Plan for Busing by Income Splits Wisconsin City

The last time folks here got this riled about the public schools was 10 years ago. Charles Miller remembers it well.

“I lost friends,” said the longtime school board president.

What happened was that the school board changed the boundaries of the town’s two high schools. For the first time, the sons and daughters of the affluent south side sat in classrooms with blue-collar kids from across the tracks.

“There was tremendous controversy,” Miller recalls. “People moved out of certain areas to get away from it.”

The uproar then, when La Crosse was virtually all white, should have prepared the district for the furor that has erupted over the latest attempt at social engineering in a town that is now racially diverse.

At a time when other school districts are struggling to free themselves from court-ordered busing plans--adopting magnet programs and championing the concept of choice--the tiny La Crosse school district will launch a first-of-its-kind busing program next fall designed to achieve economic integration.

It is the district’s novel approach to coping with a problem that plagues school districts nationwide--how to provide equal educational opportunities in communities with isolated pockets of poverty and wealth.

The issue has proved particularly vexing in the Los Angeles Unified School District, which is facing a landmark lawsuit alleging that poor and minority students receive inferior educations. A proposed settlement would force the district to spend more money staffing and maintaining inner-city schools at the expense of suburban campuses.

The problems of La Crosse, with 7,800 students, are minuscule compared to Los Angeles. But the district’s search for solutions seems just as difficult and just as controversial.

The La Crosse plan would disperse poor pupils currently concentrated in two of the district’s nine elementary schools and bus affluent pupils to the low-income neighborhoods. The objective is to expose underachieving children from poor families to an environment more conducive to learning while lessening the burden on teachers who have large numbers of low-income pupils in their classrooms.

School officials hope the plan will erase the “inner-city” stigma now attached to certain schools and turn them into places where teachers will want to teach and where parents will want to send their children.

The plan has sparked bitter opposition, including a campaign to recall the majority of school board members. At the same time it has revealed sharp class divisions in this town of 50,000 people. Also, although busing would be based on family income rather than race, the plan has brought to the fore simmering racial tensions in a town which had been virtually all white until the recent influx of Asian immigrants.

Julie Underwood, a public-school law expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the plan is the first she’s heard of that uses busing as a tool to achieve socioeconomic rather than racial balance. It is an issue, she said, that most school districts attempt to skirt. “I think it’s a brave school board,” she said.

“Insensitive” is the term favored by parents leading the recall effort. Six of nine school board members are targeted for recall. Miller is not a recall target only because his seat comes open this month, before recall petitions could be filed. He is, however, one of two members facing stiffer than usual opposition in his reelection effort. The ninth board member is not seeking reelection.

“There has been a lack of sensitivity to the wants and desires of the taxpayers,” said Kevin O’Keefe, a lawyer and spokesman for the recall group. In addition to the busing plan, he said, the recall campaign also is prompted by the school district’s “wasteful spending” in its building program.

While school Superintendent Richard A. Swantz says that much of the opposition to busing is based on rational, valid concerns, some of it comes from racist whites who assume that the majority of low-income students are Hmong refugees from Southeast Asia.

In fact, based on federal free-lunch reports, only 400 of the district’s 1,300 low-income students are Asian, said Assistant Superintendent David L. Johnston. The rest are white.

La Crosse, a pleasant town situated on the Minnesota border, sandwiched between scenic bluffs and the Mississippi River, had an almost entirely white population until about 10 years ago, when area churches sponsored the relocation of Hmong families. Their numbers grew. Now the school district has a 14% minority population. With the changing population came increased racial tension--to the extent that a community task force was formed to deal with it.

Even with the influx of non-whites, La Crosse is the kind of town where a black man driving downtown at night may find himself being conspicuously followed by the police. And when, after being tailed for a mile, the driver stops to ask why his presence warrants such attention, the officer will assure him, not quite convincingly, that it was not his dark skin but his out-of-state plates that caught his eye.

Some parents involved in the recall campaign are so sensitive to being labeled racist that they decline to speak to out-of-town reporters. “I don’t want the KKK coming in here to sign up members,” said one woman, who declined to be identified. “We can deal with this within the community.”

She said her opposition to busing was based on issues of convenience rather than race or economic background. “We moved here from Memphis, Tennessee,” she said. “I put my children in private school there because of busing. Am I going to have to do the same thing here?”

La Crosse school officials say 1,300 students currently are bused in the district. Because busing will be necessary to fill two new far-flung elementary schools next fall, the number of bused students was going to go up to 2,100 next fall anyway, they said.

Achieving a socioeconomic balance in the schools doesn’t change the number of students who are bused, only which students are affected, said Johnston.

Superintendent Swantz, in an intemperate moment that he says he now regrets, once described the opposition in print as “the silk-stocking crowd.” He is more circumspect now, but he notes that leaders of the opposition include an attorney, a surgeon and one of the community’s largest real estate agents.

O’Keefe, who admits that it will be difficult to gather the 7,500 signatures needed to force a recall, said he believes the socioeconomic busing plan was concocted to cover up the school system’s poor judgment in locating two new elementary schools in sparsely populated areas on the edge of town.

Swantz said that the busing plan was proposed by principals in the schools where low-income students are concentrated. He said the district built the schools where it did because that is where growth is likely to occur.

Despite the controversy, board President Miller looks at the ultimate success of the high school boundary changes 10 years ago as evidence that the district is doing the right thing now. When the boundaries were changed, he said, his own children were among those reassigned to the blue-collar north side school. “My son was one of the first doctor’s sons ever to go to that high school,” said Miller, a surgeon.

Despite the uproar that resulted from the change, integrating the student bodies removed the stigma attached to the north side school, and it is helping to erode the longtime class barriers between the north and south sides.

The former “bad” high school became known as a place of academic achievement. “Now the two high schools are considered about equal,” Miller said. “Now people are moving into that area.”

One advantage of economic integration, said Johnston, is that affluent parents tend to be more involved with the schools than low-income parents, and children tend to learn best in schools where parents are integrally involved with the education process. Achieving an economic mix helps ensure that all students have the same educational opportunities, he said.

He said he expects busing to have similar results in the elementary schools.

Miller said the school board discussed avoiding busing by creating magnet schools, designed to lure top students to schools in low-income neighborhoods with special programs. The plan was abandoned, he said, because of the inherent inequality of creating special schools.

About the busing plan eventually adopted, he said: “We didn’t think about whether we were the first to do it, and I’m not too sure that we knew we were bucking a trend. What we in our little corner of the world were trying to do--it may sound corny--but we feel we want to give equal educational opportunity to all of our students.”

The Chamber of Commerce, which came out against the busing plan initially, now accepts that it is inevitable, said Wilbert Sorenson, the group’s executive director. He said, though, that a “few Realtors” still fear the plan could drive families out of the city.

Some parents have indeed threatened to withdraw their children from the public schools to avoid busing. Johnston, noting that one private school has enrolled 12 new students, said: “That doesn’t suggest at this time that there’s to be a huge exodus from the public schools.”