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Group to Study Alternative Schools

Few lawsuits end with so total a victory as Tito v. Arlington County School Board.

The plaintiffs, parents of white students, persuaded a federal judge this year to outlaw Arlington's policy of minority preference for admission to its alternative schools.

The School Board not only accepted the ruling but expanded enrollments so much that three of the plaintiffs' four children and several others who had been denied admission got into the schools of their choice. The plaintiffs also were awarded attorneys' fees.

With that clear triumph, however, has come much doubt. Arlington educators are uncertain how they can ensure both fairness and racial balance in admitting students to the alternative schools, and some wonder whether having such schools is still a good idea.

At the same meeting that the School Board voted to accept U.S. District Judge Albert V. Bryan Jr.'s ruling and expand fall enrollments for the two oversubscribed schools, the Arlington Traditional School and the H-B Woodlawn program, the board appointed a study group of residents and staff members to develop a new process for admissions.

The group also will look at enrollment procedures at the third alternative school, Drew Model School, which is located in a predominantly black neighborhood where the problem has been a shortage of applications from white students.

The group's members say they must find a way for the schools to reflect the diversity of the county school population -- about 42 percent white, 30 percent Latino, 14 percent black and 10 percent Asian or Native American -- without stumbling again over the constitutional ban on giving preference to one race over another.

Many Arlington educators and parents say they hope the committee also will point the way to more diversity in all of the county's schools, to ensure that opportunity in the academically strong school district is spread wide.

"It is the school system's responsibility to launch an effective, continuous communication process -- starting right now -- to attract this diverse pool of applicants" for the alternative schools, said Elaine Furlow, the candidate for the School Board endorsed by Arlingtonians for a Better County. "At the same time, the school system should give equal marketing help to every neighborhood school so that they do not compete at a disadvantage."

Ric Roca, an independent candidatefor the board, said the system should treat the alternative schools like charter schools and emphasize making their programs unique.

If the school board wished to ensure racial diversity, he said, it could automatically enter every eligible student in the county in an admission lottery and then work to persuade the winners to attend.

Steven M. Levine, the Arlington lawyer who successfully sued the board over its admissions policy, said he was concerned that the school system "has spent a lot of time and money trying to create diversity in the alternative schools and there are dozens of other schools that are not being looked at in this light."

He said he was bothered, for instance, by plans to ease crowding in some schools by redrawing the attendance boundaries for Long Branch Elementary School and changing an ethnic balance that closely mirrored the county as a whole.

The School Board rejected that plan, school officials said, but noted that keeping different races in balance in neighborhood schools is no easier in Arlington, despite its commitment to diversity, than it is anywhere else.

Adding to the complexity of the problem are the histories of the three alternative schools.

Jim Schroeder, president of the Arlington Education Association, a member of the admissions study group and a longtime mathematics teacher at H-B Woodlawn, said the grade 6-12 school, was created by the merger of two alternative schools in the 1970s with the notion of having a place "where students have a lot to say about their education."

Alternative public schools were established throughout the country in the 1960s and 1970s, each emphasizing student decision-making, community service, projects and less traditional instruction.

But H-B Woodlawn is one of the few to survive the back-to-basics movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when parents and school boards decided they were tired of experiments and wanted the focus to be on more difficult lessons and higher test scores.

The Arlington Traditional School, originally called Page Elementary, was created in the late 1970s to serve parents who did not like the open classroom and team-teaching programs that neighborhood schools were adopting.

Drew, which began in 1971, was designed to provide individualized instruction and more student choice, as well as other special features. Unlike the other two schools, it had from the beginning an emphasis on racial diversity, because the School Board wanted to attract white students to what had been a predominantly black school.

In July, the School Board resorted to stopgap measures to keep unhappiness at the traditional schools to a minimum.

It expanded the kindergarten at Arlington Traditional so that all of the minority students it admitted for the fall could still attend. It also expanded the sixth grade at H-B Woodlawn by 22 students but declined to double the size of that class to 120 students, the only way it could have avoided turning away some minority students who had originally been admitted.

The League of United Latin American Citizens said in a statement that it was concerned about what the changes would do to Latinos, the county's largest minority group. The judge's decision, the statement said, "works to take us in a retrograde direction towards a tragic and benighted past."

Eileen Melia, who is serving as a co-chairman of the committee considering future admissions policies, said, "Our primary focus is how do we have the alternative program reflect the diversity that is within the Arlington community and be equitable to all."