Pinellas County parents seem to like the way the school system is now set up. So why is the School Board so intent on turning things upside down with its choice plan?

Schools seldom invest the time and effort to truly determine what parents think, which makes the findings from Pinellas' exhaustive survey all the more impressive. Given the chance to move their children from their current school to any of the district's 140 other schools, an overwhelming majority of parents would decline. If forced to make such a choice, their No. 1 option would be a wildly popular arts-oriented elementary school in the heart of St. Petersburg's predominantly black neighborhoods.

The survey was intended to provide guidance as the district moves to a new system of student assignment after settling a 29-year-old federal school desegregation case, but School Board members would be foolish to ignore the message. Parents are saying something that should give any policymaker a grin. They are saying they like the school their children attend. They are also saying they will attend schools in other neighborhoods if, like Perkins Elementary in St. Petersburg, they have superior academic offerings.

The survey amounts to an endorsement of the way the district currently assigns its students, except that its results are now being used to dismantle that system. The next step is a $170,000 consultant study to determine how many hundreds of new buses the district may need in order to offer one of the nation's most extensive choice enrollment plans.

At some point, though, School Board members will need to remove their legally negotiated blinders. When will they reconsider choice?

The district has found over the course of the past three decades that it can build a school system that is racially diverse and academically strong through a blend of geographic assignment, choice programs and special attendance permits. It has proved that it can attract white students to schools that might otherwise be all-black by providing special academic programs in math and science and arts and foreign language. Yet choice threatens to undermine that successful formula, and board members still answer most critics by pointing to the broad built-in exemptions and a pledge to reconsider in four years.

Choice is scheduled to start in less than two years, though, and the board is facing increasingly bad choices. Soon, the board will be asked to buy 250 buses and spend an extra $6-million to run them at a time when the Legislature is cutting more than $1.3-billion from the state budget. In the midst of last month's special session, Pinellas school superintendent Howard Hinesley warned that the cutbacks could create a "nearly impossible challenge" next year. How, then, can Pinellas afford to spend money on parent information specialists and computer programmers and bus drivers who won't teach a single student? Why isn't Hinesley fully assessing those costs?

The choice plan may have been offered in good faith as part of a court settlement, but it was based on some legal and political assumptions that may no longer be true. A prime example is St. Lucie County, on the east coast of Florida, which offered choice on a considerably smaller scale a decade ago. St. Lucie has been described as a model for Pinellas, but that county is now facing friction from angry parents who say they want to return to geographic zones. More interestingly, St. Lucie in January eliminated its racial ratios and replaced them with socioeconomic factors. In an assignment plan similar to those used in San Francisco, Wake County, N.C., and La Crosse, Wis., St. Lucie is now providing educational diversity by assuring no single school has too much poverty.

Pinellas might learn from the new St. Lucie socioeconomic approach, or might find a way to refine choice to better serve all students, black and white, except that board members still behave as if they have no other legal options. They do.

This will not get any easier. Board members will have to decide whether to: switch to hub busing, transferring young students on their way to and from school; to squeeze out students at popular schools by lowering their capacities; to determine how many people who live close to a school will receive preferred treatment. They will have to answer to people who have recently moved to the county for why they were given "grandfathering" exemptions and confront angry parents who find out they have no choice because their applications missed the deadline.

They may also face the same parents who told them, through public hearings and surveys, that there is no good reason to turn the school system upside down. The survey says that Pinellas schools are, by and large, a winner. Why won't board members embrace that success?

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