Parents Vow to Fight Busing Plan in Vista

A group of white parents in Vista has vowed to fight a proposal to bus their children from their suburban neighborhood to a predominantly minority school in order to enhance racial and ethnic balance.

“I simply won’t allow it and neither will my neighbors,” said Jenny McDowell, a mother of three. “We will home-teach our children before we let them be bused. Why should they be bused past three schools just to shift certain percentages?”

McDowell’s comments came Wednesday night shortly after Assistant School Supt. Ron Riedberger unveiled a proposal to bus certain students from the Mission Meadows and Jeffries Ranch areas to Santa Fe-California Elementary.

The two upscale subdivisions on Vista’s northern edge are in the attendance area for Alamosa Park Elementary, which opened last fall and has 20% minority students.

Santa Fe-California, which is situated in an older, less affluent mid-city area, has 56% minority. It is the first and only school to violate the Vista school board’s policy of keeping all schools within 20 percentage points of the 32.4% minority average in the Vista Unified School District.

A year ago, the board bowed to the anger of white parents and scrapped a plan to realign boundaries and use busing to decrease minority enrollment at Santa Fe.

The board is set to discuss the current proposal Wednesday and to make a decision March 23. The proposal also calls for shifting a group of Santa Fe students to Beaumont Elementary, which has 16% minority students.

In all, boundaries for six elementary schools would be realigned to solve the overcrowding problems brought on by Vista’s runaway residential growth.

Deep Antipathy to Busing

The debate pits integration concerns against a commitment to neighborhood schools. A recent poll of Vista parents showed a deep antipathy toward the use of busing to balance ethnic and racial enrollments.

Still, as recently as two weeks ago school board members reaffirmed their support for the 20 percentage-point rule.

In case board members balk at busing white students to Santa Fe, Riedberger has an alternative plan that attempts to solve overcrowding at various schools but does not touch that one.

Riedberger disclosed the two proposals at Wednesday night’s meeting of the parent-run District Advisory Committee.

Not Far Enough

The committee declined to support the Alamosa-Santa Fe proposal on the grounds it does not go far enough to reduce minority enrollment at Santa Fe. Riedberger estimated minority percentage would only drop to 53%.

“I don’t think we’re doing nearly enough,” said committee member Tom Shadle. “We’re not addressing the problem.”

Santa Fe principal Rodney Goldenberg said in an interview Thursday that the proposed shift involving his school would be “a step in the right direction” toward lifting the educational burden on his teachers, who deal with large numbers of minority students from poor backgrounds.

In Vista and elsewhere, such students commonly come to school less equipped to tackle the daunting tasks of learning to read and write.

Hopes to Sway Parents

Goldenberg said he hopes to convince Alamosa parents that Santa Fe is a top-notch school with a good faculty, additional resources such as computers, and an unblemished record for maintaining a safe campus.

“All I can do is promise those parents that their children will receive as good an education as they will receive anywhere--maybe better because we teach in two languages, Spanish and English,” Goldenberg said. “It’s a tough sell, but I’m ready to go public.”

The proposal would touch only a selected group of students from the Alamosa area. Those currently enrolled, or scheduled to enroll in the fall of 1988 and with a sibling already in attendance, would be exempt.

Half a dozen Alamosa parents attended Wednesday night’s meeting. They said the specter of busing is already a hot topic of conversation in their neighborhood, where three-bedroom homes generally cost $150,000 to $175,000.

Petition Considered

“I don’t care about minority percentages, I care about test scores,” said one father. Santa Fe has the lowest score of any elementary school in the district on state reading tests.

The parents said they have considered a petition drive and a request to have their children transferred to the Bonsall school district. They predicted that next week’s board meeting will be packed.

“I don’t think that this kind of thing should be pushed on people,” said Betsy Reid, a mother of three. “I’m sorry if Santa Fe has too many minority children who need special help. Why can’t they be given special aides or more teachers or something?

“I’m sorry for them, but it’s not my responsibility,” she said. “My kids are my responsibility.”

Longer Bus Ride

Lorri Ryan, who has two children, said: “My son’s biggest complaint already is that the teachers don’t have enough time to answer his questions. Why should I be forced to send my children to a school where the teachers have to spend extra time with other students and may not have enough time for mine?”

Parents estimated the bus ride to Santa Fe would be about six miles, compared with the two miles to Alamosa.

“This is a fight for a neighborhood school,” McDowell said.

Although both the state and federal governments require school districts to file annual reports on their percentage of minority students, Vista is under no outside pressure to make boundary or busing changes.

Still, district officials, including Assistant Supt. Rene Townsend, who is set to become superintendent on July 1, have said that having dual school systems--one for minority students in the mid-city, one for Anglo families in outlying suburbs--shortchanges both groups.

The integration question is complicated by the Vista district’s explosive growth. A year ago, the district had 12,750 students; last Friday, it had 14,260, with projections showing an additional 1,400 set to arrive by fall.

Riedberger conceded that the two proposals are only temporary solutions.

“It’s not a long-range plan,” he said. “Long range, we just don’t know how much money we’ll have, whether school sites will be available, and how much growth we will have.”

The 15-school district has 32.4% minority students, two-thirds of whom are Latino; the rest are black, Samoan and Asian. There are no minority parents on the school board or the District Advisory Committee, and none attended the Wednesday night meeting.

The percentage of minority students is higher in the elementary grades (34.7%) than in the middle schools (32.3%) and high schools (27.6%).

Assistant Supt. Riedberger said he would propose that the school board shift the plus-or-minus 20 percentage-point guideline to include a comparison with similar grade levels, not the districtwide figure, thus enabling Santa Fe to come closer to compliance.