Growing ethnic divide in city's classrooms

Segregation grips schools from Latino southwest to white northeast

May 2, 2004

By ROBERT DIGITALE
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Santa Rosa schools have grown increasingly segregated in the past decade, dividing white and Latino majorities onto separate campuses as the number of white students has plummeted in the city's core and west side.

The trend, which is most dramatic in 10 of the city's elementary schools, reflects a rapid influx of Latino students and the accelerated flight of middle-class white students from schools with the lowest test scores and the largest numbers of low-income students.

Today, the city's southwest middle and high schools are predominantly Latino, while those in northeast Santa Rosa are overwhelmingly white. As a result, many white and Latino students are on track to spend their entire public school life at campuses where the ethnic makeups are significantly unbalanced, compared with the city as a whole.

"It's a huge thing. It's a problem that I don't think they even saw coming," Caroline Banuelos, president of the Sonoma County Latino Democratic Club, said of school officials around the city.

Banuelos said all students suffer under segregation and the missed opportunities of "going to school with people who are different."

Educators say that segregated schools routinely result in lower academic achievement for campuses that have a majority of disadvantaged students.

Hugh Futrell, a Santa Rosa school board member, portrays the need for action in stark terms: "Balkanized schools create Balkanized communities."

The board members of the city's largest district, Santa Rosa City Schools, for the past year have been developing proposals aimed at making their schools with high numbers of minority or disadvantaged students more attractive to middle-class families and more effective in educating immigrant students still learning to speak English.

Decade of change

The past decade produced a striking ethnic divide, the result of three key factors: Rising numbers of immigrant children learning to speak English; school choice programs that make parent wishes more dominant than home addresses in determining where children will attend school; and a 1993 decision rejecting both school busing and development of a magnet program at newly built Elsie Allen High School on the west side of town.

The cumulative effect on enrollment was revealed in a Press Democrat analysis of school enrollment during the past 10 years, a review of school transfer data from the city's nine school districts, population comparisons by ethnicity from the 1990 and 2000 census, and a school-by-school review of academic performance scores and socioeconomic data.

The proportion of Latino students in elementary schools has grown to 37 percent, significantly greater than Latinos in the city overall, about 19 percent. Many of those students are learning to speak English as a second language.

In the 11 elementary schools of the Santa Rosa district, more than half of all kindergartners have limited skill speaking English.

Ten years ago, only one elementary school in Santa Rosa had a majority of Latino students. Today, there are a dozen of them and 10 are particularly striking for their poverty and their lack of white students. Together, the 10 schools have seen white enrollment decline during the past decade by nearly 1,400 students -- a 64 percent drop that was far greater than at the city's other campuses.

Those schools have large majorities of students who are economically disadvantaged and unskilled in speaking English. Most of the schools' parents aren't high school graduates.

While the changing makeup of the city's schools represents the demographic changes of a growing Latino population, it is also the result of significant flight of white students to schools with predominantly middle-class enrollment.

More than 4,000 of the city's 29,000 students -- one in every seven -- transferred from their neighborhood school in the city this year. While the reasons for the transfers vary widely, educators have said that a disproportionate number of students are bypassing the city's lowest-performing, highest-poverty rate schools.

The transfer numbers don't include the 3,800 private school students in Santa Rosa -- most of whom live within the city -- nor does it include hundreds more who are schooled at home by their parents.

Frustrated educators and parents say the division is producing vastly different academic results that speak not to differences in teacher quality but to a growing divide between the community's haves and have-nots.

"Give me your zip code, and I'll give you your test score," said Ted Milkoff, president of the Santa Rosa Teachers Association.

School officials and community leaders fear the trend could further divide the city's students on the basis of both race and household income.

Students in the south part of the city "increasingly attend schools stratified by color, language and economic status, even though new housing in south Santa Rosa includes substantial middle-class, owner-occupied housing," Futrell wrote this winter in a call to action for his colleagues.

School officials warn of a self-perpetuating cycle, in which student flight from a school leads to falling test scores and rising student poverty rates, which in turn heighten the concern of parents who are considering whether to send their children to those schools.

Some officials privately suggest there is a "tipping point" after which it becomes almost impossible to reverse this trend. It remains a problem faced by many of Santa Rosa's nine school districts, which are bound by state and federal law to reach ever higher performance standards.

Path set in 1993

Community leaders voiced concern about the prospect of ethnic divisions in Santa Rosa schools in 1993 when the Santa Rosa school board considered new school boundaries.

The board rejected an advisory committee's plan to ethnically balance the city's middle and high schools through busing or to add a magnet program that would draw students to the soon-to-open Elsie Allen High. Instead, the board majority voted for a neighborhood school model -- a plan widely supported by parents.

Futrell, then a member of the advisory committee, pushed for the magnet program at Elsie Allen and says the board's current efforts to strengthen the high school's academic appeal speak to the wisdom of the rejected, decade-old proposal. But what went unnoticed until recent years was the great rise in the number of elementary schoolchildren learning to speak English and the flight of middle-class students under school-choice programs.

"What we didn't foresee was the big acceleration of those demographic changes," he said.

During the past decade, nearly all of Santa Rosa's 37 elementary schools experienced a drop in white students -- partly attributable to the aging of baby boomer parents. But the extent of the decline differs dramatically.

Dividing lines

Bellevue, Brook Hill, Burbank, Kawana, Lehman, Lincoln, Meadow View, Monroe, Roseland and Sheppard elementary schools, all located around the city center and westside neighborhoods, lost nearly two-thirds of their white enrollment.

In the rest of the city, the white enrollments averaged a drop of just 16 percent.

A similar trend has occurred at the city's middle and high schools.

The four schools on the city's west side, Cook and Comstock middle, Elsie Allen and Piner High, have seen their white enrollment drop by nearly a third during the past five years.

Together, these four westside campuses lost about 800 white students. During the same period, the white enrollments at the middle and high schools east of Highway 101 remained largely unchanged.

Forty-five percent of all Latino elementary students in the city attend schools that feed into Cook and Elsie Allen, two predominantly Latino campuses in southwest Santa Rosa.

Meanwhile, in east Santa Rosa, 1,900 white students attend Rincon Valley Middle and Maria Carrillo High -- schools where only one student in 10 is Latino. The elementary schools that feed into those secondary campuses also enroll relatively few Latino students.

Santa Rosa school board members have been the most vocal in decrying the loss of students and its impact on schools.

"One could say de facto segregation is taking place by allowing other districts to cherry-pick students," board member Frank Pugh told colleagues earlier this month. "It is not to the benefit of anybody to allow that to continue."

Historical parallel

The issue is coming into focus even as the nation is marking the 50th anniversary of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision, Brown vs. Board of Education. In that 1954 ruling, the justices unanimously found that segregated schools are "inherently unequal."

While the Brown decision addressed mandatory segregation, communities have found that simply nullifying a law isn't enough to end the divisions.

Santa Rosa increasingly looks like the rest of California -- both for the rise in its Latino population and for the division as to where whites and Latinos attend school.

"Mexican American students are more segregated in California and Texas than are African Americans in Alabama and Mississippi," said University of Texas professor Richard Valencia, author of "Chicano School Failure and Success."

Those who study segregation say the division stifles young people's efforts to learn to live and work together, and it threatens to leave California with large numbers of Latino students whose schooling lacks the means to lift them out of poverty.

"One of the most damaging directions in the future would be to maintain an increasingly Hispanic underclass for whom it turns out there is little chance for advancement. And the school system is our best hope for avoiding that," said John Logan, director of the Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research at the University at Albany, in upstate New York.

Diversity declines

In southwest Santa Rosa, the number of white students dropped this past decade as they advanced through the grades.

In 1993, the southwest elementary schools that feed into Cook and Elsie Allen enrolled 277 white kindergarten students. By the time those students had reached sixth grade in 1999, only 205 remained in those same schools. The next year, only 149 white seventh-graders entered Cook. By 2002, only 116 of that same group entered Elsie Allen as ninth-graders.

The outflow of white students from the Cook area has accelerated during the past four years. In 1999, 86 percent of the neighborhood's white sixth-graders went to Cook. By the fall of 2002, that figure dropped to 61 percent.

Some parents pulling their children out of predominantly Latino schools say they are fearful their children would receive less attention because teachers will naturally concentrate on students who lack language skills, slowing the progress of the class. Others fear that their children won't make friends with students from different backgrounds.

At the city's middle and high schools, some parents also said they are worried about student safety, including the prospect of street gang activity in neighborhoods near some schools.

Fighting the trend

To combat the loss of students, Santa Rosa district officials said they must provide new academic programs -- magnet programs -- that retain students.

Among the plans are an elementary grades International Baccalaureate program at Doyle Park School, a possible "University Center" partnership between Elsie Allen High and Sonoma State University and a proposed new middle school aimed at addressing the flight of both white and Latino families from Cook Middle School.

Futrell said board members are trying to answer a fundamental question: "How do we demonstrate to anxious, predominantly middle-class parents that their kids will get a good and safe education in their neighborhood schools?"

News Researcher Teresa Meikle contributed to this report. You can reach Staff Writer Robert Digitale at 521-5285 or rdigitale@pressdemocrat.com.

10 MINORITY SCHOOLS

Of Santa Rosa's 37 elementary schools, 10 are striking for their poverty, their large share of the city's Latino students and their loss of white children during the past decade. The schools are Bellevue, Brook Hill, Burbank, Kawana, Lehman, Lincoln, Meadow View, Monroe, Roseland and Sheppard. Here are overall statistics:

72% Latino enrollment

15% White enrollment

64% Decline in white students over 10 years

79% Economically disadvantaged

64% Learning English as a second language

52% Parents lack high school diploma

62% Portion of all Latino students in the city

Source: California Department of Education, Sonoma County Office of Education

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