Integration Plan Aims to Mix Blacks and Latinos : Education: Pasadena school district, where only one-fifth of students are white, is expected to establish campus enrollment ceiling for city’s three largest racial or ethnic groups.

Widely known for its old money, the Tournament of Roses and, more recently, the transformation of a blighted area of its downtown into a retail and restaurant showcase, Pasadena also has a claim to fame in the history of the nation’s efforts to desegregate schools.

Twenty-five years ago this month, the Pasadena Board of Education touched off a divisive, nearly decade-long battle over desegregation by becoming one of the first school systems outside the South to adopt a school busing plan to satisfy a court order.

Then, six years later, the U.S. Supreme Court used an appeal from the board to exempt it and other school districts from having to rectify segregation resulting from shifting housing patterns.

On Tuesday, the board is expected to pioneer again when it voluntarily approves a new desegregation plan that would all but assure the continued integration of Latino and black students, but could result in some campuses having no white children.

Supporters of the proposed policy say it recognizes the demographic transformation of the district, while reaffirming the principle of integration, and seeks to prevent any school from being dominated by one ethnic group.

To do that, it establishes a campus enrollment ceiling for the three largest groups of students--Latinos, blacks and whites. But the policy also does away with enrollment floors, meaning white students will no longer be prevented from transferring out of predominantly minority schools.

“The policy is a very modest one . . . and really makes it fairly easy on the community,” said the Rev. George Van Alstine, the Board of Education president who also was involved in desegregation efforts in the 1970s. “But at least it keeps the commitment out there.”

The new policy comes at a time when public schools across the country are more racially segregated than at any time since the 1960s. Many urban school districts are abandoning, or neglecting, integration efforts, arguing that so few whites remain in urban public schools it is fruitless to try to attain an ethnic mix.

The Berkeley school district, for example, has discarded the districtwide busing program that it set up voluntarily in 1968, and instead will allow parents to choose schools for their children. The plan seeks to maintain some degree of integration but sets no numerical limits.

Gary Orfield, a desegregation expert and Harvard University political scientist, said Pasadena’s shift in emphasis--to focus on maintaining a balance of minority students at every campus--is important. Several national surveys have found that racial animosity between blacks and Latinos is even more virulent than between whites and members of minority groups and should be addressed in the schools, he said.

“What they are struggling with is the kind of thing that a lot of places will be struggling with in the near future,” Orfield said. “There isn’t an easy way for this to work out if we don’t have kids growing up together and sharing some experiences together. They’re thinking about it in terms of the viability of their own community, which is the right way to think about desegregation.”

When U.S. District Court Judge Manuel Real decreed in 1970 that “there shall be no school in the district with a majority of minority students,” more than half of the district’s students were white.

To comply with that order, the district--which draws its students from Pasadena, Altadena and Sierra Madre--established primary schools for kindergarten through third grade, and elementary schools for fourth through sixth grades, then paired the schools and bused students between them. That ensured that students from both minority and white neighborhoods would be bused. The busing plan was eventually scaled back significantly.

Since then, white enrollment has dropped dramatically because of white flight, a jump in private school enrollment and the relative aging of the city’s white population. Today, white students account for fewer than one in five of the 22,000 children attending Pasadena public schools. Almost twice as many white children in the district attend private school as are enrolled in the city’s public schools.

Meanwhile, as in virtually every Southern California community, immigration and other factors have brought about a steady increase in Latino enrollment. Nearly 45% of the district’s students are Latino--more than four times their percentage in 1970. Blacks are the second-largest group of students at 35%, a percentage that peaked in 1980 and has been dropping slowly.

Board member Elbie J. Hickambottom, the principal author of the new plan, said his opposition to school segregation has not wavered.

“I still believe in desegregation and I still believe in integration, and with the higher number of black and Hispanic students we have, I still want to see a mix in our schools,” he said.

If enrollment limits were not established, Hickambottom said, as many as five schools would be virtually all Latino and another four campuses virtually all black.

“If we had a school that was 90% Hispanic and one 90% black five or six blocks away, there would be more rioting and shooting between blacks and Hispanics than you can imagine,” he said.

The new policy would not allow any school to draw more than two-thirds of its students from any one ethnic group. It establishes a ceiling for whites of 40% at any one school. Black and Latino enrollments would be limited to 20 percentage points above their districtwide representation, meaning roughly 55% for blacks and 64% for Latinos.

*

Hickambottom said there are too few white students in the district to try to implement a policy that would spread them among all the schools. “The only thing I have insisted on is that we avoid concentrating Anglo kids in certain schools,” he said.

A quarter of the district’s students--virtually all of them minorities--will continue to be bused from the northwest part of the district because the schools in those neighborhoods are overcrowded.

Under the new plan, it will be easier for all students to transfer to any campus that has room and has not reached its enrollment cap for their ethnic group.

As broad as those guidelines are, several schools will still be out of compliance, and board members have not yet decided how to integrate those campuses.

About 80% of the students at Madison Elementary School, for example, are Latino and nearly 75% of the students at Edison Elementary School are black. Racial isolation at those schools, as well as several others, has been increasing since the mid-1980s, when the district all but suspended enforcement of its previous integration plan.

Jalal Sudan, president of the Altadena branch of the NAACP, said he is concerned that, under the new plan, some campuses that now have few white students could end up with no white students. In addition, he said, the new policy should include specific and measurable educational goals.

In the past, he said, “much of the effort was placed on integration for integration’s sake, and there was not a lot of effort put into the ultimate demand, which was quality education.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Changing Student Bodies The Pasadena Unified School District in 1970 began massive busing to satisfy a court order. Now, the district’s demographics have changed and the goal of its proposed new desegregation policy is to better balance enrollment among minorities and prevent any campus from being dominated by one ethnic group.

Race 1970 1995 White 54% 17% Black 33% 35% Hispanic 9% 43% Asian 4% 4%

Mostly minority elementary schools 1970 1995 Number of schools 8 of 28 22 of 22

Source: Pasadena Unified School District