None Dare Call Year-Round Racist : Schools: The board’s plan to ease overcrowding will speed white flight, locking in the district’s two educational systems, one for the well-to-do, the other for poor minorities.

In the long and acrimonious debate over year-round schools in Los Angeles, everyone delicately avoided the real issue--racism.

True, parents are legitimately worried that multi-track schools will put their children on conflicting school calendars and preclude family vacations. But that is not the real reason for fearing the year-round schedule. It is that year-round schools promote racism in Los Angeles education. Unfortunately, perhaps unknowingly, the Board of Education handed the racists a victory by adopting the year-round plan.

Like New York’s and Chicago’s before it, Los Angeles’ educational system is rapidly becoming two. There are the private schools, always attended by upper-class children and now increasingly by middle-class whites. And there are the overcrowded and under-funded public schools, mostly attended by blacks, Latinos, the poor and the illiterate; they have no other choice. This transformation has occurred in just 10 years. In 1980, the Los Angeles Unified School District was 65% white. Today, it is 15%.

By design, the board’s approval of year-round schools will mean that more blacks and Latinos will be bused to less populated white schools to ease overcrowding in minority districts. If the experiences of New York and Chicago offer any guide, that will set off even more white flight to private schools. We thus seem destined to have a public education system mostly attended by minorities and the poor.

Ironically, school busing, which was intended to promote racial equality, has actually hampered it. Before the landmark Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education ruling (1954), the law accepted separate but equal schools. As a result of white flight and fear of busing, we still have separate schools, but they are unequal.

White flight is a major reason why Los Angeles public education is in a financial crunch. With their children securely enrolled in private schools, middle-class whites are joining with childless adults, especially the elderly, to make it more difficult for the public-school system to raise additional funds through bond issues or outright tax increases. Partly as a result, the educational needs of students who have no alternative but the public system are imperiled.

Sure, President Bush and other politicians say that they are “for education.” But they never put the taxpayers’ money where their mouths are. California currently ranks 50th--dead last--in spending per student. It’s a disgrace.

And frustrating. I want my children to attend a public, integrated school. I want them to experience individuals from all walks of life, not just the one in private schools. For the time being, I’ll keep them in their public school.

The year-round plan aims to increase all schools’ capacities by 23%. To do that in San Fernando Valley and Westside elementary schools, the new students will have to be bused in from overcrowded schools in East and South Central Los Angeles. As a result, the Valley and Westside schools’ existing and delicate racial balance, the product of years of integration, will be disrupted.

Worse, there ultimately may be no balance. The parents of many of my children’s classmates are applying to private schools. If they and similarly motivated parents in other communities follow through with plans to pull their children, only a handful of whites will remain.

Also, teachers admit that the new influx of non-English speaking students, nearly all of whom lack preschool training, will also undermine the quality of education at Valley and Westside schools. The current pace of children’s education will surely slow down.

Proponents of district-wide, year-round schools, such as board member Rita Walters, indignantly argue that Westside and Valley communities should not be spared the burden of dealing with an overcrowded school system. This view is short-sighted. Rather than dealing with the real problem--how to create good schools in local communities--the Walters approach overlooks the long-range financial impact of white flight. If whites are no longer in the Los Angeles school system, they will not financially support it.

During the debate over year-round schools, one state politician candidly admitted that there are no political points to be scored in voting for more school funding since that, by necessity, requires tax increases. Voters seem more willing to spend tax money on building new prisons and stricter enforcement of drug laws. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of young minds throughout our city are wasted.

We do not need year-round schools. We need to reopen the 20-plus closed schools in minority areas. We need greater funding of such preschool programs as Head Start. All of us--black, white, brown, parents and non-parents--must realize that without added tax dollars, our public schools will continue to deteriorate.

Short of that, the Los Angeles public school system is destined to become just a warehouse for young children. With too few teachers and too few classrooms, education can be little more than keeping children entertained for 13 years, while their real learning occurs on the streets. And that makes us all losers in the school board’s vote to approve year-round schools.