School Busing and White Abandonment of Public Schools

SCHOOL BUSING AND WHITE ABANDONMENT OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS /. Dennis Lord" SCHOOL DESEGREGATION AND BUSING IN THE U. S. As a result of Brown versus Board of Education I and II in 1954 and 1955, racially segregated schools were declared unconstitutional; school districts which maintained dual systems were assigned the task of drawing up desegregation plans in order to bring their systems into compliance with the Supreme Court rulings. (1) Many years passed, however, and racially segregated schools still lingered. Ten years after Brown versus Board of Education I, a further impetus to school desegregation emerged with passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But as the decade of the 1960's came to a close, many school systems in both the North and South were still operating one race schools. (2) As a means of meeting court ordered desegregation guidelines, some school systems began to transport students by bus across former district lines. In recent years, "school busing" has become not only a local community concern but also a national political issue. Despite the controversy surrounding busing, the word does not appear to have a universally accepted meaning. Bradbury has identified some of the many definitions of busing held by residents of Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N. C. (3) To many white parents in the school system, busing has meant any reassignment to a school different from the one the student had attended prior to court ordered desegregation. Another view of busing involved an assignment to a school which was not the closest one for the student at his grade level. To many residents, the word implied a situation whereby a white student was assigned to what previously had been a predominantly black school. In such cases, schools often were located in inner city areas or locations far removed from white population. It is this last definition that is used in this study. A decline in white public school enrollment has often followed court ordered desegregation and busing. For example, studies by Lowry and Munford in Mississippi revealed that the state's white public school enrollment declined rapidly following the onset of full school integration in 1969. (4) By 1971, 25 percent of the state's white students were in private schools. Lowry's study further reveals that the rate of white abandonment of the public schools in Mississippi has been closely related to the percent of Negroes in the population. On a county basis, the correlation between the percent drop in white public school enrollment and the percent of Negroes in the total enrollment was + .95. •Dr. Lord is assistant professor of geography at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. This paper was accepted for publication in February 1975. 82Southeastern Geographer DESEGREGATION IN CHARLOTTE-MECKLENBURG, N. C. The original Charlotte school desegregation court order was issued in 1969; desegregation of the system began in the fall of 1970. Major changes in pupil assignments were required in order to fully integrate the school system. Prior to the implementation of the court order, the system had operated about one half of its schools as predominantly one race schools. The white/black ratio for the approximately 84,000 student system was 70/30. The court ruling specified that the student body of any school was not to exceed 50 percent black. In view of the racially segregated housing patterns which existed in Charlotte, the full desegregation of the system required the use of a number of desegregation techniques including rezoning, pairing, and satelliting. The consequence of such use was "school busing." The burden of busing did not fall equally on all areas of the school district, nor did it exhibit a random pattern (Figure 1). When the number of years a child could be bused is tabulated for each of the school attendance areas in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg system, the amount ranges from zero to the maximum possible 12 years. In general, the greatest burden of busing was placed upon black residential areas. In this respect, Charlotte is similar to many other school systems. Such a plan tends to minimize the total amount of transportation needed to desegregate the system. The least amount of busing existed for the high income Southeast area of...