Shesold her house to the district to reduce busing, but now Diana Dallas' granddaughter is likely to be bused.
By DONNA WINCHESTER
Published June 8, 2003
ST. PETERSBURG - Diana Dallas is battling with the Pinellas County School District - again.
The first time was in 1999, when officials wanted to raze her home to build a new school. Now, she's upset about a new student assignment plan, which she says has let her down.
The district won the first round. It most likely will win this one, too.
Dallas vividly remembers the summer day in 1999 when a Bay News 9 reporter thrust a microphone in her face and asked her how she felt about the district's plan to take her Childs Park house to build a middle school.
She recalls the letter she got from district officials a few days later explaining that the home she and her husband, Joseph, had lived in for 13 years was one of 130 in a $110-million project to build new schools or renovate and expand existing ones south of Central Avenue.
The construction, the letter said, was part of a long-range plan that would end decades of forced busing for desegregation and that would allow African-American children to attend schools in their neighborhoods.
A week later, at a gathering that included others whose property the district needed, Dallas learned that her home, which stood at 4030 20th Ave. S, was approximately on the site of a new middle school the district wanted to build.
"I'm not going to turn my property loose and go," Dallas told the group. "I don't think so."
In the ensuing months, she accepted the $74,000 offer to buy her home. Convinced that her sacrifice would eventually benefit African-American children, she and her husband and their four grandchildren settled into a $90,000 home on 28th Avenue S.
Dallas, who is 63, said she never expected the district to do her any favors once the deal was sealed. She got a fair price for her property. Once she signed the papers, she was allowed to live in the house mortgage-free for more than a year before she had to move. The district gave her $1,000 for moving expenses.
But she thinks it's ironic that after giving up her home so that African-American children wouldn't have to leave their neighborhoods, her 5-year-old granddaughter LaShawn will most likely be bused out of the neighborhood when she begins kindergarten in August.
Equally ironic, she feels, is that many white children who don't necessarily want to attend the schools she prefers for LaShawn will be filling the seats to balance a federally mandated ratio that caps African-American enrollment at 42 percent through 2007.
All of this is the result of "controlled choice," a plan that has revamped how the district matches schools and students. It gives parents more choices in determining where their children will attend school, but the 42 percent cap has a limiting effect.
Despite officials' hopes that schools' special programs would attract diverse groups of students, the choices parents made before the Dec. 13 choice application deadline indicate that most families want their children to attend schools in their neighborhoods. White parents chose schools in predominantly white neighborhoods; black parents chose schools in predominantly African-American neighborhoods.
Dallas learned recently that she got none of the choices she made for LaShawn. Instead, student assignment has offered her several other schools, the nearest of which is 24 blocks north of Central Avenue.
So far, she has refused all of them, saying she will not send her granddaughter to a school so far away.
Student assignment director Kathy Walker says Dallas doesn't have much choice. Very shortly, students who have not chosen a school will be assigned to one. LaShawn is on that list in the district's eyes, Walker said, because she has not chosen a school that has room for her.
"That baby has been with me since she was 8 months old," Dallas said. "If something happens to her, I don't want it to take a half hour to get to her.
"I don't know what I'm going to do. I really don't know."
- Information from Times files was used in this report.
