Burden still on black students

Partly because of the deal to end desegregation, many did not get in their chosen school.

By STEPHEN HEGARTY, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 22, 2003

The burden for keeping Pinellas schools desegregated will continue to be greater for black children under the new choice plan.

While 18 percent of the district's enrollment is black, 34 percent of the students who will be sent to schools they didn't choose are black. Those 3,307 black students either did not win any of their school choices or did not fill out the choice applications.

That was one apparent trend on Friday as school officials started sifting through the preliminary results of a computer program that matched students with schools for the first year of choice, which begins this fall.

Slightly more than half of 1,268 children who did not win any of their choices were black. And almost all those black children who did not get any of their choices live in Area A, which includes St. Petersburg neighborhoods south of Central Avenue.

"I guess I'm not surprised," said School Board Chairwoman Linda Lerner. "We knew that in Area A we would have trouble getting everyone into the schools they wanted."

It's easy to see how students might miss out on all their choices. Parents were asked to give five choices in order of preference. Despite instructions, some filled out only two or three choices. Some wrote the name of the same school five times.

For others, it was the result of choosing schools that were popular among children of the same race, then being unlucky in the random selection used for tie-breakers.

For example, if a black student entering second grade listed Campbell Park Elementary as his first choice, he would have been one of 36 kids -- most of them black -- competing for 24 spots. If he made nearby Lakewood Elementary his second choice, he already would be out of luck there because 41 children made Lakewood their first choice and competed for 30 spots.

Next week, the school district will start calling the parents of those 1,268 children who did not receive any of their choices and offering them spots in other schools. They will try to match the students with a school close to their home. But they also must match that student with a school that has room, and where they can help achieve a racial balance.

That is particularly tricky in Area A. That's where the district has the greatest concentration of black students. And under the district's agreement with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, no school can have an enrollment that is more than a 42 percent black. Though that rule applies districtwide, it is an issue primarily in south Pinellas schools.

"It's because of the agreement and the ratios" that students missed out on their choices, Lerner said. "I think African-American children, all children really, want to stay closer to home."

Now that more than 100,000 children have been assigned to schools, school officials have to work to fill under-chosen schools and to achieve racial balancing.

They'll try to perform that balancing act with the 1,268 children who missed out on their choices and with the 8,578 children whose parents did not fill out a choice application.

Those children who did not fill out choice applications will be assigned to schools last. About seven of every 10 of those children are non-black.

Under the terminology of the old federal desegregation lawsuit, students are categorized as black or non-black. The second category includes whites, Hispanics and Asians.

Taken together, the students who did not win any choices or failed to fill out choice applications are 34 percent black and 66 percent non-black. Though the greater numbers are non-black, proportionally the burden is greater on black students because they comprise about 18 percent of the Pinellas student population.

But that burden was even greater under the old busing plan and the federal desegregation order.

Under that system, about 10,800 students were bused to schools well outside their neighborhoods for integration. Most of those students -- 73 percent -- were black.

By comparison, under the choice plan 9,846 children -- those who didn't get one of their choices and those who didn't fill out an application -- likely will be sent to a school not of their choosing.

"Based on those numbers," Lerner said, "it looks like we're doing a little better than before."

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