa Fe-California students to the new school, thus decreasing Santa Fe-California’s minority percentage and pushing the new school closer to the districtwide average.

More than a hundred parents--Anglo, black and Latino--packed the school board meeting in strenuous opposition. Some said they bought or rented the homes specifically so their children could walk to school, and others discussed keeping their children at home rather than submitting to forced busing.

“I do not want my children standing on the corner at 7 a.m. waiting for buses in this unsafe neighborhood,” said Cindy Laybourne, who has three children at Santa Fe-California. “This is a high-crime area; there is drug dealing; there are transients who roam the streets.

“I’m worried enough about having my children coming back and forth to school,” she said. “I tell them to walk quickly and always stay with a friend. I will not risk my children just to have them bused away in the name of ethnic balance.”

Board members hastily retreated and dumped the busing plan. As a result, the new school, Alamosa Park, opened this fall with 20% minority students, second lowest among the nine elementary schools. The lowest is Beaumont, with 16%.

Now, the district faces a similar decision on yet-another new school planned for the western edge of the district, which stretches to encompass part of Oceanside.

This time school officials are trying to build public acceptance, if not support, for a possible busing plan by involving the District Advisory Committee.

The group consists of parent representatives from each of the schools and some members at large.

The committee--which appears sympathetic to the use of busing--plans to poll parents, teachers and the community, but members have no illusions that attitudes against busing have changed.

“We know people don’t want change,” said committee member Peggy Duffield, whose two children went to Santa Fe-California. “You mention boundary changes and busing and you can fill up the board room. People don’t want change, but that’s not an option.

“People at each school,” Duffield said, “have to accept the growth in the district and the growth in ethnicity. People have to learn to accept the community we’re living in.”

The panel’s survey will attempt to determine whether parents think the schools are racially or ethnically imbalanced and whether they will accept a change in the neighborhood school concept to achieve a balance.

“If we stick with neighborhood schools, Santa Fe is stuck,” committee member Audrey Stetson said. “We’re not just talking about ethnic or racial imbalance, we’re talking about a socioeconomic imbalance.”

On a ranking that accompanies the state reading tests, Santa Fe-California and Bobier were the only Vista schools where the average parent was not at least a skilled worker.

Like all lower-income schools, Santa Fe-California encounters a high percentage of single-parent families, a low level of involvement by parents in school activities, and a tendency by students to come to school without the kinds of home experiences that prepare them for learning.

Townsend recalls a new teacher being shocked to learn that only four of her 30 students came from families that read a daily newspaper.

It is not uncommon for Latino students at Santa Fe-California to leave school for a month or more at the holiday season so their families can return to Mexico to visit relatives--which may be culturally enriching but can prove devastating to academic progress.

“I talked to six teachers at Santa Fe, from the 2nd to 5th grade, and everyone told me the same thing: They have four, five, maybe six students who are above average, and everybody else is way down at the bottom,” Duffield said. “These students don’t have a lot of good academic role models and a lot are at-risk students (likely to drop out later).”

Rodney Goldenberg, the high-energy principal at Santa Fe-California, does not disagree with that assessment.

“The teachers at Santa Fe-California need the higher-achieving students in their classrooms to set examples for all,” Goldenberg said. “Working all day, every day, with predominantly low-achieving students is exhausting for teachers, and deprives other students of role models of academic success.

“Our teachers roll up their sleeves everyday and go to work. But I don’t know how much longer they can go on.”

Because of a high percentage of low-achieving students, Santa Fe-California, Bobier and two other Vista schools receive additional federal funding, which Santa Fe-California uses mainly to hire classroom aides. The school also offers bilingual classes and a computer center.

Key Teachers Lost

Still, the school lost its art teacher, physical education teacher, and music teacher as part of the district’s continuing money problems. Goldenberg said the school needs them back--along with a full-time counselor.

Goldenberg’s school is actually two schools merged into one in 1983.

Santa Fe enrolls students from kindergarten to 5th grade. California, which is not part of the integration issue, serves handicapped students from several North County districts.

The enrollment last month for the Santa Fe portion of the school was 1,091, compared to an average of 742 for the district’s other elementary schools.

The school also houses the district’s Newcomer Center, which prepares foreign-born children for entry into the school system. In its first year, the center served nearly 500 students from 38 different countries.

“This school is one of a kind in Vista because of its bigness, its special programs and the fact it’s a true neighborhood school,” said the school’s dean of students, Marsha Logsden-Magos, former coordinator of the migrant education program.

For now, the school board is cautiously waiting for the advisory committee’s recommendation and the survey results. Next year could be a volatile one for school politics in Vista.

The board is inching toward placing a property tax increase on the November ballot to provide money for school construction. What’s more, three of five board members are up for re-election.

With conservative administrations both in Sacramento and Washington, and a statewide anti-busing proposition passed in 1979, the district is under no outside pressure to shift boundaries or engage in busing. The state asks school districts to set percentage guidelines but does not act to enforce them.

In Oceanside, 55% of students are minority, and three schools are at or above the local board’s guideline of 15 percentage points, including one that is 85% minority. Still, there is no state or federal intervention in sight in Oceanside, nor any local discussion of busing for integration.

“I have ambivalent feelings about busing,” said Vista board member Lance Vollmer. “I think the idea of neighborhood schools is important to education. As long as you are not intentionally segregating and you are providing equal education to all environments, you’re doing your job.

“I would have a hard time busing large numbers of students unless there are inequities,” he said.

But board member Viger remembers her experience visiting black schools in North Carolina in the 1960s when she was a student at East Carolina University.

“I remember thinking that even though they had the same facilities, the same kind of teachers, they were still missing something in terms of social balance,” she said. “There is more to education than just ABCs to be gained.

“There is an opportunity to learn to respect different cultures and people who are different than you. Once lost, that opportunity is hard to get back.”

Santa Fe-California is Vista’s oldest elementary school--opened in 1951, with most of the buildings built in 1954--and officials appreciate its loyal following. Logsden-Magos notes the absence of graffiti and vandalism, which she said shows that the neighborhood has a protective attitude toward the school.

Ofelia Barajas, who has two children in the school, said, “Santa Fe is a fine school. I want my children close to me, not bused to someone else’s neighborhood.”

Busing--for topographic and safety reasons--is nothing new to Vista schools. The district maintains a fleet of 68 buses that travel 1.2 million miles a year.

The bumpy terrain and far-flung nature of the district make busing inevitable. Some students are bused because of the danger posed by Vista’s narrow, confusing and traffic-clogged streets, its lack of sidewalks and a civic penchant for crowded intersections at odd angles.

About 45% of Pupils Bused

About 45% of elementary school students in Vista are bused, with parents of bus riders charged 50 cents a day. The average bus ride is 25 to 30 minutes, according to transportation director Max Mattox.

As the district grows, more students will be bused, regardless of what the school board decides about integration. The highest percentage of bus riders is at Alamosa Park, the newest elementary school, where 78% of the students ride the bus.

Bobier (6.2%) and Santa Fe-California (28.5%) have two of the smallest percentages of students who live far enough away to ride a bus to school--reinforcing their image as neighborhood schools and stiffening the resistance to busing.

So many students are already bused for safety and distance reasons that advisory committee member Wanda Prosser notes, only half-jokingly, that, “There really aren’t any neighborhood schools in Vista anymore except Santa Fe, Bobier and Olive.”

One possible way to stem the increasing percentage of minority students at Santa Fe-California may be to take students already being bused, either to Santa Fe-California or to a predominantly Anglo school, and send them elsewhere.

The advisory survey will seek to determine whether parents are less opposed to busing for integration if it involves students already being bused. The plan that sparked opposition in the spring would have bused students who otherwise could have walked to school.

On an exceptionally rainy night last week, advisory committee members assembled to approve the wording of the survey, which will be sent home to parents of elementary school students.

A similar survey will be given to school employees, and one will be printed in a local newspaper to solicit community response about busing and integration.

The results should be ready in mid-January, leading to a public hearing and school board decision in February.

“We need a strong statement of where we’re going,” said Santa Fe-California Principal Goldenberg. “What it boils down to is that everybody believes we have a problem, but we don’t have any agreement on what the solution should be.”