The program is at odds with many neighborhoods, which have not integrated well.
By MELANIE AVE
Published September 10, 2004
TAMPA - Christina Brown and her husband, Kennedy, live in East Tampa, where she grew up, and the couple intend to stick around.
"I've been here all my life," Mrs. Brown said.
Their 5-year-old daughter Aaliyah attends a new neighborhood school, Sheehy Elementary. At Sheehy, eight of 10 children are African-American, reflecting the racial makeup of the surrounding area.
The Browns, who are black, highlight a challenge now facing the Hillsborough County public school system: Many schools do not integrate naturally, because neighborhoods do not integrate naturally.
Tampa and its suburbs remain nearly as segregated as they were three decades ago, before court-ordered busing for integration began. Last month, Hillsborough launched a voluntary school desegregation plan called controlled choice, which relies on parents to choose schools outside their neighborhoods.
Early signs show a problem. So far this year, there are four more largely black schools than there were last year and two more largely white schools, raising questions about the future of the choice plan's ability to integrate classrooms.
"It remains to be seen what it's going to do," said Doris Ross Reddick, 77, Hillsborough's only black School Board member and the plan's only dissenting vote. "There are going to be some schools that are totally white and totally black, or almost.
"I don't think anything that's segregated is the most ideal situation."
Yet segregation is real among many Tampa neighborhoods.
In 1970, when Hillsborough County was nearly 14 percent black, only 24 percent of its Census tracts reflected that diversity, meaning they had an equal or greater proportion of blacks, according to a St. Petersburg Times analysis.
In 2000, Census workers counted Hillsborough 15 percent black, and only 27 percent of Census tracts reflected that.
The black population more than doubled in those three decades - to about 150,000 - but most families, like the Browns, have stayed in or near the same segregated neighborhoods, despite 33 years of busing for integration.
"Nothing's changed," said Jim Hosler, research director for the Tampa-Hillsborough Planning Commission. "If the hypothesis for school integration was neighborhood integration, it didn't work."
Most of the city's black residents continue to live in sections of East Tampa, Port Tampa, Progress Village, West Tampa and Plant City, communities where African-Americans have lived for decades.
They concentrated in those areas partly because of family ties and economics, but also because of discriminatory lending and real estate practices.
The main goal of school desegregation, of course, was not to integrate neighborhoods. It was to offer black children a fair education in schools with equal resources, something they had been denied during years of formal segregation.
But many people dreamed of more, hoping integrated classrooms would someday lead to a mixed-race world.
"Children who went to integrated schools would be more likely to work at integrated offices, to have friends of different backgrounds, would be more inclined to live in neighborhoods that were integrated," said Barbara Shircliffe, an associate professor and educational historian at the University of South Florida.
Some of that has happened. Blacks and whites work together, dine together and socialize together. No longer are there all-white communities in Hillsborough, like there were in 1970 when 16 Census tracts had a 100 percent white population.
On a limited scale, people of color have made inroads into Tampa's whitest neighborhoods.
"African-Americans are just about everywhere in Tampa," said Rose Raiford, 30, whose third-grader attends mostly white Gorrie Elementary in Hyde Park. "They've moved out and about and all around."
Like Christina Brown, Raiford lives in a mostly black neighborhood - near downtown Tampa - not far from where she was raised.
She believes black residents freely choose where they live but that many prefer to stay where they are most comfortable.
Experts say neighborhood segregation has more to do with money than with discrimination.
Diana Washington, lead organizer of the Tampa chapter of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, notes that a family's income determines where their home is located.
"People live where they can afford to live," she said. "Let's face it, not everyone can afford Davis Islands."
For Hilrie Kemp Jr., the decision to live in Progress Village was a matter of both comfort and money.
In 1962, he and his family moved from a West Tampa public housing complex to a three-bedroom home in Progress Village, southwest of Brandon. Hillsborough County opened Progress Village in part to provide homes for African-Americans displaced by urban renewal.
"This was the ideal place to come for the value," said Kemp, 67, president of the Progress Village Civic Council Association.
He looked at other neighborhoods a decade later, when his income rose, but discovered the resale value of his house was not enough. So he stayed in Progress Village, where six of every 10 residents are black.
"The house you buy in Progress Village for $100,000, you couldn't buy in town for $150,000," he said.
Kemp speculates that many people have an innate desire to live among their own race.
"In my mind it has nothing to do with being prejudiced," he said. "You feel more comfortable with people who look, act and talk like you."
That may be true for some people, but not everyone.
Ed Johnson, manager of the city's East Tampa development division, lives in a mostly white community near MacDill Air Force Base. He moved there while in the Air Force 25 years ago.
He has since retired.
"I never looked at it as I needed to pack up and go live over in the black community because I'm black," Johnson said. "Is the goal to make every community equally diversified?"
Some blacks have left urban areas only to return.
Chloe Coney, 54, grew up in West Tampa but moved to the suburbs of Oldsmar with her husband when her three children were young. She moved back to East Tampa to be closer to her job as executive director of the Corporation to Develop Communities.
It is where she feels most at home.
"When you look at the urban core, African-Americans have lived here for a long time," she said. "They want to continue living here in their community."
Community advocates hope that new schools in black neighborhoods - Sheehy, among them - will help draw people of all races.
If the schools don't become diverse and instead divide along racial lines?
Sam Horton, president of the Hillsborough NAACP, worries that resegregation will invite unequal conditions among schools.
He sees the links between race, poverty and performance. Many schools that have begun to resegregate are located in poor neighborhoods.
"The level of instruction," Horton said, "will be based on the level of kids in that school. People who have never been successful can't give a picture of what success looks like."
Some people believe the conditions have already started to slide at two schools that opened in black neighborhoods this fall, James and Booker T. Washington, which have kindergartners through eighth-graders.
Teachers and parents at Washington, near Ybor City, complain about bathrooms that don't work, a library without books, a computer lab with no computers and gym classes that meet in the library because there's no gymnasium.
At James, off Ellicott Street, meals come from elsewhere because there's no kitchen equipment. Nor is there a science lab. Children pack overcrowded classes.
School Board member Reddick complained about the problems at a recent meeting. James was named for her late mother, Clemmie Ross James.
"I think it could have been better planned for by the persons responsible for the buildings, the yards, everything else," she said. "It was a lot of frustration for me."
Assistant superintendent Ken Otero said school officials are addressing problems, which he blamed on a late decision to convert the schools from elementary only to combine elementary and middle school campuses.
Similar problems occurred, he said, when Walker Middle School and Armwood High School opened in largely white neighborhoods. He insists race has no bearing on the supply and facility deficits.
"That's definitely a perception and not the truth, but perception is reality to some people," Otero said. "We'll do whatever we can to clear up those problems."
Donnie Evans, Hillsborough's chief academic officer and its highest-ranking black administrator, said the school system values diverse classrooms because children learn from each other's cultures.
At the same time, he doesn't want anyone to think majority white schools are any better than majority black schools.
"We can provide a quality education regardless of who is sitting in the classrooms," said Evans, who lives in largely white New Tampa. "We want parents to feel they can choose. We want them to have no concerns about the quality of education that their child is getting.
"The bottom line is, it's the parents' choice. We knew all along when we developed the choice plan some schools would become dominantly one race. We were hoping there wouldn't be that many though."
- Times computer-assisted reporting specialist Connie Humburg and staff writer Matthew Waite contributed to this report. Melanie Ave can be reached at 813 226-3400 or melanie@sptimes.com
