Officials debate busing

Several city councilors Monday said Boston may not be ready to stop school busing after Mayor Thomas Menino raised the issue in January.

The Boston City Council’s Committee on Education discussed the issue at a hearing Monday. Several councilors said they do not think Boston has matured enough to allow parents to send their kids to the school closest to their home, without concern about the racial mix there. The changes in school assignments would apply only to elementary and middle school students.

“There is an absence of schools in communities of color, which is not discriminatory,” said City Councilor Chuck Turner (South End, Roxbury). “Any attempt to remove seats before improving the quality is discriminatory.”

The debate over neighborhood schools – which Mayor Thomas Menino ignited this year with his push to change how Boston students are assigned to schools – opens wounds from Boston’s busing crisis of the 1970s. While ending busing would save the cash-strapped school district money, some on the city council say the change would put undue strain on schools in poorer neighborhoods.

Forcing students to attend neighborhood schools would put a larger burden on Roxbury and Dorchester, Turner added, saying layoffs may be needed at some schools to improve others before students are allowed to attend them.

But committee member John McDonough said allowing students to attend neighborhood schools would save the city $9 million to $14 million per school year by removing between 200 and 300 buses currently needed to take students to their school assignments.

City Councilor-At-Large Felix Arroyo questioned whether neighborhood schools would be able to handle the extra students the new plan would allow for the 2005-2006 school year and beyond.

“We might need to build new schools to accommodate the present population,” Arroyo said. “This theoretical construction is bad when we don’t know the consequences.”

Arroyo said he is against forcing students to attend schools closest to their homes because residents have said returning to a neighborhood-based school system would discriminate against families in Roxbury.

Councilor-At-Large Maura Hennigan said a new budget, which may include layoffs, should take into account changing demographics resulting from the new plan and that no one should be let go until everything is evaluated.

“This is difficult to plan when you don’t have a sense of what layoffs will bring,” Hennigan said. “We have the opportunity to increase seats in the system, since not every neighborhood has a school to send students to. We need to know where we are today to figure out what changes we can make.”

McDonough said the Roxbury, Mattapan and Dorchester districts already have 211 students over capacity and the elementary school population is rapidly climbing.

“In reality, it’s difficult to determine the costs on transportation,” he said. “Because there is open enrollment in public schools, the cost of transportation could vary. The figures are not dependent on the number of students per district.”

But committee member Dr. Michael McIntyre said approximately 30 positions would be cut within the school district next year – including teachers, administrators and secretaries.

“Given the budget constraints, this reduction of 30 positions would include both layoffs and retirements,” McIntyre said.

There has been an 8 percent reduction in the total budget from last school year because of the change in operating costs, according to McIntyre.

“A comparison of year after year shows that it is likely to see one more challenging fiscal year, which will not be as hard as last year,” he said. “But we need to try to maintain the talented teachers that we have.”

June 1 is the deadline to hire new teachers for the upcoming school year. The deadline to implement the new plan for the 2005-2006 school year is Nov. 1, when changes can first be put into effect.

“It is difficult to do projections when you have a moving target,” Turner said.