THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 27, 1996 TAG: 9610270320
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JON GLASS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: 269 lines
Lillian Stuart and Phyllis Keene live in the same public housing neighborhood within sight of Roberts Park Elementary School. Yet they have made strikingly different choices for their children's schooling.
Stuart sends her granddaughter to Roberts Park, and every day escorts the first-grader and neighboring friends on a minutes-long walk from apartments in the red-brick housing complexes.
Keene buses her 9-year-old daughter to another public school across town, seeing her off mornings on a school bus on a corner across from Roberts Park.
Ten years ago, the School Board won a landmark legal battle in federal court to return to neighborhood elementary schools. The case essentially re-segregated black students at Roberts Park and nine other primary schools and set the stage for a national movement to end forced busing as a way to racially integrate classrooms.
A decade later, far removed from the courtroom, the ruling figures into the choices that Stuart, Keene and hundreds of other blacks in the city make for their children's education.
In the 1980s, the busing debate came to symbolize a political power struggle between the city's white establishment, desperate to reverse a middle-class white flight to suburbia, and a growing black population that didn't want to lose gains in civil rights.
These days, the debate centers on the city's economic and social health - how well the school system is educating the community's black children, who constitute 64 percent of the students. The record shows that much remains undone in the 10 community black schools.
With a few notable exceptions, student achievement in those schools lags at the bottom, despite additional resources, including as much as $1,000 more per pupil than the citywide average. A decade ago, the School Board agreed to allocate more resources to those schools, responding to critics who feared that the black children's education would suffer if they were resegregated.
On the 1996 national standardized Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, for example, the average reading comprehension score for the 10 black community schools ranked in the 33rd percentile. The other 25 schools ranked in the 50th percentile, the national average.
In math, the black schools scored in the 43rd percentile; the other schools ranked in the 62nd percentile.
As black students have moved into middle and high school, they are less likely to take college-prep courses. In 1994-95, a quarter of the city's black graduates earned an advanced diploma. By comparison, about twice as many whites graduated with an advanced diploma.
Two years ago, the Harvard Project on School Desegregation, a research group based at Harvard University, concluded that Norfolk's return to neighborhood schools was a failure - a record of ``false promises.''
School administrators disputed the findings. But their response wasn't heartening to black parents: Community schools weren't to blame, officials said; low-income blacks as a group were doing poorly regardless of what school they attended.
Recent reading scores, however, show that blacks in the 10 community schools overall were behind blacks of the same social class in more racially balanced schools. Results from the 1996 Iowa tests, for example, show that 42 percent of poor fourth-grade blacks at the community schools were reading at or above grade level; that compares to 51 percent of poor black kids in the other schools.
Citywide, 84 percent of white middle-class and 75 percent of poor white fourth-graders were reading at or above grade level. Sixty-nine percent of black middle-class fourth-graders were at or above grade level.
Superintendent Roy D. Nichols Jr. said raising achievement has been tough.
``We have not found the secret yet - how you take those kids and catch them up,'' Nichols said.
When he came to Norfolk four years ago, he formed a task force to identify ways to raise scores and hired an assistant for ``continuous improvement'' to oversee progress.
Last year, hoping to voluntarily integrate the black community schools, Nichols opened the city's first elementary ``magnet'' school at Chesterfield, a 97 percent black school. It worked: Shooting for a modest 3 percent white enrollment, Nichols was elated at the response: Applications from white parents poured in, and now the school is 21 percent white.
School officials are waiting for payoffs from a preschool initiative for needy 3- and 4-year-olds that began in the early 1990s and now reaches 1,200 youngsters.
Nichols launched a $1.2 million reading initiative that includes mandatory summer school and automatic retention of third-graders reading below grade level.
``In urban districts, children are coming to school without exposure to books, and we think this will offer the help they need to be on a level playing field,'' said Joyce Swindell, senior coordinator of communication skills for Norfolk schools.
The city can't afford to turn out kids unprepared to contribute to society, parents say, and the challenge has become acute in the black community. Of the school system's 19,611 elementary school students, 63 percent of them, nearly two-thirds, are black. The majority - around 85 percent - are poor enough to qualify for free- or reduced-price lunches. About half of them are schooled in the black community schools.
Poverty and poor school performance exist in every urban school district in the country. But many parents bristle over children in the black community schools being labeled ``at risk.''
``The child is not `at risk' unless the teachers, the supplies and the parents are not there for them to learn,'' said Golethia Taylor, a volunteer grandmother at Monroe Elementary School, one of the 10 community schools. ``Abraham Lincoln learned in a log cabin by the fire light - was he at risk? There are concerned teachers and parents and staff here, but they are fighting the stigma of society. Somewhere along the line the stigma needs to be dispelled.''
To be sure, there have been successes. A recent Virginian-Pilot computer analysis that factored in student poverty showed that half of the community schools were meeting or surpassing expectations.
Last year, fourth-graders at the Bowling Park black community school scored highest in the city on some sections of the Iowa tests, and scores at several others inched upward.
While much of Bowling Park's success is attributed to a dynamic principal and teaching staff, other schools have begun to copy what officials say works: Before- and after-school programs, early-childhood classes, aggressive parental outreach, school uniforms and same-sex classes.
The taste of success has made parents impatient for more.
``They've had 10 years of trial and error and they've identified what works,'' said Nelson White, a black community activist who organized a parents' group in the early 1980s to support a return to neighborhood schools.
``The city just has to commit the resources needed to achieve the goal.''
When parents like Stuart and Keene decide where to educate their children, the choice often is a matter of convenience. Most parents like having their children in a school close by, where they can respond quickly in emergencies and get involved.
For Stuart, who, like many parents interviewed, doesn't own a car, it means being able to volunteer and take computer classes at Roberts Park's parent resource center, which offers job training and other opportunties for self-improvement.
Many parents defend the community schools. Some attended the same school when growing up; they believe the schools are doing the best they can with the resources they have. Stuart is impressed that her granddaughter began reading as a kindergartner using a new computer program, which is now in all the community schools except Bowling Park.
Parent Beatrice Lang, who has a first-grader at Roberts Park, said: ``Some parents don't give our black neighborhood schools a chance. They judge by what they think they know.''
Like Keene, however, more than 400 African-American parents choose to bus their children to a more racially balanced school. Since 1986, the School Board has offered the busing option - called a ``majority-minority'' transfer - to children in schools that are more than 70 percent one race. The option was meant to win trust among blacks worried that school resegregation would be detrimental to their children.
Keene, echoing common sentiments, uses the busing option to widen her daughter's view of life. Many black children growing up in the city's public housing communities face poverty, crime, drugs and hopelessness. School is the only place to gain exposure to other ways of life, parents say.
``She's been surrounded by blacks her whole life, and I want her to see the whites and the Filipinos so she can learn to get along,'' Keene said.
Even parents like Stuart acknowledge benefits of racially integrated schools. Also, many say the racial isolation and concentrated poverty in the community schools create obstacles to learning.
``There are so many black children here with the same problems and the same needs, the teachers get tired,'' said Patricia Crowell, a single mom who lives in the Diggs Town public housing neighborhood.
``It's not that they don't try; I believe they do - I think they're just overwhelmed.''
Many parents this year see class sizes at some community schools creeping larger, despite School Board promises of smaller classes. Many worry about inadequate resources, such things as computers and technology, books and instructional supplies, teachers and support personnel.
Some parents say too many kids in those schools enter middle school unprepared.
``We've had kids on the honor roll over here and when they go to other schools or when they get to Blair (Middle), it's like they don't know it,'' Taylor, the Monroe volunteer, said.
Such concerns have led to calls to resurrect a Community Oversight Group, formed in 1986 to ensure the community schools were not slighted. Committee members disbanded in 1991 after deciding the School Board had delivered promised resources to the schools.
The Rev. L.P. Watson, a former committee member, approached the current School Board in August to ask for a new committee. Board members said they would consider the idea.
``You know that nothing is going to work perfectly, and all of us can get careless when no one is looking over our shoulder,'' said Watson, who sits on the local NAACP's education committee and was active in opposing the end of busing for desegregation.
When the city ended elementary busing for desegregation in 1986, it was the country's first school district to win approval to dismantle court-ordered busing plans of the 1960s and 1970s. Forced busing had come in the years after the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling that outlawed school segregation.
Following Norfolk's lead, cities nationwide, including Portsmouth, have ended forced cross-town busing. Portsmouth returned to neighborhood elementary schools last year, not enough time to draw conclusions about the impact. But parents have raised many of the same concerns as in Norfolk about ensuring quality education for their children.
Suffolk, the other majority-black school district in South Hampton Roads that faced court-ordered busing, continues to bus for racial balance in all grades.
Time magazine reported last spring that nearly one-third of the nation's black public school children now attend schools that are more than 90 percent minority. Many people see that as undermining civil rights gains made since the Supreme Court's decision outlawing school segregation.
Ten years ago, city and school officials hoped to reverse white flight by ending cross-town busing. From 1969 to 1981, about 19,000 white students abandoned the city's schools. White enrollment dropped from 57 percent to 42 percent.
Experts on the city's busing history disagree over its impact on white flight. Crime, limited housing and dissatisfaction with the city schools also contributed.
But one thing is unarguable: The percentage of white students has continued to dwindle. Between 1986 and this year, white enrollment has dropped from 40 percent to 31 percent.
The School Board limited its neighborhood school plan to elementary schools, largely because parents voiced most concern about the long bus rides facing children of that age. At the time, the board pledged not to expand neighborhood schools to middle or high schools.
But busing remains an issue to parents like Kathy Freudenberg. She soon will decide whether to send her children across town from the Bayview area to Ruffner Middle, which she would have to do under the school district's current busing plan. Freudenberg endured a 50-minute bus ride during Norfolk's years of court-ordered busing.
``Ruffner is a wonderful, beautiful school and probably has all the technology you could want for your child, but I will not bus my children - that's the last straw,'' she said.
City Councilman Randy Wright, who rose in politics as leader of a white, anti-busing group in the early 1980s, raised the issue of neighborhood middle schools last month in a meeting with School Board members.
``I think we would see a tremendous increase in school enrollment all across the board,'' Wright said in an interview. ``It doesn't have anything to do with race, it's just time. We live in a world now based on convenience, whether it be shopping or schools.''
To address complaints, school officials spent months in 1993 and 1994 trying to redraw busing routes to shorten rides for middle schoolers. But they couldn't do it without further segregating the schools - something they didn't want to do, Nichols said.
Much of the difficulty lies in city housing patterns. Blacks are concentrated in the south side, whites in the north. Given segregated neighborhoods, busing is the only way to ensure a racial balance in most schools.
Nichols told Wright, however, that he was willing to revisit the issue.
These days, most black parents and community leaders seem to accept the segregated community schools as a fact of life.
``I wouldn't want anyone to be forced to ride a bus if they didn't want to go. I think it's fair to have an option,'' said Karen Mason, a mother of a kindergartner and first-grader at Roberts Park Elementary School.
Many parents say bringing back busing would not solve the problems. Most say solutions lie in more parental involvement, and the community.
Increasingly, school officials say, volunteers are responding - from neighborhood churches and businesses to civic groups. Ultimately, the performance of the community schools will be a measure of the city's success.
``You can't run away from yourself,'' White said, ``so we have to rise up as a community to get involved and stop looking to the outside for salvation.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photos
BILL TIERNAN/The Virginian-Pilot
WALKING: Lillian Stuart walks granddaughter Keamber Stuart and
others to Roberts Park.
RIDING: Sylvia Urquhart, 9-year-old daughter of Phyllis Keene, heads
across town.
Photo
BILL TIERNAN/The Virginian-Pilot
March 1986: People crowded in to hear the School Board discuss the
neighborhood schools plan.
Graphic
The Virginian-Pilot
RETURN TO NEIGHBORHOOD SCHOOLS
SOURCE: Norfolk Public Schools
[For complete graphic, please see microfilm]
KEYWORDS: SCHOOL BUSING NORFOLK NORFOLK SCHOOLS
GRADES NEIGHBORHOOD SCHOOLS DESEGREGATION by CNB