Improving Busing Program
Your article stated that minority students in Los Angeles Unified School District’s voluntary integration busing program, Permits With Transportation (PWT), are doing “little or no better” than students they left behind in segregated schools. The lack of benefits flowing are compounded by many hardships endured, long bus rides, frustration from a sense of not belonging and embitterment from receiving schools.
The PWT program has been the “linchpin” to the court-ordered voluntary desegregation requirement. Therefore, there are serious legal obstacles to abandoning it.
Why, then, can’t Los Angeles schools do something unexpected--make excellence a real priority for the PWT program. Why don’t school officials spend the money that they do have on support services that are desperately needed in the receiving schools. A district with a $220-million shortfall would, of course, have to cut back on the number of PWT students permitted to travel but, at least, what the district would do to desegregate, would be done right.
If “so much depends on the attitude and individuals at the receiving schools” as Supt. Leonard Britton says they do, where’s the money to improve that attitude?
MALKA L. TASOFF
Tarzana
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