Wheels of Fortune

At 6:23 a.m., bus No. 4067 pulled up sharply at the corner of Slauson and 4th avenues and swung open its squeaky single-panel door. High school students--some yawning, others popping with morning energy--boarded quickly and walked straight to their assigned seats.

The engine roared and the windows rattled as the bus rumbled west to the San Diego Freeway. Destination: Chatsworth High.

Some of the 40 students on board talked with friends, their whispers breaking the silence. Others--up since 5:30 a.m.--fell asleep, their heads pressed against the vinyl seats.

As they dozed, the world outside was transformed from corner liquor stores and dingy apartments to a land of sprawling homes with sparkling pools and minivans in driveways.

Josue Maldonado recalled the first time he came into the Valley.

“Everything I saw was like, ‘Whoa!’ I never knew this was here,” he said after his morning nap. “It was like a whole other world.”

And at 7:20 a.m., I stepped off the bus into that world, just as I did for so many years as a student.

*

People are often puzzled when I tell them I was raised in South-Central, yet graduated from Valley schools. “How’d that happen?” they wonder.

Talk to my mother.

She made the decision in 1983 to have me bused under a voluntary Los Angeles Unified School District program to integrate schools.

The voluntary program was expanded after California voters approved a constitutional amendment that effectively dismantled mandatory busing. It allowed minority parents the option of busing their children to predominantly white schools.

At its peak in 1984, about 23,000 students were bused under the voluntary program. But as the black population in the district dwindled and magnet schools siphoned off many potential students, the voluntary busing program shrank, to about 6,000 students currently. By contrast, there are about 46,000 students at magnet schools that offer specialized or accelerated learning.

When I was in third grade, the magnet program was limited. But the basic voluntary busing program appealed to African American parents like my mother who--disappointed with the teaching environment at my neighborhood elementary school--were eager to expand their children’s horizons.

As a second-grader at the Crenshaw-area school now called Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary, I often found myself in the principal’s office. My mother never seemed to believe that I was the victim of trumped-up charges--an unwitting accomplice in a schoolyard scuffle or prank.

“The education was just superior [in the Valley],” my mother said recently. “And I wanted you to have exposure to other cultures.”

She got her wish.

In 1983, my first year of busing, I met Felix Shafir, a fellow third-grader whose Russian family had recently settled in the Valley. We became best friends, sharing a mutual excitement about comic books and often debating which were better: Marvel or DC. We remembered each other’s birthdays and when he turned 13 I found out what a bar mitzvah was. I sometimes spent the night at his house and once shared a Russian dish made from cow tongue with his family.

Today we’re still friends, more than 17 years since we first met.

Academically, it was a good fit. By junior high school I was taking honors classes and by high school I was taking Advanced Placement courses in preparation for college--competing side by side with my white counterparts.

By 1992, after 10 years of busing, I had graduated from Beckford Avenue Elementary, Nobel Junior High and Chatsworth High, and had been accepted at Stanford University.

“It worked,” said my mother, proud of herself.

But I was not always so certain. I questioned why I had to leave my own neighborhood--why they couldn’t fix the schools where I lived.

*

It is a question that 15-year-old Josue Maldonado has asked himself.

“When I’m sitting on the bus . . . sometimes I wonder what I’d be like if I went to school down there, if my grades would be the same, if I would have the same attitudes toward school, you know,” said the precocious teen who aspires to be a history professor.

For the last eight years, his mornings have been fairly routine: his alarm blares at 5:30, he showers, gets dressed and maybe--if there’s time--eats a bowl of Lucky Charms before walking two blocks to the northeast corner of Slauson and 4th to catch his bus.

Usually the first at the corner, he has only the neighborhood’s stray dogs to keep him company.

“I’d rather be early than get left,” he said, referring to his bus driver who lacks sympathy for straggling students. “She will leave you.”

Just as I did, he attended Beckford, Nobel, and now Chatsworth, and by the time he graduates he will have completed the same journey I undertook 17 years ago.

“It was scary,” the Latino 10th-grader said of the first time he was bused. “I was going far away from home to some place I had never seen before.”

He eventually made friends, among them a white student named Justin whom he’s known since third grade.

“Caucasians are not all that different from us,” he said. “I mean, they have their problems too.”

He’s also learned that distance can be a strain on relationships. “I try to make it a rule not to date anyone at school.”

From what my fellow riders tell me, the reasons why parents choose to bus their kids hasn’t changed much in eight years.

“The Valley’s more focused on education,” said 11th-grader Jose Flores, whose four older brothers were also bused. “My mom said I’d be better out here away from gangs and problems like that.”

But there’s a price as well. The long hours on the bus take away from time that might be spent studying or participating in after-school activities. And bused students can be viewed as unwelcome intruders.

“One boy, I heard him say, ‘There go them ghetto kids being bused.’ And I had to stick my head out of the window and say, ‘Homeboy, watch your mouth!’ And he was black,” Frederick Brewer, who is African American, recalled with disbelief.

It seems the only thing that has changed are the students themselves. Buses that once almost exclusively carried blacks are now shared with Latinos. The sounds of ebonics and Spanish mix in the air, despite a bus rule mounted above the stairwell that orders riders to “Refrain from loud conversation.”

At 2:40 p.m., bus No. 4067 pulled away from the front of Chatsworth High headed back to South-Central, following a fleet of school buses getting on the freeway.

Boisterous laughs filled the air as students shared the day’s gossip. A few stretched their tired bodies across the cushioned seats and fell asleep. Others ignored bus rules, playing tag across the aisle.

“The only thing I don’t like is the traffic,” said Josue as he plopped his backpack on the floor and braced himself for the long haul. “But it’s worth it. Had I gone to a school [in my neighborhood], I probably wouldn’t be the same person I am today.”

The words rang true. Some of my friends I left behind in neighborhood schools succumbed to the pressure to join a gang. For others, the fear of walking through gang turf after school wearing the wrong color--red or blue--made them feel like they lived in a war zone. It wasn’t the school that needed fixing so much as the neighborhood itself.

It wasn’t always easy navigating two worlds--an inner city of cracked concrete and graffiti, and a gentler place of green lawns and tidy shopping malls. But my mother made the right decision. I’d do it all over again.