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Board okays school choice plan
By SARAH SCHWEITZER © St. Petersburg Times, published November 22, 2000 TAMPA -- Saying a need for closure trumped lingering concerns about a plan to end the long-running desegregation battle in Hillsborough County, the School Board approved a sweeping school choice proposal Tuesday that could halt more than a quarter-century of court-ordered busing. With the move, Hillsborough joins a growing pool of school districts across the country, including Pinellas, which in recent years have adopted similar voluntary measures to achieve school desegregation. The sole dissenter Tuesday was Doris Ross Reddick, the board's only black member, who had deferred a vote on the plan last week. In a measured but strained tone, Reddick said she could not vote for a plan that was unrealistic in its expections. "I will let the situation speak for itself and let the judge do the rest," said Reddick, referring to Chief U.S. District Court Judge Elizabeth Kovachevich, who will review the plan. Other board members said the time had come to put the plan to the test in court, await the results and tinker with it later, if necessary. "I have some reservations, but we need to move the plan forward and get some feedback," said board member Carol Kurdell. Board member Carolyn Bricklemyer said, "It is time to bring closure to this." Sam Horton, president of the Hillsborough branch of the NAACP and one of the plan's most vocal opponents, did not speak at the meeting. He said afterward: "It's predictable. I saw this coming for three to four months, but I'm disappointed that the board did not see that this plan will lead to a loss in the quality of life." The plan, which could take effect as early as 2004, aims to decrease segregation with voluntary student crossover between black and white neighborhoods. School assignment boundaries will remain the same, but will be overlaid with a choice of other schools, some suburban and some urban. The hope is that white students will opt for urban schools offering magnet programs and other enticements, and that black students will opt for suburban schools they now attend as part of court-ordered busing. Since 1971, when a judge first ordered busing in Hillsborough, the district has grown increasingly racially divided. According to the district's most recent count, there are 24 schools where more than 40 percent of the students are black and 26 schools where black enrollment is 10 percent or less. With School Board approval now secure, the district will forward the plan to Kovachevich. Kovachevich stunned school district officials two years ago with a ruling that lashed the district for not doing enough to remove the vestiges of segregation. She ordered the district back to the drawing board to forge a plan that would demonstrate more effort to increase schools' racial diversity. District officials had argued that growing segregation was the result of residential patterns not in their control. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which represents the plaintiffs in the 41-year-old case against the district, claimed the district had a duty to take steps to stop the resegregation. The school district appealed Kovachevich's ruling to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which heard oral arguments in September but has yet to issue a ruling. The school choice plan approved Tuesday night is in concept a wide-ranging overhaul of student assignment. But in practice, it is likely to affect a narrow band of students. District officials estimate 25 percent of the district's 150,000 students will take advantage of the plan's school choice options. The rest are expected to remain at the schools they are currently assigned to.The only students who will not have assigned schools will be the 7,500 mostly black students who have been bused for desegregation purposes. These students will have to choose a school -- a factor that board member Reddick said after the vote helped sway her against supporting the plan. The cost of the plan has been estimated at $82-million dollars, with the bulk of the money slated for transportation costs. Despite its hefty price tag and historically significant break from court-ordered busing, the plan has generated little public interest in recent months. Public hearings and community meetings about the plan have drawn scant crowds, and mostly tepid comments. Strikingly absent from the dialogue has been the NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, whose leaders determined early on that they would have little to do with the plan's formulation. Horton of the NAACP said his group feared that participating in the plan's creation would give the appearance of support for the district. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund spurred Kovachevich's review in 1994 when it charged that the district had violated a 1971 order by allowing 16 inner city schools to become more than 40 percent black. But instead of focusing on the narrow issue of the 16 schools, Kovachevich reopened the entire case, which dates back to 1958, when black parents charged that Hillsborough was operating a dual school system: one for whites and an inferior one for blacks. Turnout at Tuesday's meeting was meager in contrast to Pinellas, where School Board members approved a school choice plan last month despite angry denunciations at the meeting from 60 parents, many of whom were white and argued for the status quo. Only one member of the public, Al Davis of the district's biracial committee, spoke at the Tuesday meeting in Hillsborough. "One thing that worries me is whether we might return to those unconstitutional practices," he said. "And I'm not sure that this plan is not in the direction of returning to those practices. It scares me." - Sarah Schweitzer can be reached at (813) 226-3400 or schweitzer@sptimes.com.
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