Black families' choices in Pinellas show a move away from schools in white neighborhoods.
By THOMAS C. TOBIN
Published June 8, 2003
ST. PETERSBURG - Bestowed with options their parents never had, many African-American students who were involuntarily bused to schools in white Pinellas neighborhoods are choosing to remain closer to home.
The change signals the promise and potential peril for the county's school choice plan that starts this fall. More black children will attend school near their homes when classes begin Aug. 5. But administrators at the schools they left behind are bemoaning the loss of cultural and social diversity.
The shift in attendance patterns also provides a cautionary glimpse of what could happen in Pinellas when racial controls on public school enrollments are lifted entirely in 2007. If the preference toward neighborhood schools continues to be strong, the choice plan's goal of voluntary integration will be jeopardized.
The goal relies heavily on the hope that large numbers of families, black and white, someday will compete for seats in schools in each other's neighborhoods. If that doesn't happen, some predict a return to a school system as segregated as the county's housing patterns.
Though school officials are confident the tide will change, the early numbers do not bode well for diversity after all racial controls are lifted. Among black families, enrollment numbers for the coming year show a strong initial move away from many schools in white neighborhoods.
Pinellas schools superintendent Howard Hinesley said he is neither surprised nor concerned by the loss in diversity at mid-county schools. He said the four-year phase-in period before choice's racial controls are lifted will allow the district to work through problems.
Jade Moore, chief of the county's teacher union, said he also expected more black students would choose schools closer to their homes in St. Petersburg. He said many African-American families have spent the past two years watching three new south Pinellas schools go up in their neighborhoods. All were named after prominent black men - U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Pinellas lawyer and judge James Sanderlin, and Pinellas legislator Douglas Jamerson - who championed integration and better schools.
"Now, they actually want their kids to go there; it's just human nature to want that to happen," Moore said of black parents. "What you're seeing right now is the first blush of one or two generations who've never had a choice."
Minority exodus
The trend is seen in schools south of Ulmerton Road, the east-west highway that divides north and south Pinellas. A large-scale swapping of white and black students took place for three decades to maintain racial balance under the court-ordered busing plan that expired last month.
Of the 41 regular elementary schools south of Ulmerton during the just-completed school year, 28 showed significant declines in the number of blacks willing to return this fall.
Schools such as Bardmoor, Cross Bayou, Madeira Beach and Seminole posted double-digit drops in the percentage of black students when the results of the choice plan's computer selection were released in February.
Those and other schools in Seminole, Pinellas Park, Largo and St. Petersburg shared a yearslong relationship under the old desegregation plan in which white students were sent south into black neighborhoods and black students north into white neighborhoods.
When the choice plan walled those schools off from south Pinellas schools and into a mid-county zone known as "Attendance Area B," it made an exodus by black students from St. Petersburg even more likely.
The vast majority of black students south of Ulmerton Road come from "Attendance Area A," which has a jagged northern boundary that follows 54th Avenue N, Gandy Boulevard and Interstate 275 to the Howard Frankland Bridge.
Many Area A schools in predominantly white neighborhoods also were not popular with black students during the choice process.
Blanton Elementary on 54th Avenue N in St. Petersburg had 180 black students in the most recent school year, but only 92 were placed there in February by the choice computer run. Seventy-Fourth Street Elementary had 123 black students last year, but only 53 as a result of choice.
In the months since the choice computer selection in February, the district has filled Blanton, Seventy-Fourth and other Area A schools with hundreds of black students who did not participate in choice or did not get one of their five choices.
As a result, most of those schools now have black enrollments that come close to last year's percentages. Many, in fact, will be more diverse next year. But much of that will be enforced diversity, which may or may not endear black families to those schools after racial controls expire in 2007. More than 40 percent of the black children in those schools were not placed there by choice.
Though less pronounced, the exodus is evident as well among mid-county middle schools. Madeira Beach, Osceola and Pinellas Park middle schools each lost dozens of black students to schools in Area A.
Osceola, for example, will drop from a black enrollment of 26 percent this past school year to about 12 percent in August. Most of Osceola's black students traditionally come from the Lakewood Estates area of St. Petersburg.
In an interview on the last day of school, Osceola principal Bob Vicari illustrated the trend in the school cafeteria, walking down a line of black students waiting to get lunch.
"Where are you going to school next year?" he asked them. Some said they would continue to go to Osceola, but most mentioned middle schools in St. Petersburg.
Vicari winced.
"Within the next three years, I'm going to lose a lot of my minority kids," he said. "It's a shame."
Said Mary Brown, the School Board's first elected black member: "I think we lose something when children do not have a chance to interact with everyone. . . . Companies are pushing more diversity, and yet we have schools that are getting less diverse."
Magnet school hopes
The secret to the choice plan, she said, is to make all schools so good that race and geography will be pushed to the background when parents decide where to place their children.
Until that happens, Brown said, the best way to maintain diversity is to strengthen magnet schools in St. Petersburg, which have a record of attracting white parents to black neighborhood schools.
"They're the only saving grace for diversity in St. Petersburg," she said, lamenting recent budget cuts that some say have eroded the quality of the magnets.
The district also must pay more attention to struggling schools and struggling students in St. Petersburg schools, Brown said. If they are elevated, the rest of the district will rise with them, she said.
For now, though, she compared the city's current standing in the school district to the under-performing division of a large corporation.
"I'm sorry but we're educators. We're being paid big bucks to find the (solutions)," Brown said. "You don't spend this kind of money and keep doing the same thing. I want to see results."
Hinesley said that as the district opens new schools in St. Petersburg, elevates programs throughout Pinellas and ensures that most people continue to get their first- or second-choice school, diversity will fall into place.
That will take a huge effort, Brown said.
"It is a complex problem if we allow it to be," she said. "We have got to come together like we never have before, and work to make every school in this district a good school."
