School reformers seeking key to suburbia - conflict in Hartford, Connecticut between integration and school choice advocates - Cover Story

Insight on the News, April 5, 1993 by Elena Neuman

Summary: A lawsuit in Hartford, Conn., seeks to erase the municipal lines that separate the city's school system from those of its suburbs. Plaintiffs say that only through integration will disadvantaged students acquire the drive to succeed in life. But people who have exercised school choice with a moving van aren't happy about the idea.

The Fred D. Wish School has all the attributes of a typical public elementary school. A bright American flag snaps in the cold Connecticut wind above the entrance; a child dangles his feet from an oversize chair as he waits to see the principal; ebullient students throng into the clean, tiled hallways to form a single file as lunch aromas waft up from the cafeteria.

Located next to Hartford's poorest housing project, the Wish School, reflecting the demographics of the city's population, is more than 90 percent black and Hispanic. Many of the students speak little English and must be placed in remedial classes far below their age-level. Hunger is a common complaint. The students fear random street violence in their short trudge from the project to school, and many return to roach-and rat-infested apartments at the end of the school day.

A few miles away at Whiting Lane School in West Hartford, an affluent and partially integrated suburb, children run, screaming with glee, out the glass school doors into the pristine snow. Another crisp American flag billows above them; students' art embellishes the hallways.

But here most of the faces are white, and parents wait expectantly in their cars and on the sidewalk to escort their children to warm, middle-class homes. West Hartford is approximately 80 percent white; Simsbury and Wethersfield, two nearby suburbs, are 95 percent white.

With its gold coast areas like Greenwich and Westport, Connecticut is statistically the wealthiest state in the nation; yet its three major cities -- Hartford, Bridgeport and New Haven -- rank among the 10 most depressed urban centers in the country.

The dichotomy has been the subject of national scrutiny in recent months because of a school desegregation lawsuit in Hartford. Nineteen students with their parents sued the state three years ago, claiming that segregation of public schools in Hartford and its suburbs denies students their right under the state constitution to equal educational opportunity. They cite the scoring gap between suburban students and Hartford students on the Connecticut mastery tests and Scholastic Aptitude Tests as proof that the state has not been meeting its obligation to all students. The suit went to trial Dec. 15 in Connecticut Superior Court and a verdict is expected shortly.

School desegregation suits are nothing new -- even ones that argue that de facto segregation, based on voluntary residential patterns, is just as impermissible as the de jure segregation once imposed by discriminatory separate-but-equal laws.

But unlike dozens of other cases being heard across the country -- which argue that the morbid conditions in inner-city schools violate equal opportunity rights -- the Hartford plaintiffs are not seeking increased funding for urban public schools as a remedy, mostly because they can't. Hartford schools already receive substantially more money than their suburban counterparts; per-pupil spending in Hartford was $7,746 in 1992, $904 more than the state average, and teacher salaries are on average $5,000 higher than elsewhere in the state. (Much of the increased funding goes to bilingual and remedial education, as well as family planning and health services, leaving a smaller percentage for traditional educational purposes.)

Instead, the plaintiffs are demanding complete racial integration. Only sustained social interaction between white and minority children from an early age, they say, will cure the malaise of poverty, racial isolation and low achievement in Hartford's schools. The plaintiffs propose linking Hartford with 21 suburbs that have their own school districts and requiring integration throughout.

In this way, say the plaintiffs, parental involvement, so crucial to successful schools and so lacking in the inner cities, will be more evenly distributed. Involved suburban parents will serve as surrogates for the less advantaged kids whose parents are either unable or unwilling to take an interest in their children's schools.

Wish Principal Freddie Morris, who testified during the trial as a witness for the plaintiffs, says the problems of inner-city schools are "deeply rooted in the family structure" of their students. "There need to be facilities whereby parents from both avenues can go together and learn at the same time how multiethnic society really is. I don't think it necessarily takes money; it's a teaching style that we all have to look at. We have to teach minority parents to get involved."

Witnesses in the trial have argued that integration is not simply a tool for improving the schools but is desirable in itself. Students will learn to live in a multicultural society; persistent racial and ethnic stereotypes will be broken down. "Most of these kids are really wonderful kids," says Donald Carso, principal of the Thomas J. McDonough School in Hartford, who also testified for the plaintiffs in the case. His school has 846 students in a 94-year-old main building, 14 portable classrooms and an antiquated annex four blocks away. Obsolete mimeograph machines sit in corridors, and school plays must be performed in a large hallway on the fourth floor.