Shortly after 6 a.m. each weekday, Antona Jones puts her son and daughter on a bus so they can attend a suburban school an hour north of St. Louis.
“It’s cold and it’s dark and I hate it for them,” Jones says.
She worried at first that they would be the only black children, that they might be shunned by white students, or that teachers would automatically assume that Larry and Dana, being black and from the city, were not able to learn.
That has not been the case.
“Here’s a child who hated every day of school–hated every day,” Jones says of her son’s experience in the St. Louis public schools. “He has gone from having an attitude that said, `I don’t want to do this,’ to one that says, `I do not understand this, but I’m going to a help session in the morning.’ “
St. Louis has the largest voluntary desegregation program in the country. Some 13,000 city youngsters, nearly all black, make a trek every day from city to suburban districts.
About 1,250 white students leave the mostly white suburbs to travel to special magnet schools in the city, an effort to desegregate city schools, which are about 80 percent black.
But the program could end if the state of Missouri gets its way and is permitted by a federal court to withdraw the funding–$1.5 billion so far–that has kept the program alive since 1983.
Unlike many integration programs around the U.S. put in place after the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education ruling made segregated schools illegal, the St. Louis voluntary program–the result of a lawsuit and a settlement–has been judged largely successful by its participants.
To be certain, many of the same problems that have spelled failure for other desegregation programs plague St. Louis’ system: high costs, lingering academic disparity between minority and white students, and inner-city schools that remain largely segregated because few white families live there.
While many parents and educators would like to see the 14-year-old program continue–even if only because it gives poor parents a choice in where to educate their children–state Atty. Gen. Jay Nixon has other ideas.
Nixon says the $1.5 billion the state has spent already has solved the problems of segregation and unequal education by vastly improving public schools in St. Louis.
“We have achieved the legal requirement, which is to provide equality of opportunity to kids regardless of their race,” Nixon said. “Nobody out there is even debating that we have failed in that. Where we were and where we are are dramatically different places.”
Now, Nixon said in an interview, it is time for the state to stop spending an additional $60 million a year in transportation and education costs to take children to wealthy suburban districts.
The city students can be educated well in city schools, Nixon said. Missouri is offering to spend $200 million to phase out the program over three years.
Nixon said he is frustrated by allegations that “city schools are not capable of educating their own kids. I think they can. . . . Completion of this remedy would be the reinvestment in city schools. The state is interested in education not transportation.”
Charles McKenna, a longtime superintendent in Ladue, one of the wealthiest suburban districts, said he also believes the program has come to its natural end.
“To solve segregation problems in our society with school integration isn’t realistic,” he said. The money funding the desegregation program should go to other districts where there is “tremendous poverty,” said McKenna.
But St. Louis public school officials are horrified by the prospect of having 13,000 students return to the city system, which already has 44,371 students.
“It would be a tragedy,” said David Mahan, who retired last year as superintendent of the St. Louis School District after 38 years.
The educational improvements in the district, such as lower teacher-to-pupil ratios, magnet schools and special programs, would be diluted or lost if the transfer students return, Mahan said.
“A lot of desegregation programs have a lot of legitimate criticism, but St. Louis is not one,” said Michael Middleton, a professor at the University of Missouri Law School, who helped represent the NAACP in its support of the program.
“It is a modest program, and it was well thought out and monitored and it works. It can’t solve all the problems, but it has improved some children’s life chances.”
Dariel Smith, who attended city schools until he began high school in suburban Kirkwood last fall, agrees.
Smith, a freshman at Kirkwood High School, says he doesn’t have to worry about avoiding fights the way he did in the city. He also finds it impossible to “act the fool, like a clown in class” the way he did at his old schools. Lapses like sleeping in class or listening to a tape player are also things of the past, he says matter-of-factly.
“If you did it here, you’d be in detention every day,” Smith says, laughing.
The desegregation program has not been a clear-cut success. Test scores show that black children in city magnet schools–many of whom started out as the highest achievers–do better than their counterparts in the suburbs, at least until 8th grade, when the transfer students in the suburbs start closing the gap.
Children in the city’s all-black schools, which received an enormous amount of additional funding, do the second best. And children in the few city schools that do have white children fare the worst–those integrated schools did not receive any additional resources.
“School desegregation does not ensure integration, or success,” says Luther Ballinger, the coordinator of the transfer program at the suburban Pattonville school district. Poverty, poorly educated parents, inadequate housing and single-parent families are problems many white students don’t have to contend with, he said.
But he insists that transfer students can reap the advantages of a suburban education if they are determined and if the school is equally prepared to help them.
“How much better might black people have done if they had lived and worked in an integrated environment? It’s the only way to survive,” Ballinger said.
John Saunders, whose two sons attend schools in Pattonville, said his sons are thriving. But he is convinced that a lot of their success is because teachers know he and his wife are watching how the boys do and how they are treated.
Students whose parents are not so vigilant may not fare as well, Saunders said.
