Schools Leave Busing Intact to Keep It Out of Spotlight

In discussions that foreshadowed further debate this fall, San Diego city school trustees Tuesday refused to cut their busing program to save as much as $1.6 million.

Trustee John De Beck argued for changes now in the $23-million annual transportation program so the San Diego Unified School District could make less severe cuts than planned in employee pay.

But the district’s voluntary integration program consumes more than half of all busing costs, and De Beck’s colleagues feared that his recommended changes would bring unneeded attention to integration at a time of unsettled race relations.

To save money, De Beck would simplify bell times for starting and ending the school day at almost all of the district’s 153 schools, meaning that fewer buses would be needed to move 19,000 students back and forth across the city each day as part of voluntary integration. The changes would also mean savings in the number of buses used to take disabled students to their specialized programs.

But simplifying bell times would cause a shake-up in school schedules that would affect most of the district’s 124,000 students. And that would rile tens of thousands of parents, at least in the short term, who would largely blame the integration program for disruptions in their daily routine, argued Trustee Shirley Weber, professor of Africana studies at San Diego State University.

There are already negative feelings about the program in the community, she said, “and this would bring tremendous (additional) animosity toward integration, unnecessarily at a time when we’re trying to do things about” improving race relations.

Weber and other board members said the bell times issue, and any savings in busing costs, should be examined over the next year and implemented no sooner than the 1993-94 school year.

But De Beck pointed out that the savings of $1.6 million could help defray the 2.67% salary cuts the board wants its employees to take beginning July 1, to make up for up to $9 million out of an expected $30-million budget deficit.

“These are only dollars for moving kids around, not for raising a test score, not for meeting any of our (academic) goals,” he said. “I don’t think that buses serve kids” when trustees are trying to save money for programs, and when the alternative “is pushing our employees to take pay cuts.”

De Beck said the $1.6 million could also cover most of the planned cuts in sex education, nurses and elementary instrumental music that the board may be forced to make next week.

Those cuts and many others suggested by Supt. Tom Payzant earlier this month remain on the table for trustees to pick and choose from next week, when they must submit a tentative budget for the 1992-93 school year, which begins July 1.

The board made little headway Tuesday in deciding where to approve or modify Payzant’s hit list. The list includes high school sports, music instruction, salaries, nurses, writing teachers, maintenance, books and supplies.