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TUSD
Desegregation: Mission Accomplished?
Although some critics say that should be enough reason for a federal judge to keep the order in place, the district says the imbalance is a result of demographics and shouldn't be considered by the judge deciding the case later this year. Opponents of lifting the order are not convinced TUSD has complied with the order's "stipulation of settlement," which affects dozens of TUSD's 106 schools. They hope U.S. District Judge David C. Bury will look at academic achievement advances among minority students — or lack of advances — in considering TUSD's request to close the case, legally called giving the district unitary status. Officials for the 60,000-student district say the desegregation order was never intended to address the achievement gap among whites and blacks and Hispanics. It is too early to know how TUSD would be affected by Judge Bury's ruling. However, TUSD individual and business taxpayers who cover desegregation costs are not likely to see their taxes go down. If TUSD has its way, it would get to keep all the money annually earmarked for desegregation costs and decide how it would be spent. If attorneys representing the interests of blacks and Hispanics have their way, the district will stay under the order and may have to change how TUSD fulfills it. TUSD now spends nearly 20 percent of its $342 million total budget on desegregation costs. 'Small piece' of gap If the order is lifted, any curriculum changes would take months, perhaps years, to be put in place. TUSD officials say the magnet program of specialized classes at some schools would not be affected. TUSD Superintendent Roger Pfeuffer said schools can be held accountable for only a "small piece" of the achievement gap and that poor children often have parents who are undereducated and therefore unable to help them get ready for school before kindergarten. Members of the Independent Citizens' Committee go so far as to call parts of TUSD's request "racist." The committee was created to be the watchdog on TUSD compliance with the 1978 desegregation order and its budget. ICC member Sylvia Campoy, the former desegregation order compliance officer for TUSD and later a TUSD board member and president, said TUSD should have taken action before now to address the demographic forces its says are preventing it from integrating schools. "If the district realized at one point or another that demographics changed so significantly, they should have petitioned the court to change the stipulation," Campoy said, adding that a later TUSD compliance officer "time and time again recommended that." "Then why are they wanting to keep the $62 million, if money doesn't make a difference?" she said. "They were 10 seconds short of saying minority kids are genetically inferior," she said, referring to TUSD arguments, "and that's what really made us mad." At odds on order's parts Attorney Rubin Salter, who has represented black plaintiffs since filing the original 1974 lawsuit through the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said TUSD has spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars on desegregation. "They have paid for janitors, lots of things that didn't have to do with desegregation," he said. "Did it go to bottom line of desegregation? We don't have the information to make that determination. There needs to be an accounting of what it specifically has accomplished regarding the narrowing of the achievement gap." Maria Mendoza, one of the original plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed by Hispanic parents in 1974, remains a harsh critic of the district. She said improving the academic achievement of Hispanics was a key part of the case, but the district has accomplished little. "I still see the test scores (of Hispanic students) on the floor," said Mendoza, a parent when the suit was filed in 1974. "Hispanic students still aren't getting the same educational opportunities as Anglo students ... and they continue to drop out of school." Roy and Josie Fisher, a black couple with students in the district, filed a similar lawsuit that year. Their suit and that filed by Hispanic parents eventually were put into one, and in 1978, U.S. District Judge William Frey issued the desegregation order. Under the order, TUSD made specific faculty assignments in the 1970s and implemented three phases of student assignments to schools in the early 1980s. It also closed schools and spent lots of money to improve facilities at others, said Richard Yetwin, a local attorney representing TUSD in the case. Attorneys for the blacks and Hispanics in the case said TUSD is stonewalling them by withholding information they need to prepare their court arguments. Groups want more data ICC members said they are in the same boat and need more information from the district on such things as student and faculty assignment policies, as well as data on dropout and discipline rates. "If they are in compliance, then why aren't they willing to provide the information and brag about it and work with us and the plaintiffs?" Campoy asked. Yetwin said he has sent more than 1,100 pages of documents to the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund attorneys now representing the Hispanic plaintiffs. In court papers, he calls many of their other requests for documentation "vague, overbroad and unduly burdensome ... irrelevant ... and beyond the scope of the stipulation of settlement." He believes the district has "complied fully with the stipulations of the settlement" and that that is proved by a 300-plus-page report TUSD took two and a half months to prepare for the court last year. "Now, if we want to configure a school from K-5 to K-6, we have to go through the court to do that," he said. "If we want to let students into magnet programs, we have to abide by a criteria of ethnicity." ICC members said the district already is inappropriately using such discretion and should have gotten federal approval last year to create dual principal positions at eight schools, most part of the desegregation order. Salter said what TUSD really needs to do is revamp its desegregation plan, including junking the magnet program. "The magnet thing is not working," he said. "You don't have many Anglos in the South and West Side magnet schools. Borton Primary (in midtown) is yuppie heaven." Borton, 700 E. 22nd St., was added to the desegregation order in 1979 becoming one of TUSD's first two magnet schools. One thing all sides agreed on is that the controversial practice of busing students outside their neighborhood schools — done extensively elsewhere in the country in desegregation districts — has been virtually a last resort here. Pfeuffer said TUSD has waiting lists of children of ethnic backgrounds wanting to get into magnet schools that have empty seats. But the district can't put them in those seats because that would alter the ethnic percentages TUSD must try to maintain under the federal order. Fewer than 900 kids from the district's 1978 enrollment of 57,983 ended up being moved involuntarily by the judge, Pfeuffer said. "That was a huge victory for this district and this community." What's next? All sides in the case face a filing deadline at the end of this month, with no court hearing likely until fall and a final decision within a year. Desegregation budget The desegregation of Tucson Unified School District began in 1978. Funding to implement programs came through federal sources until 1984-85, when it became a state taxpayers' responsibility.
FISCAL YEAR: TOTAL* 1984-85: $2.27 * in millions Source: Tucson Unified School District |
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