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School deseg program extended for five more years

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Oct. 18, 2012 - St. Louis area school districts voted unanimously today to extend the voluntary desegregation program for another five years. But the move does raise another question:

How much longer will the program go on? When, why and how will it end?

The federal court settlement that moved the plan to its current format was ratified in 1999 for a 10-year term. That end date was extended for five years, and the vote by the board of the Voluntary Interdistrict Choice Corp. Friday at Lindenwood University set a new date for the program to end in 2019.

Read the Beacon's earlier story below:

David Glaser, chief executive of the entity known as VICC – once the Voluntary Interdistrict Coordinating Committee – says he hasn’t heard of any district opposed to the extension. He notes that though the number of students taking part is down from its height, 5,200 students still get on a bus each day to travel from St. Louis to St. Louis County or to city magnet schools in the opposite direction.

But he realizes that legally, and for other reasons, the program won't be a perpetual one.

“Our attorneys tell us a desegregation program can’t be indefinite,” Glaser said. “There has to be an ending time. But obviously our board could decide five years from now, or at some point in the future, to make it an economic-based program, so that it would be based on the financial need of students, if they want to extend it in that fashion. Other options also could be considered.”

He said three districts have stopped taking new students. Ladue graduated its last deseg students about a year ago, Pattonville stopped taking new ones a few years go because close to 50 percent of its resident students were African American, and Lindbergh’s enrollment is growing so much it doesn’t have any more room.

Among the most enthusiastic supporters of the program, Glaser said, are the Parkway, Rockwood and Clayton districts. Other county districts still involved are Affton, Bayless, Brentwood, Hancock Place, Kirkwood, Mehlville, Valley Park and Webster Groves.

The program began in the early 1980s as the result of a lawsuit filed in 1972 by Minnie Liddell and other black families in the city who were tired of having their children shunted from one school to the other. At first, it was an intradistrict program, moving students among city schools; later, county districts were added.

After many years of moving through the federal courts, a settlement agreement was reached that set declining levels of enrollment for the county districts involved.

At its peak, in the early 1990s, 13,500 students were bused from the city to the county each day, and more than 1,100 more went from the county to city magnet schools. Demand still exceeds supply, with hundreds of students ending up on waiting lists.

Money for the program comes primarily from the state foundation formula, the state tax dedicated to schools and transportation reimbursement from the state.

Although some have disputed the academic success of the deseg program, Glaser emphasized that the main goal of busing students between the city and the county has always been integration.

“That is the legal reason why the program exists,” he said. “Are there other ancillary reasons, such as academics? Absolutely. But if you read the federal court order issued to start the program, it found that the schools were not integrated.

“When the litigation was filed, the plaintiffs wanted to make sure students were provided with equal academic opportunities. It really goes back to Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, which found that schools being separate but equal was not valid. It really wasn’t all that long ago that some districts had schools for white students and other schools for black students. It’s hard to believe that ever happened, but it did.”

When and how will the program end? Glaser said there are no hard and fast benchmarks, but he did note a few of the considerations.

“One,” he said, “is that you want to give students who reside in the city of St Louis equal academic opportunity, and certainly Superintendent Kelvin Adams is making good progress for achievement in the city. That would cause the program to end naturally, no matter what anybody did, because at that point there wouldn’t be demand from families in the city. Why would kids want to hop on a bus and ride for an average of 50 minutes if they could walk to their neighborhood school that is five or 10 minutes away?

“At some point in time -- I don’t know what the number is -- but if enrollment fell below, say, 1,000, what I conjecture might happen is that one option would be that whatever district had, say, 500 of those thousand kids might take over the administrative responsibility of overseeing the program. Certainly another option would be fore another organization that already exists, like Cooperating School Districts, to take over administrative responsibility.”

Administratively, Glaser said, only 2 percent of the funds dedicated to the program go to VICC – about $1.2 million a year. Of the rest, 64 percent pays for tuition reimbursement and 34 percent goes for transportation.

“We’re pretty lean and mean in terms of administrative costs,” he said. “But if those costs didn’t change, but the number of kids in the program was cut in half, it would double from 2 percent to 4 percent.”

Dale Singer began his career in professional journalism in 1969 by talking his way into a summer vacation replacement job at the now-defunct United Press International bureau in St. Louis; he later joined UPI full-time in 1972. Eight years later, he moved to the Post-Dispatch, where for the next 28-plus years he was a business reporter and editor, a Metro reporter specializing in education, assistant editor of the Editorial Page for 10 years and finally news editor of the newspaper's website. In September of 2008, he joined the staff of the Beacon, where he reported primarily on education. In addition to practicing journalism, Dale has been an adjunct professor at University College at Washington U. He and his wife live in west St. Louis County with their spoiled Bichon, Teddy. They have two adult daughters, who have followed them into the word business as a communications manager and a website editor, and three grandchildren. Dale reported for St. Louis Public Radio from 2013 to 2016.