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Schools

Group's task: rethink choice

Officials must decide how to replace school choice when its key provisions expire.

By THOMAS C. TOBIN
Published August 24, 2005

Pinellas school officials know they must soon address the watershed moment looming over the horizon. But they want a group of Pinellas residents to give it a try first.

The School Board and superintendent Clayton Wilcox have handed a 44-member task force the grinding job of crafting a system that could replace the choice plan starting with the 2007-08 academic year.

The group - an assemblage of community activists, parents, administrators, educators and business people - is holding its second meeting tonight. District officials were careful to appoint black and white members from north and south county.

The choice plan's key provisions expire after the next school year, ending 30-plus years in which courts have regulated the racial makeup of Pinellas schools.

The task force is being asked to help devise a replacement system that "promotes integrated schools" yet gives students the opportunity to attend a school close to home. Since black and white people in Pinellas tend not to live in the same neighborhoods - and since the courts will no longer impose integration - district officials agree the task will require creative thinking.

"We're interested in exploring some new answers to really what are some very old issues," said Gareth Whitehurst, the group's chairman.

Among the central questions to be hashed out over the next 18 months: Should Pinellas continue to invest time, money and energy into racially integrating its schools? And, if so, how hard should it try?

Would resources be better spent on improving all schools, as some of them become predominantly black? Or is there too much value in racially integrated schools for Pinellas not to keep trying?

The first meeting of the task force found members ready to explore all sides of those issues. After breaking into small group discussions, one group emerged after a "frank and open discussion" that pondered the question: "Is separate but equal possible?"

Task force member Sami Leigh Scott heard people in her group express relief that choice, with all its busing needs, was almost over.

"It was just a very disturbing conversation all around me that they're thrilled to get this (busing) albatross off our necks," said Scott, who represents the Pinellas SAC Association.

Giving up on integration would be "going back," she said in an interview this week. "I can't accept that that would be the best we can do as a society."

Scott and other task force members predicted the panel's discussions over the coming months will be fascinating and passionate.

"It will take time and it will take lots of thought and lots of struggle," said School Board member Mary Brown.

When finished, the group will present its ideas to Wilcox, who will use them as he develops a plan for School Board consideration.

Designed as a transition after 30 years of court-ordered busing, the choice plan tries to encourage voluntary integration by beckoning black and nonblack families to attend schools outside their neighborhoods. It caps the number of black children at 42 percent in any school.

The plan, however, has resulted in high transportation costs, long bus rides for many children, an application system that defies simplicity and a nagging problem for Pinellas home buyers who no longer can shop based on a school zone.

Many families are not responding to choice's fundamental idea. Application trends indicate that several schools would quickly become predominantly black if choice's race ratios were left to expire in 2007 with no replacement plan.

The district is counting on the task force to come up with a solution - be it a new twist on an old idea or a lightning bolt from the blue that no other American school district has yet thought of.

"I want to commit to you that I am willing to look at anything," School Board member Carol Cook said at the panel's first meeting. "I'm hoping we don't turn the district into turmoil while we're doing it. But I think we need to look at it open mindedly."

Task force members have some ideas about what they would like to see.

Tarpon Springs mayor Beverley Billiris, a former teacher, said she sees a system that involves much shorter bus rides for students.

Don Shea, whose wife is a real estate agent, said the new plan needs to be more simple. "There's no blessed way to explain (choice) to people who are moving to town," he said.

Shea, who is president of the St. Petersburg Downtown Partnership, said the School Board's goal of integrated schools is "critically important." But he added: "We have to minimize the torture families are going through to get those goals met."

Cliff Burney, chairman of the St. Petersburg NAACP's education committee, said he wants to see "quality integration as opposed to desegregation." That means ending the practice of putting black and white students in the same building only to have them segregate into different programs within a school, he said.

"It's going to be an interesting 18 months," Burney said.

Scott, the SAC representative, said she hopes the group will transcend the forces that too often keep black and white Pinellas residents from working together on tough issues.

"I am thrilled that I get to be a part of it," she said, "and that there's a larger group than just myself trying to figure out just how you handle this kind of insanity."

[Last modified August 24, 2005, 01:14:20]