METCO officials call for funding increase

METCO officials call for funding increase

David G. Yosifon

The state of Massachusetts, acting Governor Paul Celluci announced last week, has a $1 billion budget surplus. Though there are a number of competing plans on how to spend the windfall, a modest chunk of it will likely be returned to taxpayers in the form of tax cuts, the rest will be spent on capital projects, and new expenditures for innovative or long-proven programs.

Once again though, not for METCO.

The Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, the 32-year-old voluntary school desegregation program which sends students of color from Boston and Springfield to suburban schools, has received no increase in its $12 million budget for the last decade. With inflation figured in, the METCO program has suffered increasingly debilitating cuts each of the last ten years.

With Beacon Hill bobbing in gravy this year METCO officials hoped finally to receive a significant increase. No such luck. The state House's budget again level funds the program at about $12 million, and the state Senate's buget offers a mere 3 percent increase. The final appropriation will likely be somewhere between the zero and 3 percent figures.

Jean McGuire, METCO's long time executive director, says the legislature has reneged on promises repeatedly made to her during lean budget years that things would get better when the economy did.

"Every year they have told us wait until things get better, wait until things get better," McGuire said. "Now there is a surplus, so what's the problem?"

"They pump money into a glam-our-slammer instead of funding education," she says, referring to the state's new prison next to the Roxbury exit of Interstate 93. "It tells you what they really want for black and Latino kids."

McGuire is frustrated that the state has been committing funds to experimental educational programs, such as school choice and charter schools, instead of expanding existing programs like METCO that have long and successful track records.

And the experimental programs, McGuire says, have been more lavishly funded than METCO. The state reimburses participating suburban school districts about $3100 for each METCO student, all of whom are minorities, that the district accepts. School Choice Districts, meanwhile, get $5000 for each student they receive -- and 90 percent of School Choice participants are white.

"You can have innovation without ripping off a successful program that we know works," she said.

One of the difficulties in getting the legislature to commit more funds to METCO, according to John Shandorf, assitant director of METCO, is that while the program is funded by all the state's taxpayers, only seven of the Commonwealth's 56 senators hail from districts that participate in the program.

Of course, METCO operatives are more than willing to expand their operations beyond the 37 suburban districts it currently serves and set up similar programs in other parts of the state -- but they would need a significant budget increase to do so.

METCO was created in 1966 as a program to voluntarily ease racial segregation both in city schools, which are populated by students of color in far greater numbers than their proportion in the city as a whole, and in suburban schools which often have few if any black or Latino students at all.

The program buses black children, and since the early 1990s Latinos and Asians as well, to suburban schools in the hopes that both those traveling and the host community will benefit from the racial, cultural, and geographical exchange.

Over the years politicians and commentators have come to discuss METCO primarily as a mechanism through which a handful of lucky minority students can escape the Boston public schools and enjoy a safe and quality education in the suburbs without moving there, which most poor families could never afford to do.

The program is extremely popular, and very difficult to get into. There are 3,300 students currently enrolled in METCO, and about 14,000 African Americans currently on waiting lists. According to Shandorf, if a parent wants his child to go to METCO from the first grade they had better sign the child up right around the time it is born. For Latinos it is slightly easier to get in, and METCO actually recruits Asians to participate.

There are no academic entrance requirements to get into METCO, and the program is fully available to most specials needs students.

McGuire insists that voluntary desegregation and cultural exchange remains the foremost purpose of the program, and so she is frustrated when politicians argue that METCO's funding should not be increased because the Boston Public School's will soon be improved and the program will become unnecessary.

While METCO students and their parents may not always be motivated by this racial exchange agenda, the program seems to achieve its desired effect anyway. A 1997 study, which came out of Harvard University's Civil Rights Project, found that 88 percent of surveyed students said their primary interest in participating in the program was to receive a better education than they would in the Boston Public Schools.

About 26 percent said their most important reason for participating was the opportunity to experience a new environment and meet new people, and 22 percent said it was to experience different cultures.

The same study though found that more than 90 percent of METCO students surveyed said they had "good" or "excellent" experiences learning to get along with people from different backgrounds. The study stressed that the students indicated that "getting along" did not necessarily mean becoming close friends but rather indicated an ability "to cope and co-exist in a white environment."

While there are a number of studies like the Civil Rights Project's, McGuire said that a fuller picture of METCO's success and impact would have to assess the attitudes of white students in the suburban schools, since the program is as much about their attitudes and perceptions as it is about black students from the city.

McGuire's tough rhetoric about the state's failure to commit new resources to METCO is echoed by John Bryant, president of the METCO Parent's Council.

"We have gone the politically correct route of appealing to the consciousness of the state to do the right thing," Bryant said. "Now we are considering a class-action lawsuit."

Bryant said his parents group is considering suing the state on the grounds that it fails to provide METCO students with important educational opportunities, such as access to extra-curricular and after-school programs, which other students at the schools that METCO kids attend are afforded.

As many as two-thirds of METCO schools, according to Bryant, have had to cut transportation budgets to the point where they can no longer provide late buses to bring students back to the city in the evening, when after-school programs are through.

And the cuts run deep than just transportation for after-school programs. METCO was never designed as a simple busing arrangement -- a central element to the program has always been providing councilors and seminars to help both city and suburban students better understand each others backgrounds. Special METCO tutors have also traditionally helped Boston students get up to speed in suburban schools that often move at a faster academic pace than the Boston public schools at which students previously studied.

As METCO's budget has stagnated over the last decade, fifteen councilors have been reduced to four, seminars have been virtually eliminated, and tutors have been cut in the host district, according to Bryant.

"It's just not enough to get kids out to the suburbs to sit next to a white kid in class," said Bryant. "Little by little the program is being destroyed. It's like their saying this year I'm going to cut off your toes, then you hands, then your legs, and then next year we're going to see if you can leap over these hurdles," Bryant said.

Reflecting on Martin Luther King Jr.'s admonition that civil rights strides have only been made when grassroots activism is combined with legal challenges in the courts, Bryant said his organization is "very close" to filing a lawsuit against the state on behalf of METCO students.

"It appears there needs to be some higher authority to intervene," Bryant said.