Board to Quietly End Integration Experiment : Education: Two Westside schools--one mostly black, the other mostly white--melded in 1977. But parents increasingly sent their children to magnet and private schools.

Late this afternoon, in the same routine stroke of the pen that will approve the purchase of pencils and books and suspend a janitor, the Los Angeles Board of Education will end a landmark experiment in voluntary school integration.

In 1977, with parents in the Los Angeles Unified School District bitterly divided over mandatory busing, two Westside schools came together to propose a solution that would spare their children from a cross-town bus ride while desegregating classrooms.

Their solution was to link their two campuses, one mile apart--one almost all white, the other almost all black--as one school sharing an integrated student body.

Parents from the affluent, predominantly white Beverlywood area west of Robertson Boulevard would send their children to their neighborhood school, Canfield Elementary, from kindergarten through third grade. Their fourth- through sixth-graders would be bused across La Cienega Boulevard to Crescent Heights Elementary, in a more mixed middle-class neighborhood.

Crescent Heights parents would follow the drill in reverse: Their children would be bused to Canfield until third grade, then return to Crescent Heights for fourth through sixth.

The pairing endured for 17 years, yet it has never really produced the integrated campuses that supporters envisioned. Today, the school board will formally cancel the arrangement, probably without discussion.

Crescent Heights attracted few white children. Canfield parents often turned to private schools when their children reached the fourth grade and faced transfer to Crescent Heights. Other Beverlywood parents eschewed public schools altogether--particularly the newcomers, many of them Orthodox Jewish families who preferred religious schools.

And as the district expanded its magnet program offering integrated, specialized schools, many in both neighborhoods chose to bus their children to more distant magnets rather than attend Crescent Heights.

“Over the years, there was a smaller and smaller group of white parents supportive of the pairing,” said David Shatkin, who sent his oldest child to Canfield and then to Crescent Heights. But he enrolled his younger child in a Baldwin Hills magnet after third grade at Canfield.

“It got to be a vicious cycle,” he recalled. “When fewer white kids went over to Crescent Heights, the people who still had children at Canfield became more concerned about sending their kids over to a school with so few white kids, so they began looking at options earlier and earlier.”

Shatkin and Marcy Frerichs were among a small group of white parents who recruited their neighbors to enroll at Crescent Heights. “It was the most frustrating situation because you had an ideal setup for integration to work--communities that were fairly equal, the same middle-class working people,” Frerichs said.

She sent her son to Canfield, then to Crescent Heights. But when her daughter got to Canfield’s third grade four years later, “there were only two of the original 20 neighborhood kids who had started kindergarten with her.”

Over the years, the white enrollment at both schools dwindled. Although officials hailed the pairing as a model of voluntary integration, neither school now has more than a few white students despite substantial white populations in their neighborhoods. Canfield is 14% white and Crescent Heights is 7% white.

Only 10 white children from the Canfield area are bused to Crescent Heights, which has 17 whites among its 250 students. Crescent Heights sends 120 students to the primary classes at Canfield, but 95 of those are minorities.

Beginning in September, both schools will enroll students in kindergarten through fifth grade. For the next year, students now at Canfield or Crescent Heights can choose to attend either school. Beginning in 1995, students will have to attend their neighborhood school or apply to move through open enrollment.

For teachers and parents at both schools, the philosophical high ground has been superseded by the practical limitations that the system presents.

“Our teachers and parents feel it’s an old concept,” said Crescent Heights Principal Marie Kendricks. “The pairing is not doing what it was intended to do--integrate the communities--and it is depriving our school of the benefits of having the younger children on campus, things like the parental involvement the primary grades bring.”

And an imminent reconfiguration of district schools meant that Crescent Heights faced losing its sixth-grade class to nearby middle schools, further cutting the school’s enrollment.

For Canfield, the change will “bring back the concept of a community-based school and we hope that will attract some of the neighborhood families back,” said Principal Sylvia Rogers.

The dissolution was supported by parents from both schools, but it was still wrenching for many who remember the sense of hope that the pairing generated in its earliest days.

“It’s a little bittersweet, but I understand it,” said Frerichs. “I think what happened is it’s run its course . . . not to say that’s good or bad. For those schools, it probably isn’t much of a racial issue any longer.”

The school district’s integration coordinator, Ted Alexander, said he is disappointed to see the arrangement end. “It was the only pairing of its kind that existed,” he said, adding that the dissolution means that Crescent Heights will probably become even more segregated.

But school board member Mark Slavkin, who represents the area, said the pairing can no longer be considered a vehicle for integration. “I think there’s a sense now of people saying ‘let’s be real.’ We don’t have any significant number of white students in either school anymore.”