PARRAMORE AT CROSSROADS
The buses converge on Orlando’s Parramore neighborhood every school day, picking up about 500 children and spreading them among eight elementary schools as far as 5 miles away.
That morning dance has been the reality for 43 years, since Orange County closed Parramore’s last neighborhood school, Holden Street Elementary. Those buses remain as one of Central Florida’s last remnants of desegregation.
The era of court-ordered busing is coming to a close as school officials prepare to build a new community school in Parramore, a predominantly black, 1.5-square-mile community just west of downtown Orlando. The school is expected to open in 2017.
Some experts predict that will lead to a resegregated school that could struggle from the start. Though some parents embrace the idea of a new school, others in the community worry it won’t make things better in the impoverished, struggling neighborhood.
“If it’s an easy commute, Iwould be there every day [volunteering],” said Yolanda Nesbitt, whose youngest three children are bused 3 miles to Fern Creek Elementary. The proposed school site is down the street from her apartment on Livingston Street. “It’s crazy to have kids bused to eight different schools.”
Orange school officials insist the new school will succeed.
“We’re providing something that will be a jewel in our crown: the best facility in Orange County,” said Bill Sublette, chairman of the School Board. Plans call for a combined elementary/ middle school with night and weekend hours and social services for families.
But Lawanna Gelzer, a community organizerwho was a childwhenher family moved to Parramore in 1971, isn’t convinced the school will relieve the neighborhood’s struggles. Gelzer attended Holden Street just before it closed and then rode a bus several miles north to Princeton Elementary.
“Parramore is not going to be saved” by the new school, she said.
An area in flux
New Image Youth Center on South Parramore Avenue sits at the epicenter of the busing, near a spot where six school zones converge within a few blocks. The afterschool haven attracts students from those schools and several others.
In the blocks around the center, men loiter in groups on corners and on porches. The neighborhood has struggled for years with poverty, failed revitalization attempts and a lack of community as residents move in and out. Middle-class black families fled decades ago, residents and elected officials say.
Among the children in the neighborhood attending traditional public schools, 88 percent are black. Nearly 90 percent of the residential properties inParramore are rentals or vacant, according to the Orange County Property Appraiser.
One fourth- grader, Smith Charles, lives in a rectangle of the neighborhood that sends 20 students to Kaley Elementary.
So loath to miss school, the 11-year-old has walked the 3-mile route several times after missing the bus.
Although Smith has never lived outside Parramore, he has attended three elementary schools. His family moved several times within the half-mile between Church and Gore streets, each time landing in a new zone.
First he went to Orange Center, then Lake Como and nowKaley.
“We should go to one school so we can have fun and play together,” Smith said. “I feel better when I have at least the friends I know.”
Every time he has changed schools, his grades have dropped and then slowly risen, said Smith’s 18-year-old brother, Romerlens Charles. He said he thinks a closer school would help his mother and other parents participate more.
“If the parents are involved, there is nothing that can go wrong,” Romerlens said.
That’s the reason Sublette said he thinks busing should end.
“For me, does having a neighborhood school near the families and students it serves outweigh the concerns about desegregation? To me it does,” he said.
He also noted that Orange already has other schools where most students are poor minorities, and the district works closely with them.
Kat Gordon, the School Board’s only black member, was behind the push to have the district released from a desegregation order in 2010, which allows the end of busing. She also supports the return to community schools.
But 60 years after Brown vs. Board of Education rendered school segregation illegal, black children in the South attend majority-black schools at the highest levels in more than 35 years, according to the Civil Rights project. Most school districts released from court oversight tend to slowly resegregate, particularly in Southern elementary schools, according to a 2011 Stanford University study.
In Orange, the end of busing will affect the racial balance of about a dozen elementary schools, all of which have earned more A’s during the past 10 years than any other grade combined.
Although most of the schools will see some drop in their black population, Fern Creek Elementary would be fundamentally reshaped. It would drop from 51 percent black to 3 percent black without students from Parramore. And Princeton Elementary would see its black population drop to 6 percent from 21 percent.
For an idea of what could happen in Parramore, Orange County could look a couple of miles southwest. In1996, a federal judge allowed the district to resegregate Eccleston, Washington Shores, Orange Center and RichmondHeights elementaries as part of a plan to end busing that affected about 20 schools.
In the past three years, only one earned an A grade: Eccleston in 2012. Richmond Heights closed last year.
Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, cautioned that ending busing can create schools that struggle to attract teachers and become labeled as failures.
“Schools that are intensely segregated by race and poverty are battling up against tremendous odds,” said Orfield, who has spent more than 30 years studying the effects of desegregation and resegregation on schools.
Black students who attend integrated schools do better in life, according to a study byRucker Johnson and a team of professors at the University of California, Berkeley.
Analyzing data that tracked until 2011 a group of children born from1955 to 1985, they found that “for blacks, school desegregation significantly increased educational attainment and adult earnings, reduced the probability of incarceration, and improved adult health status.”
Orfield added, “What kids won’t get … is competition and contact with students from middleclass backgrounds.”
Vow to be model
In Orange, school officials promise the Parramore school will be a model. The district has been acquiring land in the area bounded by North Westmoreland Drive, West Amelia Street, North Parramore Avenue and West Livingston Street for the school.
Officials say plans will include a partnership with the Boys & Girls Club, preschool programs, social workers and medical staff. Hotel owner Harris Rosen has talked about helping provide college scholarships for students who attend.
“We believe, with the right resources in place, the right partnerships, a community- school concept, we can be tremendously successful in helping serve those children in a school they can call their own,” said Superintendent Barbara Jenkins.
Jenkins said Parramore does not have enough children to fill a school, so the zone for a new school there would reach beyond its borders.
School and community officials also are banking on revitalization efforts throughout Parramore to help draw middle- class families to the school.
That makes some residents, including Lori Mahan, suspicious the school is being built mainly to cater to families who might move into the Creative Village project planned for the site of the former Amway Arena.
Mahan is raising two grandchildren who are bused to Blankner School. She said she has never been there because she doesn’t have a way to get there.
Despite her concerns, she said a school nearby “would be good for little kids around here.”