Voluntary Program’s Cost Too High : Vista School Integration Plan Stymied

A politically volatile plan to achieve better racial balance in Vista’s elementary schools has been stopped cold--not on philosophical grounds, but with the news that the district doesn’t have the money to implement it.

The proposal called for the elementary schools in the Vista Unified School District to expand their boundaries in order to bring in an ethnically broader population of students to each school. In turn, the schools would be reconfigured by grade level, with some taking only students in kindergarten through second grade, and others taking students from third to fifth grade.

The plan was recommended by a citizen’s advisory group and applauded by some as a way not only to bring about greater racial balance but also to enhance local education by allowing each school to focus its curriculum and planning on just three grades.

Many parents complained loudly, however, because it would have required an elementary-age child to attend two schools before reaching sixth grade, and some claimed it was a poorly disguised busing integration plan.

Cost of $1 Million a Year

Philosophy aside, the plan called for busing an additional 45% of the district’s elementary students to their new schools--at a cost of about $1 million a year, according to staff estimates.

Trustees learned the price at their meeting Wednesday night and said they couldn’t afford it.

Officials say they will now consider other alternatives to reach racial balance--including the notion of establishing magnet schools with enhanced programs to encourage voluntary transfers of white students to predominantly minority schools, or vice versa.

And some trustees are wondering whether their schools need to be racially balanced at all.

“It has been my understanding that racially balanced schools were mandatory,” said Dr. Stephen Guffanti, president of the Vista school board. “But now I’m told we don’t have to. It’s something we’re going to have to ask the county counsel,” which provides legal advice to the county’s school districts.

At issue is a policy established by the school board itself that the minority population at each school be within 20% of the districtwide average. About 36% of the district’s students are of minorities, and two schools do not fall within the district’s own racial-balance plan. Santa Fe-California Elementary School has a minority enrollment of nearly 62%, but, on the other end of the scale, Beaumont Elementary School has a minority enrollment of about 16%.

State law requires districts to have racially balanced schools--but leaves to each district the definition of what is racially balanced. “A school district might decide that a school with a minority enrollment 15% above the district average is segregated, or it could set that figure at 20%, 30% or 40%,” said Reuben Burton, director of the state Department of Education’s office of intergroup relations.

Once a district establishes its own definition of racial balance, it is required by law to develop a plan “to eliminate the segregation” at schools that don’t fall within the definition, Burton said. And one of its options, he said, is to simply redefine after a public hearing on the matter what percentage of minority students constitutes a segregated school.

School board member Marcia Viger said she supports the grade-level reconfiguration plan and its philosophy “of community schools versus neighborhood schools.”

‘Back to Square 1’

“But it looks like we’re back to Square 1 and, of all the plans we’ve been studying over the past 2 1/2 years, magnet schools might be the second choice,” Viger said.

“There’s a big dispute, though, as to whether or not the kind of integration we want in Vista is even necessary or important or beneficial,” she said. “I’m hearing in dialogue everywhere, not only in the community but in the professional periodicals and from people in Sacramento, that we’re almost back to the idea that schools can be separate and equal.”

Vista school officials previously proposed--and backed off from in the face of harsh parent criticism--the redrawing of several school boundaries and the busing of some students to Santa Fe-California Elementary School to achieve better racial balance.