Desegregation Busing in the United States

@gailcalled The current law is still confusng to me. I did some googling before posting the question. Is it saying busing is no longer done? I saw some info, not in the wikipedia, about the supreme court case, but that was confusing to me too. One thing said the case was a set back, another implied the court would not take the case. I don’t know why I am having trouble understanding the material, but I am. I was hoping a jelly could sum it up if they new the answers.

I don’t know the general law on this, but in my area, they do bus kids to different schools. Not by color, but by socioeconomic class (which happens to coincide, frequently).

@augustlan I remember we talked about this on another Q, but I don’t remember all the details. I thought they had redistricted where you live? How far are the kids bused?

@JLeslie They did redistrict, and the kids get bussed across town. Maybe 15 minutes?

Same as with @augustlan. The city schools have all been disaccredited, so there’s a bit of a push to get kids into the county schools. The city kids (when I was going to school) were uniformly black.
Interestingly, the student body tended to segregate itself. Most of the city kids knew each other and would hang out together, and everybody else tended to clique up with their buddies from kindergarten.
Concerns range from cost (neither bus nor taxi were free, and the added numbers also put a strain on human resources) to the changing school environment, increasingly characterized by hallway fights (from one to five in my junior and senior years) and rambunctious behavior, and I’ll bet that the standardized tests figure in there, too.

I have mixed feelings on the matter. It’s good to be able to help people – and a lot of those kids saw their opportunity for what it was – but at the same time, the students who didn’t want to be there detracted from the learning environment. On a financial end, we’re a bedroom community – the city doesn’t want any more businesses here than what it’s got lining the street in the old downtown, and so every single thing – including the buses and taxis – is largely paid for by property taxes taxes.

They do it in Yonkers NY. The residents of Yonkers could live right across the street from a school and still have their kids bused to a school across the city. The children are assigned to schools by a random lotto system or something. Yonkers is a big city, as you know. Kids could spend 45 minutes on a bus even though they live right near a school, because they’re bused to a far-away school.

@jca Does it work well? Are parents fine with it? They are only bused within Yonkers? Or, also to neighboring cities?

@JLeslie: Only in Yonkers because school taxes are paid to Yonkers, so it would not make sense to pay school taxes to Yonkers and bus them to White Plains, for example. Parents have no choice, or send their kids to private school (which a lot do because the schools in Yonkers are so bad all over Yonkers primarily because of the busing). It’s a big reason why a lot of people don’t want to live in Yonkers.

Wait, am I reading this right, you guys don’t get a say in what school your kids go to?

In Yonkers NY, no. I don’t live there, but I used to live there and I worked there until about 5 months ago. It’s riddled with “urban blight.”

I still don’t have a grasp on how the laws work. Are there federal laws mandating this sort of thing? Or, is it local governments doing it? What?

@jca So the travel time has a lot to do with trafiic, more than a very long distance if my geography knowledge serves me. Not that it matters in practice, because all the kids cares about is how long they are on the bus.

What is happening where I live is all the schools will be run by the county, so they are saying busing will be county wide.

@JLeslie: Lots of traffic and lots of stops.

That sucks in your county, because people could live in a nice town or city and be bused to a town or city or where it’s not so nice, or the schools aren’t so good. Meanwhile, people pay taxes in their town and may want the kid to be local, for the schools and for the short commute. What kid wants to get on a bus at 7 to get to school at 8:30? Makes no sense.

@jca What I am trying to figure out is if there actually will be busing, or if everyone is freaking out over nothing.

Last night a friend of ours went on that familiar rant of paying his tax dollars to educate the city kids, and I said, “I pay for your kids.” I wish I had said it in a nicer tone. He asked, “how do you pay for my kids?” In a sort of surprised your full of shit way. My reply, “I pay property tax like everyone else and I have no kids.” He pays around $5k in property taxes and has two children in public schools. That is cheap, I subsidize his kids. Pretty much anyone who has children in the public school system is subsidized by those who don’t, unless they live in a very expensive house and only have one child. The point is this is a familiar rant of the right wing not wanting to pay for those who don’t pay, and not just relating to school as you know.

So, back to what I am trying to figure out. Is the busing talk a real issue? Or, is the local right wing just getting people fired up for some other reason I don’t understand.

@jca I was just thinking I guess over a lifetime the middle class kids are not really subsidized since the parents will still be paying taxes even when the children are not in school. So, it depends how you look at it.

@JLeslie: I agree with what you said and I understand your point.

You’re asking if there will actually be busing, and I think that’s something that only time will tell. Is it officially going to start, or is it just something that’s being talked about. Does it have to be voted on? If it has to be voted on, there’s a chance it will not happen.

In Yonkers, in the 80’s, Judge Sands ruled that Yonkers should have busing, based on segregation. Yonkers has “good neighborhoods” and “bad neighborhoods” and so the busing would distribute all the kids all over. The problem is for the parents who pay high taxes to live in the better areas, it doesn’t matter because the kids may be sent to a tough area of Yonkers. The parents could pay for private school, but then they’re paying taxes for the good area house and paying for private school on top ot it. It’s for that reason that a lot of people don’t want to live in Yonkers.

@jca I understand your point to. If I had children I would want my children to be in good, safe schools, and not bused across town. I tend to be against busing. But, I also want children to have opportunity to go to better schools while we have this situation in America where schools are not all equal. I lean towards allowing children to transfer to schools out of their district, rather than having formalized busing. That way the kids and families who really value education are more likely to wind up in the “suburban” schools, and there is less likely to be any problems. Just my thoughts. There are problems with my idea. Without busing those children need to get to the out of district shools on their own, more difficult for poor students.

Excellent question: I wondered this situation myself. And, here is why…....

In my city, busing has continued, as though it never reached its goal.

Is it the money collected by state and local governments?

Why?

Here is another thought. Why are school buses allowed on the interstate? They travel no more than 50 mph and this is 20 mph under the posted speed limit. Is this also not a great danger to the students and other drivers? Impeding traffic is as dangerous as vehicles that are speeding. Any thoughts?

@john65pennington I’m pretty sure 50 is a legal minimum speed. I didn’t realize buses have to drive that slowly. I don’t have a problem with buses being allowed on interstates as long as they stay out of the passing lane.

I remember that @augustlan said on a different Q that it did seem to help where her kids are.

What we don’t know is if the community and kids would be much worse off if busing had never been done. During the time of desegregation the inequity was vast. From what I remember Nashville was one of the better cities regarding desegregation, kind of ahead of other southern cities. I know people who tell me stories of white kids being pulled out of public school to not so great private school, to not be in school with the black kids. It was not like now with fancy private schools, but rather makeshift private schools.

Black schools were not close to equal. In fact it was a fund by Julius Rosenwald, part owner of the Sears Corp., who spent millions of dollars to try and bring education in black communities across the south up to par back in the early-mid part of the 20th century. The wikipedia link talks about the incredible disparity. That is what people all around me want today. They want children to get only what the tax base in their immediate community can afford. That would mean the poor, many times minorities, will have a disadvantaged education. I guess maybe busing forces parents to care about all the schools in an indirect way, but it doesn’t work perfectly, because like @jca‘s example people just move to a school distrct they like, or like many in the south, people just put their kids in private schools.

@JLeslie I don’t know if it still occurs where I grew up, but my parents specifically moved us out of one school district and into another because the district would bus the kids from the suburbs to the schools in the city and the kids from the city to the schools in the suburbs. This was more than 20 years ago. My parents did not want us traveling that far away from home when we had schools closer to us within our district. That was before the schools started having school choice as well though, so I don’t know if it’s still an issue. We moved to a district that only had one high school, so there was no concern about them busing us to another school farther away within the district.

Busing is still very much a part of the school system here. It’s been a controversy for sometime. Due to the financial reasons, the facts that kids don’t socialize well, the amount of time on a bus-etc.

Chapter 220 is the popular name for the Voluntary Student Transfer Program. This program is designed to racially integrate schools by giving minority students the opportunity to attend schools in suburban areas that are predominantly non-minority (white.) Non-minority students from the suburbs are given the opportunity to attend racially diverse schools in Milwaukee Public Schools.
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