Ratio of Whites Hits City Schools Low : Ethnicity: Student enrollment of whites is less than 34% in the district, spurring calls for changes in the integration program.

White student enrollment in San Diego city schools has fallen to its lowest percentage ever--less than 34% of the district’s 125,000 students--adding greater urgency to discussions by school trustees over how to redo expensive integration programs.

The district’s latest ethnic pupil census shows that white students total 42,202, a drop of almost 1,500 from last year, when the percentage stood at 35.4%. It is a trend that has been prominent the past few years.

In just the past four years, the number of white students has dropped almost 10%, from 43% to 33.8%. Since 1976, when integration programs began in the district, white enrollment has declined from more than 80,000 to 42,000, while nonwhite enrollment has grown from 41,000 to the current 82,500.

The multimillion-dollar, voluntary busing integration programs are designed to maintain as many schools as possible with at least a half-white and half-nonwhite student balance. But administrators now realize that such a ratio is no longer realistic.

As a first step, they plan to ask trustees to base the balances on the district’s annual enrollment data. For example, that would mean a 66% to 34% nonwhite-to-white goal for this year.

Theoretically, under a revised plan, a school in a predominantly white area could end up with a predominantly nonwhite student population, and administrators have warned that some areas might object to such increased busing.

It is unclear whether white enrollment is dropping proportionately to white population growth in the northern areas of the city of San Diego, which are mainly served not by San Diego Unified School District but by the suburban, and heavily white, San Dieguito and Poway districts.

For years, some property agents have cited those two districts as selling points to attract buyers to the northern area.

San Diego city schools in the northern tier are the ones with the heaviest white student enrollments.

Jerabek Elementary in Scripps Ranch is almost 84% white, while De Portola Middle School in Tierrasanta is 63.6% white, one of only two middle schools-junior highs among 21 that have a majority white enrollment. (Correia Junior High in Point Loma is 50.4% white.)

Among high schools, La Jolla High has the largest percentage of white students, about 63%.

In contrast, many elementary schools in the Barrio Logan and Southeast San Diego areas have few if any white students, despite being given tens of thousands of dollars annually in integration money for special academic programs to lure whites from across town.

Logan Elementary has only 13 white students, 1.2% of its student body, and King Elementary also has 13 white students, for a 1.3% total.

Conversely, Logan, Sherman and Perkins elementary schools--all of them with special academic magnet programs--have close to 90% Latino enrollments.

Latino students now total almost 30% of district students, at 37,245, and the trend indicates they will pass white students in the next several years to become the largest single ethnic group within the nation’s eighth-largest school system.

Among the district’s 72,000 elementary-age students, Latino pupils are almost 32% of the total, nearly equaling the 33.3% white total.

African-American students compose 16.6% of all students, a slight increase from last year. Asian students taken together are about 19%. When broken down by specific ethnicity, Filipino students stand at 8.3% and Indochinese at 7.8%.