Meredith Brace is on a mission to attract her white neighbors The mother of two is circulating a newsletter to parents about the school's strengths, and holds meetings with neighborhood families in her living room.

She's trying to convince them that Harding -- where 90 percent of the kids are Latino and test scores are among the lowest in the area, but improving -- is still a good school and that their involvement can make it a great one.

A community without a cultural divide is also on her mind.

"I keep telling these parents, if we all send our kids to Harding, they won't be the only white kids at the school," she said.

But it's a tough sell. Most parents at a recent meeting left unconvinced, explaining that Harding doesn't appear to be the best choice for their children for a variety of reasons.

White flight from schools -- coupled with lower white and increased Latino birthrates in recent years -- have made the city's elementary campuses increasingly Latino and increasingly segregated.

Some Santa Barbara educators and leaders worry that the situation will lead to an even deeper cultural, academic and economic divide between whites and Latinos -- who live side by side, yet often worlds apart.

Many parents interviewed said people make too much of race in school selection, and that their choices are based on what's best for their kids on the social and educational fronts. But many others have a simpler take.

Over her nearly 30 years at the campus, Harding Principal Marlyn Nicolas has watched hundreds of white families transfer out. She said people come up with all kinds of explanations.

"But the real reason is too many brown faces," she said. "Most of them are white, and most have never even been inside my school. They don't want to admit that they're not coming because of the makeup of my school."

THE DISPARITY IN NUMBERS

Neighborhood children know the score.

After school one recent day, six boys and a girl shot hoops in a driveway along Robbins Street, a Westside block lined with Volvos, SUVs and tidy, nicely landscaped homes. Visible at the end of the street is Harding. But only one of the seven children attends school there.

The rest pile into cars each morning and their parents drive them past their neighborhood school to other public elementary schools, or to private or parochial schools.

The schools they attend are far whiter and have higher test scores than Harding.

"My parents found a better school in Monroe," said 8-year-old Jared Diamond. He lives on Robbins Street, but his parents drive him, and his 6-year-old brother Avery, to Monroe School on the Mesa, which is 30 percent white.

To gauge the extent of white flight from neighborhood public schools, the News-Press asked UCSB geographer Stuart Sweeney to apply 2000 Census numbers to the Santa Barbara Elementary School District's boundary lines.

At Harding, for instance, there are 37 white and 483 Latino children. Those numbers do not reflect the ethnic breakdown of children living in the surrounding neighborhood. The census shows that 308 white and 577 Latino elementary-age children live within the Harding School attendance area. In other words, of the children living near Harding who could be enrolled there today, 34 percent are white and 65 are percent Latino, while the school itself is 7 percent white and 90 percent Latino.

Disparities between the number of whites at a campus and those in the surrounding neighborhood are seen throughout the district campuses.

The census shows there are about 2,670 white and 3,770 Latino children ages 5 to 11 in the attendance areas of the district's nine grade-school campuses. But enrollment figures show 1,166 whites and 3,795 Latinos in those same schools.

So where are the other 1,500 white students?

Just like the Diamonds, their families have chosen some other school, in some other neighborhood. Less than 1 percent are home-schooled. And these are not just rich kids going to private schools.

"One mom told me, 'Just transfer to Washington. Everybody else does it,' " said Mrs. Brace, who also lives on Robbins Street. She's set on sending her children, 4-year-old Bolden and 1-year-old Georgia, to Harding.

A Santa Barbara district policy allows parents to transfer their children to other campuses as long as there is space and a valid reason, making it relatively easy for parents to drive their kids away from neighborhood schools.

'I also try to appeal to their sense of morality. What kind of example are you setting for your kids? When you're not accepting of others, why should they be?"

Mary Nicholas,
Principal of Harding School

Last year, there were 294 transfers granted to students moving from one Santa Barbara elementary school to another. This year, there were 129 transfers from Santa Barbara elementary schools to other school districts. The district says it does not keep track of the number of students who transfer.

Mrs. Nicolas and her staff say they have tried to convince the parents who walk in that Harding is an "awesome" school, with improved test scores and high academic standards, a new science lab, and plenty of creative arts opportunities.

The majority of Harding teachers send their own children to the school, she said.

"I also try to appeal to their sense of morality," she said. "What kind of example are you setting for your kids? When you're not accepting of others, why should they be?"

BUZZ AT THE PARK

When it comes to speaking on the record for a newspaper article, few people feel comfortable sharing their views on race. But stop by any park, and chances are moms hit on the subject at some point.

The buzz from white parents sounds something like this: I don't want my child to be the only white kid in the class. ... The teachers focus on pulling the bottom up. ... My child won't be challenged. ... Who will his friends be? ... Who'll come to the birthday party? ... Everybody else transfers out. ... My son doesn't need three hours of phonics every day; he already speaks English. ... I can't talk to any of those moms; I don't speak Spanish. ... That school is too rough. ... Poor kids are misbehaved. ... The test scores are low. ... Latino parents don't get involved.

White flight is alluded to, but rarely addressed directly, at board meetings.

Officials are aware of the problem, but the topic appears to be too hot to touch.

'The young professionals buying homes in Santa Barbara are so night and day from the Latinos. Their mind-set is, 'Hey, I want the very best for my kid, and I'll drive wherever I have to.'"

Michael Caston,
former Superintendent of Santa Barbara Schools

 
"We used to sit around for hours talking about it (behind closed doors), and we knew we didn't have a solution, but we knew we were losing students left and right," said Michael Caston, former superintendent of Santa Barbara schools. "It was just one of those inherent issues that I knew I could never fix."

Mr. Caston left Santa Barbara to head schools in Escondido. After a year in a different city and environment, he sees the depth of the cultural divide in Santa Barbara.

"The young professionals buying homes in Santa Barbara are so night and day from the Latinos. Their mind-set is, 'Hey, I want the very best for my kid, and I'll drive wherever I have to,' " he said. "It's really too bad, because just think of what those (white) kids could do for a school."

Mr. Caston's successor, Debbie Flores, hopes that higher test scores will help improve the schools' image.

"Of course, I would listen to novel ideas about how we could attract some of our families back into the district," she said. "It's an issue I would love to take on."

Mrs. Flores believes most parents who seek transfers see an inaccurate picture of their neighborhood school. Poor children can also be bright or gifted, and they're not naturally misbehaved or headed for gangs, she said.

'Of course, I would listen to novel ideas about how we could attract some of our families back into the district," she said. "It's an issue I would love to take on.

Debbie Flores,
Superintendent of Santa Barbara Schools

 
"I was just at Cleveland School this morning, and we mentioned that we did not see a single child that had anything close to gang attire on," she said. "We have very well-behaved kids across the board."

WHERE ARE THE WHITES?

In 1970, 94 percent of the city's 70,215 residents identified themselves as white, and 22 percent also said they were of "Spanish origin."

Today, of the 90,000 people in the city of Santa Barbara, 58 percent are white and 35 percent are Latino.

Compare this to the public school population: The Santa Barbara elementary district's nine main campuses contain 5,800 students. The district is 22 percent white and 72 percent Latino. Four of the district's campuses are 90 percent Latino or more. The district enrollment is 2 percent Asian and 2 percent black.

Elementary districts in outlying areas, such as Cold Spring, Montecito and Hope -- as well as Santa Barbara's public alternative campuses -- are predominantly white.

Goleta Union School District, a string of elementary schools, had 6,000 white kids 30 years ago. There are 2,200 today -- even as the area's population has grown more than 50 percent.

By junior high and high school, most local white students and their Latino neighbors are reunited -- the elementary public school districts for Santa Barbara, Goleta, Montecito and Hope Ranch feed into Santa Barbara, Dos Pueblos and San Marcos high schools and the four local junior highs. Private schools often don't have secondary campuses.

Of the high school district's 10,339 students, 48 percent are white, 44 percent Latino, 3.4 percent Asian and 2 percent black.

By junior high, students have become separated by academic level, depending on the courses they select. Most parents feel comfortable that their child will be placed in classes with others at the same level.

There is some transfering around in the high school district. More students transfer to La Colina Junior High or Dos Pueblos than any of the other schools.

Like Santa Barbara, many American communities have grappled with white flight. And many experienced turmoil when school districts redrew boundary lines and began busing in an effort to comply with federal rulings to desegregate schools.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, there were 250,000 white students in the early 1970s. Today, there are 48,000.

Boston's public schools saw fiery riots and rock-throwing when the city attempted to integrate its schools, which were largely white, or largely black. Boston schools went from being majority white in 1974 to 15 percent white today.

In San Francisco, school officials are attempting to tackle segregation through a "diversity index," which assigns students to certain schools based on their socioeconomic background, not their ethnicity.

In all the above cases, declines in can be attributed in part to demographic shifts in the population. Schools have a smaller pool of white children to pull from than in the past.

But in the case of Santa Barbara, 2000 Census data show that there are thousands of white children living here and that schools will have a pool of whites in years to come. There are about 2,300 white children under age 4 living within the district's boundaries.

This is a very different picture from traditional white flight, in which white families abandoned whole communities when other cultures spilled in, activating the demographic tipping point.

MIKE ELIASON / NEWS-PRESS
Meredith Brace plans to send her children Bolden, 4, and Georgia, 1, to Harding Elementary School.

LEN WOOD / NEWS-PRESS
Below right, Meredith is trying to attract her white neighbors to Harding Elementary School, which is 90 percent Latino, 7 percent white. Mrs. Brace has held meetings in her living room to air perceptions about the school.

Santa Barbara has maintained its white population in downmarket neighborhoods such as the Westside, where Harding School is located.

Young professionals have moved to the Westside, and Eastside, because they can't afford $700,000-plus homes in wealthier neighborhoods, or because they have strong ties to the neighborhood. But in a majority of cases, to the despair of public school advocates, they don't have similar ties to the neighborhood school.

Still, many districts, including Santa Barbara, hold on to essentially the same expensive busing policies and gerrymandered attendance boundary lines put in place decades ago. Add substantial white flight, and irony results. Hundreds of Latino kids, for example, are bused from the lower Westside to Adams, making the school 75 percent Latino and 17 percent white.

"When you're busing all-brown kids to an all-brown school, you know you've failed," said Alice Post, a local parent who formed a group to promote neighborhood schools -- but ended up sending her own children to a private school. "Our neighborhood schools are good, but they're not living up to their potential."

Nationally, many districts have abandoned the goal of desegregation, arguing that their cities are too racially segregated to make school integration feasible, or that enforced desegregation only exacerbates white flight.

Districts under court-ordered desegregation mandates, such as Denver, Savannah, Ga., Kansas City, Cincinnati and Cleveland, have been released from those orders in recent years, in part because school officials proved that all steps to desegregate had been taken, whether successful or not.

In 1972, in response to concerns about a number of schools in town that were almost all-white or all-Latino, the Santa Barbara school district put out its own desegregation-integration plan. It involved controversial moves to redraw enrollment boundary lines and bus students.

"We believe that segregated schools -- whether by design or by happenstance -- quench the desire of children to achieve. Boys and girls need many different kinds of experiences, and need to test and measure themselves against all kinds of other children," said the superintendent at the time, Norman B. Scharer.

Mr. Scharer placed one of his assistants, Blas Garza, in charge of developing the plan. Mr. Garza stayed with the district for 35 years. He still lives in Santa Barbara but now works at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks. He realizes that the integration plan was not successful and only perpetuated white flight in most schools.

"Everything I have worked on has been destroyed," he said. "Not just integration, but bilingual education and the multicultural resources centers I had set up for teachers here. So I go to teach in my ivory tower."

SEGREGATED ... SO WHAT?

Parents ask: Does it really matter if a school becomes all-Latino or all-white? Are racially balanced schools worth the trouble?

A number of activists, academics, teachers and even some parents answer yes to both questions.

Schools filled with high numbers of poor children whose parents are poorly educated are at a disadvantage in many ways. Their parents, who may work two jobs and be unfamiliar with the American public school system, are less inclined to volunteer in the classroom or participate in the PTA. They don't have the contacts to pull off big fund-raisers that pay for those extra things schools struggle to maintain, such as librarians, counselors, and art, music and science programs.

How can Harding's annual wrapping paper drive ever compete with Roosevelt School's auction of a trip to Paris or a brand-new car?

The car auction raked in $50,000, while the wrapping paper sales earned about $13,000.

Overall, the Roosevelt PTA raised $100,000 last year, Harding raised $27,000 while Franklin School raised $10,000. Add that up over the years, and it makes a difference.

There is significant research indicating that poor children benefit educationally from the middle- and upper-class children they sit next to in class, and largely from their parents -- who push for higher standards for all, and often volunteer in classrooms.

'When the middle-class parents flee, those schools just tumble. They don't have any parents forcing teachers to raise those expectations. You become lax."

Babatunde Folayemi,
Santa Barbara City Council Member and Director of the Pro-Youth Coalition

 
Babatunde Folayemi, a member of the Santa Barbara City Council and director of the Pro-Youth Coalition, believes Latino schools such as Cleveland, Harding, Franklin and McKinley do end up offering a lesser education to students.

"When the middle-class parents flee, those schools just tumble," he said. "They don't have any parents forcing teachers to raise those expectations. You become lax. Then you don't have the same types of creativity or resources given to a school that are brought there through those strong PTAs."

Mr. Folayemi said once children move on to junior high and high school, and merge with students from stronger campuses, the gap becomes glaring.

"If you go to the high schools and look at college credit classes, you still see 90 percent of students are Anglo," he said. "I feel that's a direct result of early education. The Latino kids are still playing catch-up. And then few ever make it to college."

Santa Barbara is no Washington, D.C., Boston, Chicago or L.A., and it should not settle for racially segregated schools or white flight, says Adams School Principal Jo Ann Caines, a longtime district employee.

"It's not OK because it isn't reflective of this community," insists Ms. Caines, whose campus is 75 percent Latino. Adams was 80 percent white in 1970.

The Adams PTA, essentially run by about five white moms, is working to attract families living in the adjacent, upscale Samarkand neighborhood. Census 2000 numbers show that the ethnic makeup of elementary-aged children living around Adams is 60 percent white.

Lanny Ebenstein, a political scientist and former Santa Barbara school board member, has studied enrollment shifts and monitored white flight in local schools for years. In 1980, during his days as a UCSB student, he wrote a report titled "An Analysis and History of Desegregation Efforts in the Santa Barbara School District."

Then and today, Mr. Ebenstein argues that it's crucial for Latinos to be exposed to middle-class whites, and vice versa.

"What's really at stake here is whether Santa Barbara will remain an integrated family community," he said. "After segregated schools, the next step is segregated school districts. The reintegration of American schools is going to be the great task of the next couple of decades."

Many white parents who don't send their children to their neighborhood schools say they don't want homogeneity either. They just want their child to be able to look across the classroom and see at least a handful of kids who look like them, and that's not possible in many of Santa Barbara's elementary schools today.

These parents also want to be assured that their child will not be held back, or constantly used as a role model, next to students who walk in with poor English skills and little academic support at home.

'After segregated schools, the next step is segregated school districts. The reintegration of American schools is going to be the great task of the next couple of decades.'

Lanny Ebenstein,
Political Scientist and ex-Santa Barbara School Board Member

 
They won't sacrifice their child's education in the name of what they consider to be political correctness. And they want their children to be able to compete with other students when they get to junior high and high school.

"No one wants to appear racist," said Les Imel, superintendent of the top-ranking Hope School District, which had 200 students transfer into the 1,300-student, three-school district last year. Most of the transfers, he said, were white, and most were from Santa Barbara.

"If you have a group of youngsters who are extremely needy, who take up all your resources, the fear is that when your child comes in way beyond the basics, the teacher won't have time to challenge them to their utmost ability," he said. "Those are parents' fears, and the schools need to work with them."

Gary Orfield, a Harvard University professor of education and social policy, has studied the issues surrounding school segregation for 30 years.

In one recent study, he established that 70 percent of the nation's Latino children attend highly segregated schools.

Mr. Orfield speaks passionately about the days when, as a parent of young children living in Washington, D.C., he mobilized a group of white parents to march into the school office to sign up their kids for kindergarten at the same time, so they wouldn't be the only white students at the campus.

"Nobody wanted to admit they weren't going because of the racial makeup, but once we got that critical mass of white parents there, the school became 30 percent white really fast," he said.

The Harvard professor is now studying successfully integrated schools around the nation. He's also talking with the products of those schools -- the students.

"All these kids, whether black or white or Latino or Asian, are reporting the same thing," he said. "They're able to work well together, to discuss sensitive issues that cross racial lines, they're thinking about their future, and their community, in a different way. They very fluently cross these lines, which is something that very few adults in today's society can do."

The professor says the research is clear: "Desegregation opens richer opportunity networks for minority children, but without any loss for whites. Part of the benefit for minority students comes from learning how to function in a white middle-class setting, since most of the society's best opportunities are in these settings."

Beyond sociology, there are tangible dollars-and-cents reasons to stem white flight, too. With Santa Barbara schools in the midst of budget cuts due to declining enrollment, each departing student is missed more than ever.

Enrollment along the entire South Coast is declining, in part because of lower birthrates, but also because students who leave the district mid-career, and families who leave the area because they can't afford to live here. In response, the Santa Barbara elementary district has eliminated about $900,000 in programs and personnel.

The district may increase class sizes in coming years. There's also talk of eliminating some busing. The Santa Barbara elementary district spends $500,000 annually to take mostly Latino kids to and from school.

If schools throughout the district could attract even a portion of the children in their neighborhoods who currently attend other campuses outside the district, the enrollment decline -- and budget crisis -- would be less dramatic, or perhaps nonexistent.

The state pays elementary districts about $4,500 per pupil. If 200 new students entered the district, there would be no budget deficit.

Perhaps more important is that a few more white faces in the district's kindergarten classes might make other white families feel more comfortable about sending their children there. The pattern could be broken.

THE MIDDLE-CLASS EXODUS

Interviews with more than 100 families across Santa Barbara revealed that in every instance, parents transferred their children to schools where there were more children like them -- both socioeconomically and ethnically. In many cases, there were still large numbers of Latino children at the new school.

That well-to-do families send their children to private schools is nothing new. Mr. Ebenstein said the number of Santa Barbara elementary students in private or parochial schools was about 1,000 in 1980, and remains at that level today. He said about 80 percent are white.

Still, white flight has become so common in most of Santa Barbara's nine neighborhood elementary schools that even middle-class families are seeking transfers, and often to other public schools.

District policy allows parents to transfer, as long as there is space at the new campus, and the parent has a valid reason, such as the job or day-care provider is closer to that other school.

"We require people to give documentation of where they work," said Superintendent Flores, who regulates the transfers. "For the years when we were so overcrowded, we were more lenient about it."

If the district turns down a transfer request, parents could decide to send their children to another district -- taking the $4,500 each student represents with them. Or they could send their children to a private school.

Mrs. Flores said no parent has ever told her that they were transferring from a school because they were worried about demographics.

But if you ask parents directly, most will tell you.

"My daughter is blond, blue-eyed. My picture of where she would go to school was not 98 percent Latino," said Jean Costigan, who lives near Harding but sends her children to Monroe with other neighborhood kids. (Harding is actually 90 percent Latino.)

'The fear white parents have is that too many brown faces are going to hold their child down, but that's not the case here."

Jo Ann Caines,
Principal of Adams School

Within the Santa Barbara district, parents seek transfers into schools like Monroe, Washington, Roosevelt and Peabody. Seeing more requests for transfers out are schools like Adams, Cleveland, Harding and McKinley.

White parents also line up to get into the Hope District and a number of alternative public campuses, like the Open Alternative School. Private schools have waiting lists.

And there appears to even be segregation within the private school system. Whites flock to certain campuses, while many middle- and upper-class Latino families head to the Catholic Notre Dame School. Latino families have also flocked to the Santa Barbara Community Academy, an alternative school opened by the district several years ago where students wear uniforms.

Fewer than 1 percent of the Santa Barbara's school-age children are home-schooled.

Some parents hang on to the hope that their child will be bright enough to test into the GATE (Gifted and Talented Education) magnet program at Washington School. The magnet -- which brings together high-achieving students from around the district -- was created, in part, to keep white families in the district.

Most parents say that if the school in their neighborhood had a great reputation and high test scores, they would never think about leaving.

"OOH ... WHITE KID 11 O'CLOCK"

White flight is also called class flight because the families leaving include some middle- and upper-class Latino families. Among educators, it is also referred to as bright flight because the students leaving are often those who score highest on standardized tests.

But Mrs. Brace insists that people are wasting money and precious time traveling all over town when they have a fine educational opportunity in their own back yard.

"The grass is not always greener on the other side. The grass is greener where you water it," she said, citing her favorite quote during an afternoon walk to Harding. The playground was full of Latino kids who participate in the after-school program.

"Ooh ... white kid 11 o'clock," she said, pointing out the one blond in a crowd of students heading to the playground.

"Twenty-five years ago, the whole neighborhood went here. If you didn't, you were a geek because your parents made you go to private school. Now, when I bring up the school to moms I meet at the playground, they cringe," said Mrs. Brace, whose family moved into the Harding neighborhood when she was a girl.

There is a certain threshold, about 80 percent Latino, at which white parents start to bail out at a faster rate. When that "tipping point" is reached, it becomes more difficult to draw in new whites, Mr. Ebenstein said.

Parent Carrie Randolph is watching the demographics at Harding closely. She can see the school from her front yard but is considering sending her 3-year-old to the private Montessori School when the time comes for kindergarten.

"The racial makeup of the school is definitely a concern for me," Mrs. Randolph said. "We haven't made up our minds yet."

Joyce Dpezman-Margolis, a former educator, chose the private Waldorf School for her son, instead of Adams.

"My fear was because he isn't the high achiever or the troublemaker, he wasn't going to stand out and he'd just get lost," she said. "We started looking at private schools, which is something I thought I'd never do because I'm such a public school advocate."

Staff at the 170-student Waldorf School say parents often tell them that they're looking for a place where their children will be challenged on many levels.

"Here, they learn three different instruments, two different foreign languages and we do a lot of biodynamic gardening, plus all of the rigorous academics," said M. Nicole van Dam, the school's development director. "We offer all these 'luxuries,' while public schools are having to cut."

"We heard negative things about Harding, like they teach below the lowest common denominator," said Dan Diamond, whose boys attend Monroe but use the Harding playground as a neighborhood park.

Mr. Diamond said his wife went to a meeting at Harding when they were thinking about enrolling their son in kindergarten.

The teacher told parents that information on how to enroll was being provided in Spanish in the next room, and his wife was taken aback when "everybody but her stood up and went over there."

While there is virtually no crime reported on elementary campuses here, many parents point out that some Latinos take on a "gang-wannabe" attitude that they don't want their kids associated with. But many school leaders say that attitude is a cop-out. They add that local schools offer all kinds of "extras" like music, art and dance.

"Some of it is outright racism, some of it is just lack of knowledge about what's really going on inside those classrooms," said Ms. Caines, principal of Adams. "The fear white parents have is that too many brown faces are going to hold their child down, but that's not the case here."

Harding parent Teodora Diaz isn't offended that white parents shun the school. She just doesn't understand why.

"I love this school, and I love how they teach my kids," Ms. Diaz said in Spanish. "I wouldn't care if this school was all-white and we were the only Mexicans. As long as they treat us with respect and make sure our kids are learning."

Asked if she would feel the same way if the school were full of, say, poor black children, Ms. Diaz didn't have an answer.

The series News-Press education reporter Camilla Cohee conducted more than 100 interviews with parents, students, teachers and others to prepare this five-day report. While she spent six months combing neighborhoods, visiting schools and sorting data, this series is actually the culmination of six years spent reporting on the education beat.

How did we get here and why should we care?

MONDAY

Not all whites are leaving their neighborhood schools.

TUESDAY

Comparing the schools: Is it worth the drive?

WEDNESDAY

A family's gain goes far beyond test scores.

THURSDAY

Searching out solutions: How to reverse white flight.

Assistant Professor Stuart Sweeney of the UCSB Geography Department assisted the News-Press by using Census 2000 data to determine the number and ethnicity of children living within Santa Barbara elementary school attendance areas.

Children were categorized as either Hispanic or non-Hispanic. Each category was divided into age groups: 0-4, 5-11 and 12-17.

The "non-Hispanic" category includes whites, Asians, blacks, American Indians and other ethnic minorities.

To derive the number of white children, the News-Press docked 5 percent from the "non-Hispanic" numbers. They are, therefore, estimates.

The U.S. Census Bureau uses "Hispanic" to identify the ethnicity of individuals from Spanish-speaking countries. However News-Press style is to use the term "Latino," which refers to Spanish-surnamed people of Mexican, Central American or South American ancestry in the United States.

Citywide, whites make up about 60 percent of the population, Latinos 35 percent. Asians, blacks and other ethnic minorities make up about 5 percent.

The UCSB Geography Department, a leader in the area of geographic information science, has assisted the New-Press on a number of projects.

For more information about the department, log on to: www.geog.ucsb.edu/

For more information on Census 2000, log on to: www.census.gov.

1860s: State Legislature passes law prohibiting "Negroes, Mongolians, and Indians" from attending public schools with white students.

1896: U.S. Supreme Court case Plessy vs. Ferguson legalizes "separate but equal" schools. Separate schools for whites and blacks become a basic rule in Southern society.

1947: Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upholds a decision which ruled that "Mexican schools" were unconstitutional. At the time, most Mexicanhicano children did not attend school with whites.

1954: Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education overturns Plessy vs. Ferguson. The U.S. Supreme Court rules in a unanimous decision that the "separate but equal" clause violates the children's 14th Amendment rights by separating them solely on the basis of their skin color. Chief Justice Earl Warren delivers the court's opinion, stating that "segregated schools are not equal and cannot be made equal, and hence they are deprived of the equal protection of the laws."

1957: President Dwight D. Eisenhower sends in National Guard troops to Arkansas' Little Rock High School to protect the first black students attending with white students.

1966: Santa Barbara elementary district has 6,129 students, 61 percent of whom are white.

1971: On April 20, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the use of busing to achieve racial desegregation in schools.

1972: After years of debate, Santa Barbara schools develop and carry out a desegregation-integration plan. At the time, the elementary district, with 5,528 students, is 55 percent white. Eight of the 13 schools are either heavily white, or heavily Latino. The plan includes busing, closing two schools -- Jefferson and Garfield -- and redrawing attendance boundary lines with ethnic balance in mind. The goal is for all schools to have an ethnic breakdown within 15 percent of the district average.

1974: Protests and racial strife in Boston public schools follow a court-ordered plan to desegregate. White protesters stone buses, shout racial epithets, and hurl eggs at black students.

1972-78: At first, Santa Barbara elementary schools become more ethnically balanced because of the integration plan. Over time, white families start to leave schools in their neighborhood, and the district. By 1978, schools are less integrated than before the integration plan was enacted.

1985-2000: Santa Barbara schools continue to decline in number of white students, while districts in outlying areas increase their white populations.

Today: The Santa Barbara elementary district's nine main campuses contain 5,800 students. The district is 22 percent white and 72 percent Latino. Four of the district's campuses are 90 percent Latino or more. The district enrollment is 2 percent Asian and 2 percent black.