Students see few reminders of desegregation ruling

By Emily Richmond (contact)

Wednesday, May 5, 2004 | 11:26 a.m.

For eighth grader Tatiana Young, the idea that white and black children in America were once forced to attend separate schools isn't just hard to imagine, it's also infuriating.

"I can't even watch the movies about it in class without getting upset," said Young, a black student at Sedway Middle School in North Las Vegas. "There's no way I would put up with that, absolutely no way."

To mark National Law Day Tuesday, the Nevada State Bar Association sent some of its members to middle and high school classrooms to talk about the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that forcing public schools to desegregate.

Young, with the rest of the students in Joye Jackson's geography classes at Sedway, spent the past week reviewing the history behind the ruling.

Jackson said most of her pupils at Sedway, which is made up largely of black and Hispanic students, found it hard to believe that schools were once divided up by race.

"That's good news because it means we've come a long way and expectations for equality are very high," Jackson said. "What worries me is that students today won't appreciate what they have, because they aren't connected to a time when minorities had no chance of equal opportunities. That's why it's so important that we study our past and learn from it."

On May 17, 1954, the nation's highest court ruled that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal" even if the schools for black children were the same as schools for white children.

"The case is a landmark because it represented a fundamental shift in philosophy," said Bill Hoffman, senior counsel for the Clark County School District. "It derailed the concept that separate but equal was acceptable under the law. Once that decision was made, how you went about implementing the new judicial philosophy became the topic for the courts and continues to be the topic."

In 1968 a class action lawsuit was filed against the Clark County School Board, alleging they were running a segregated district in violation of federal law. Two years later a U.S. District Court ruled Clark County's West Las Vegas elementary schools were intentionally segregated, while the district was appropriately integrated at the high school level.

Facing a court order the district created "sixth-grade centers" in West and North Las Vegas, with white students bused in one academic year while black students were sent to predominantly white schools for grades one through five.

Shirley Barber, the only black member of the Clark County School Board, was a principal in 1972 when she was asked to open a sixth-grade center in West Las Vegas.

"I thought it was a wonderful idea at the time -- we had students who had never had any real contact with children from other races," Barber said. "They all learned to work together, play together. It really taught tolerance."

Clark County native and attorney Sue Cavaco, who visited Jackson's class Tuesday at Sedway, said her 22-year-old memories of being bused to a sixth-grade center in North Las Vegas are still vivid.

"I complained to my mother that the ride was too long, the bus was too hot, I didn't like the school," Cavaco said. "She told me, 'All your friends in North Las Vegas have to ride the bus even longer for every year except sixth grade, so you should consider yourself lucky.' And I did."

The sixth-grade center plan was dismantled in 1992 after West Las Vegas residents complained that their children were being bused for a total of five years while white students faced busing only one year.

The district instead decided that minority students zoned for the schools that had formerly been sixth-grade centers would have the choice of either attending that campus or choosing a different school.

When deciding which students should attend what school, the district aims for enrollment boundaries that encourage diversity, said Dusty Dickens, director of zoning and demographics for the district. By doing so voluntarily, the district has been free from any federal desegregation orders since the 1980s, Dickens said.

"We look at socio-economics, ethnicity, English langugage proficiency," Dickens said. "There's a lot of data we can draw on."

The schools may have been desegregated but there's still a way to go before things are equal, said West Las Vegas resident Deborah Jackson.

"It's unbelievable that 50 years after that decision (Brown v. Board of Education) that the oldest community in Las Vegas still wouldn't have its own high school," Jackson said. "We know our kids have a higher dropout rate, we know a lot of them can't pass the math proficiency test. The district's leaders need to ask themselves why that is and how they're going to fix it."

In 2002 just 47 percent of Clark County's black students graduated from high school, compared with 46 percent of Hispanic students and 67 percent of white students.

Following a contentious community meeting with West Las Vegas residents in November, the Clark County School Board agreed to make investigating the possibility of a West Las Vegas high school a priority.

Clark County School Board member Shirley Barber said it's not enough simply to build a high school in West Las Vegas and suddenly expect the achievement gap to close.

"I would want it to be a comprehensive high school plus vocational programs, because there are a lot of kids living in that area who won't be able to afford college, even community college," Barber said. "We have to make sure we are preparing them appropriately for a successful future."

For the past two years the district has been a "minority majority" district, with white students accounting for 43.7 percent of the enrollment. Hispanic students account for 31 percent while black student enrollment is at 13.9 percent.

One way of achieving more balance at schools with high minority populations is to add magnet programs that attract students from outside the neighborhood, Dickens said. At schools with predominantly white populations, minority students from other areas are offered transfers into the school, Dickens said.

Minority students assigned to Rancho High School may opt to attend Green Valley High School instead, while minority students zoned for Mojave High School may attend Centennial High School.

Porter Troutman, a professor at the College of Education at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said research has shown that large, urban school districts have been slowly reverting to segregated status. The fact that the Clark County School District has a diversity committee -- evaluating everything from zoning to hiring practices -- is encouraging, Troutman said.

"Are we where we should be 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education? Of course not," said Troutman, who serves on the committee. "But I see progress, I see a desire to change and to address the issues."