Public Schools: Buses Can Travel Both Ways

Few school issues arouse more passions than bussing children to achieve racial integration. It is clearly not a satisfactory long-range solution, especially in large cities where Negroes are heavily concentrated in large ghettos. But until urban housing patterns change, bussing is one practical way of getting a better racial balance in public schools, and it has worked out much better than expected in such cities as Evanston, Chicago and Seattle, where Negro children are transported to white neighborhood schools. This fall, the public schools of Berkeley, Calif., are proving that it is just as feasible to send buses along two-way routes, moving white children into the black ghettos.

Under the persuasive leadership of Superintendent Neil Sullivan and a five-man school board, Berkeley last September began bussing 2,000 white elementary pupils out of wooded, hillside suburbs to once heavily Negro schools in the flatlands near San Francisco Bay. About 2,000 black children move in the opposite direction. Another 2,000 students of each race were shifted to other schools within walking distance of their homes. The aim of all the trans fers was to make sure that each of Berkeley’s 14 elementary schools has between 36% and 45% black enrollment. This closely matches the city’s racial composition, which is 41% Negro.

Balancing Downward. Sullivan, who believes that “you can’t have quality education in a multiracial society without total integration,” has spent four years working to achieve that goal. When he came to Berkeley in 1964, several hundred high school students of both races were riding buses to attend the city’s only high school. Sullivan immediately extended integration downward to junior high; a year later he started bussing Negro children from lower grades into white schools. When he integrated the city’s nursery schools for three-and four-year-olds in 1966, he discovered that “the neighborhood school” was not as hallowed a concept as bussing opponents often suggest. Preschool tots normally have to be driven to school by parents; most mothers were delighted when the buses took over this chore.

Sullivan’s integration program initially ran into savage opposition. Critics challenged the school board in a 1964 recall election. The proposal to throw out the board—and presumably Sullivan, who was chosen by it—won 15,000 votes, but 23,000 people backed the board. Since then, Sullivan has faced threats against his life, still gets hate mail accusing him of being a Communist. Things might have been worse, he suggests, if Berkeley residents had not had “other things to occupy their interest,” namely, the frequent turmoil at the Berkeley campus of the University of California.

The integration program this fall has led to a few interracial scuffles; Sullivan blames them on the tendency of Negro children to play more roughly, causing misunderstandings. Otherwise, says Sullivan, the bussing plan has been “unbelievably successful.”

In Berkeley, at least, all the dire predictions about the adverse effects of bus sing have not come true. Sullivan was warned that the program would turn Berkeley into a black city; instead, white enrollment in the schools actually rose during the past three years, reversing a 20-year trend. He says that this has happened because the schools provide “something exciting at the end of the bus ride” in the form of better education. He has introduced smaller classes, more guidance counselors for troubled students, sophisticated audio-visual aids. A study by the California legislature last year showed that Berkeley is one of the nation’s few cities with a large minority population where student scores on achievement tests were higher than the national average.

Shotgun Barrage. Sullivan, 51, seems to relish tough jobs. Born in Manchester, N.H., he holds advanced degrees from Columbia and Harvard (Ed.D., 1956), served as a school superintendent in Maine and on Long Island before setting up a private school system for Negroes in Prince Edward County, Va., in 1963. There the public schools had closed rather than integrate, and Negro children had gone untaught for four years. Sullivan persisted in launching the new schools despite continual threats and a shotgun barrage on his house.

Convinced that he has done what he set out to do in Berkeley, Sullivan last month announced that he will leave in January to accept a new challenge. He will become state education commissioner for Massachusetts, where a new law requiring racial balance in the schools is meeting some resistance. Most of the opposition is in Boston, which may soon face Sullivan’s prodding question—if two-way bussing works in Berkeley, why not there as well?