Kids Volunteer for Long Rides to School

By Naush Boghossian\ Staff Writer

Freshman Erron Gamble wakes up at 5 a.m. each weekday so he can make the two-hour school-bus ride to Taft High School in Woodland Hills, where he hopes he can get a better education than in South L.A.

Dwight Flowers, 17, also awakens before dawn so he can make a similar trip because his neighborhood school, Manual Arts High, is too crowded to accept him.

Nearly 25 years after the failure of an effort to racially integrate campuses through court-required crosstown busing, the Los Angeles Unified School District’s transportation program has evolved in part to provide students a choice in their education.

About 6,500 students are now bused daily into the Valley from other parts of Los Angeles – most of them from overcrowded schools, but some because they see it as a chance at a better life.

“It’s good to have the choice to go to a school you want. At this school I don’t have to worry about fighting and gang-banging. I can walk around the school and hang with my friends without worrying about someone saying, ‘Where are you from?’” said Gamble, 15, an aspiring forensic scientist.

The district’s student-integration program enables Gamble to attend Taft rather than Locke, his neighborhood school, which has struggled with violence and low test scores.

Integration busing now is entirely voluntary, unlike the program enacted in 1978 after a court ordered the LAUSD to take “reasonable and feasible” steps to provide an equal education to students in all parts of the district.

The mandatory busing sparked protests, boycotts and “white flight” – a widespread exodus of the white middle class to the suburbs. The school district experienced a plunge in enrollment of nearly 100,000 students as parents with the means moved to the suburbs or sent their kids to private schools.

By the time the courts accepted a voluntary-busing program in 1981, the LAUSD had to shutter about 20 schools because of the enrollment drop – most of them in the Valley.

“Even 25 years later, it’s hard. There’s no way to convey what it felt like. You just have to think of it as probably one of the most destructive things ever ordered in a school district,” said Roberta Weintraub, who served as school board president during court- mandated busing.

Weintraub said the effects of the failed busing program are still being felt.

“It was just a very terrible time, and it set back education reform and curriculum development for many years to come. And it stopped support for the district and school construction, (so) only in recent years they’ve been able to get a school construction bond through that should have been done years ago.”

But one good thing that came out of busing, Weintraub said, is the rise of magnet schools, which offer special programs to draw students from outside the traditional enrollment area.

In the early 1970s, magnet schools were a novelty – just a handful, compared with today’s 162 that enroll nearly 55,000 students, officials said.

A former Valley congresswoman, Bobbi Fiedler, noted that she and others launched their political careers with the creation of Bustop, an anti-forced-busing campaign that started in the San Fernando Valley.

“It was probably the most significant individual event that affected the entire city of Los Angeles in modern time,” Fiedler said. “The outcome was that many families in the San Fernando Valley became (more) involved in the political process than they might have otherwise been – and it hasn’t stopped.”

School board member Julie Korenstein, who represents parts of the Valley, noted that one goal of the district’s $14 billion school construction program is to get all students off buses by 2012.

“There will be a drop in enrollment in the San Fernando Valley when the students who are attending the Valley schools from overcrowded areas have schools open in their neighborhoods,” she said.

Gayle Nadler recalls being bused to a predominantly Latino school in South Los Angeles when she was a fourth-grader – an experience she recalls as “life-changing.”

The teacher spoke to the children in English and Spanish, but no effort was made to bridge the cultural or language gaps. So when time came to make friends, the other children didn’t understand her, and she didn’t understand them.

That experience became the impetus for the dual-language public charter school she and her mother, Toby Bornstein, founded in Canoga Park.

“It was the experience I had when I was bused in the 1970s and how much I loved the fact that I was going to a school with so many new and different people and the struggle I had to just make friends,” Nadler said.

“I can’t tell you how connected I am to the vision of this school. It’s personal. It’s grown from the memories of a 9-year-old to a school created by parents and teachers who embrace the vision of multiculturalism.”

Students today are torn about what they would do if overcrowding didn’t force them to ride across town to go to school. Some feel they would prefer to attend a more racially mixed school, while others say the bus ride takes a toll on them, and that they’d prefer to stay in their communities.

Flowers, a junior at Taft, welcomes the opportunity to avoid what he calls “bad influences” near his neighborhood school and to take advantage of caring teachers and many activities.

But Diamond Morris, another junior at Taft, said the bus ride isn’t worth it, although she likes the school. She said time now spent on the bus could be more time to study.

“It is a really good school academically, but it would be much better if I went to my local school,” said Morris, who lives in South Los Angeles. “Not only would I not have to get up so early, but during that time I’d be on the bus, you can be accomplishing way more things than worrying about getting to school.”

Naush Boghossian, (818) 713-3722

naush.boghossian(at)dailynews.com