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In the fall of 1971, a bus left Creighton Avenue and headed toward Northrop High School.
It carried sophomore Debra Faye Williams and other black students from their neighborhoods to the new school they would attend. Central High School was closed, and the predominantly black student body had to go elsewhere.
“I was not happy about it, because I wanted to go to Central,” said the Fort Wayne Community Schools high school area administrator whose name is now Debra Williams-Robbins. “I wanted to stay with the friends that I had developed in middle school; … so I was not happy at all to have to get on the bus and ride that far.”
It was the district’s first attempt to bring racial balance to its junior highs and high schools.
The city’s elementary schools were still segregated. And many Fort Wayne residents weren’t interested in changing that.
But in 1986, a grass-roots group called Parents for Quality Education with Integration challenged the district to have schools with a healthy mix of black and white students – with a goal to provide equal educational opportunities and buildings to all. The group sued Fort Wayne Community Schools in federal court and didn’t let up.
Three years later, the lawsuit was settled, and FWCS officials have been abiding by the terms of the agreement ever since.
It’s been 20 years since a unique fund was created in the district budget dedicated to maintaining racial balance, a feat many say has been achieved, but one some still criticize.
“I don’t see that they have solved a social problem at all,” said Annette Mains, who served on the FWCS board in 1989 and voted against the settlement agreement.
That fund was the birth of the school-choice system and allowed for the district to create magnet programs at seven schools. Magnet schools have a specialized program, such as fine arts, Latin or science, which can be a draw, or magnet, to interested students.
The fund also paid for racial sensitivity training for teachers and students. The goal was for schools to be no less than 15 percent and no more than 45 percent black.
The racial-balance fund started at $2.5 million and grew to $9.1 million by 2009. It was formed by reducing the amount of money that could be raised through property taxes for the capital projects fund and created a separate levy dedicated to bringing racial balance to the schools.
“The concept was to put together programs and schools that would make parents feel that they weren’t being forced to do anything, but rather they had options that they could select from for their children, and I think, quite frankly, that worked very well,” said Bill Sweet, the current school district attorney who was also on the district’s legal team in 1989.
The structure of the fund has taken heat during school board elections from those who believe it should be funded differently. And the U.S. Supreme Court struck down similar racial-balance plans in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle, leaving the FWCS plan open to challenge.
All of it has been worth it to those who believe it’s important to educate students in a diverse environment.
“It just seemed to me wrong to not have everybody experience being in the same environment as other races,” said Ian Rolland, who spearheaded the lawsuit against the district. “There’d be a real advantage to the kids in our society if people were exposed to others who were different than they were.”
The racial-balance fund is one of a kind in Indiana. To create it, Fort Wayne Community Schools officials had to get permission from the General Assembly to reduce its capital projects fund, which pays for the repair and replacement of buildings and equipment.
The racial-balance fund has its own property tax levy, and the revenue generated from the levy can’t be transferred to other funds in the district’s budget. It’s a concept that angered some people when district officials were pushing their $500 million building plan in 2007.
Some community members thought the district was doing a disservice by using money that should go toward building maintenance for the school-choice and magnet programs.
“Those that are opposed to the racial-balance fund really don’t get what it does because to do away with it would be to do away with choice, and that’s the essence of our school district,” said former FWCS board member Jon Olinger, who suggested during the 2008 election the money for racial balance be taken out of the general fund rather than capital projects.
The existence of the racial-balance fund ultimately means less money for capital projects, but when officials had to decide where to pull the money, there weren’t many options. It was either the capital projects or transportation fund, and in 1989 building maintenance hadn’t become the emergency issue it has today, FWCS Chief Financial Officer Kathy Friend said.
“It’s a statute that applies only to us. We can’t even undo it,” Sweet said.
This year, there is nearly $9.1 million in the racial-balance fund. About 90 percent of the fund is spent on employee salaries, paying for teachers and assistants at the magnet schools, alternative-education teachers, 20 social workers at the elementary schools and seven conflict mediators.
The remainder of the money was spent on materials, development of the Montessori program at Towles Intermediate School, professional development and security.
Students have to enter a lottery to attend one of the magnet schools. Programs include Montessori at Bunche and Towles; arts at Whitney Young, Weisser Park and Memorial Park Middle; Latin grammar at Brentwood; communications at Croninger; and math and science at Irwin.
When Rolland was volunteering at the East Wayne Street Center in the late 1980s, he became concerned with the vast difference in the schools that black and white students were attending.
“It just didn’t seem to me that that was fair,” Rolland said. “It said to me and to others that the quality of education being delivered to these black kids that were in these inner-city schools was not the same that they were delivering to white kids in these suburban schools.”
Rolland, retired president and chairman of Lincoln National Corp., became the champion for Parents for Quality Education with Integration. But arriving at an agreement with the school district proved difficult.
“We the plaintiffs thought it would be nice to have a settlement that didn’t cost the people a lot of money,” said William L. Taylor, a nationally recognized civil rights attorney who represented the parents group. “The school board and the school superintendent, … they were very resistant to any kind of a settlement. It appeared we were going to have to try the case. They thought we were radicals, but it was regular community people.”
Annette Mains was one of three board members to vote against the agreement. She wanted to see the money invested in the inner-city schools rather than spent on busing students.
“The children who had the greatest needs academically really received the least. They received bus rides,” Mains said. “Children who already had privileges were given more privileges, and we felt the disadvantaged children were given more disadvantages.”
In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down voluntary integration programs in Louisville and Seattle. Attorneys involved with the local agreement don’t believe the ruling will affect the FWCS plan.
“I don’t hear anything on the horizon that gets anywhere close to that,” said Bob Walters, the attorney who represented Fort Wayne Community Schools in the lawsuit. “I don’t hear any suggestion on a local level that anybody’s talking about any material changes to that program, which has worked very well over the years.”
Officials believe the magnet program is a success, but it has done little to close the achievement gap between black and white students in the district.
Superintendent Wendy Robinson was principal of Price Elementary School in 1989 and was part of the group that decided how to spend the racial-balance money. She admits there’s a ways to go before performance on achievement tests between black and white students is equal.
But the racial-balance fund allowed the district to research and establish programs such as full-day kindergarten and Reading Recovery, a one-on-one reading intervention program, she said.
Officials learned what worked and what didn’t, setting them on a path to providing the best instruction for students, Robinson said.
“Obviously we have not completely closed the gap, but it gave us a start,” Robinson said.
Looking back, Rolland is pleased with how the racial-balance plan turned out.
“I think (it’s worked) marvelously well. I think the magnet schools was the key to it. That provided the mechanism for racially balancing the schools without forcing kids on buses,” Rolland said. “The magnet schools continue to be a strength for the Fort Wayne Community Schools to this day. Not only are minority kids benefiting from it, but white kids and everybody in the schools benefits from greater choice with what they want to do with their education.”
