Ten O'Clock News; Voluntary school desegregation in Lowell

[muffled speech] [muffled speech] [Reporter] This was Boston 1976. This is what Lowell didn't want: mandatory desegregation ordered and run by the courts. A plan that forced black and white kids to ride buses to faraway schools. A plan that tore up the city. Instead Lowell is opting for a voluntary version of desegregation: central enrollment, where kids choose three schools they'd like to attend and they board the buses voluntarily. [Robert Kennedy] Frankly the facts are that if the school committee hadn't acted responsibly, the alternative was that we would roll back the city of Lowell's efforts 15 years like Boston and would have a federal judge in here. That's the alternative. [Reporter] Central enrollment works in concert with the magnet school concept. Different schools offer specialized programs to entice pupils out of their own neighborhoods and onto buses by choice. Almost as a byproduct, the system ends up racially balanced. It's a

plan that's been working well for seven years now in Cambridge. [Peter Colleary] Choice is part of the reason for our success, that people are able to pick more than one school and then they have some choice of where they want to go. In Boston you are placed in a school. [Reporter] Peter Colleary is the man with the keys to the big computer in Cambridge. He ultimately matches all students with their first, second, or third choice schools. And while some schools have gone from 9 percent minority enrollment to 43 percent since 1981, it turns out students are more than willing to choose schools far from home. [Colleary] We found out here with central registration that 65 percent of our children do not go to schools in their own district. At least 50 percent pick schools that are not in the district. [Reporter] Why? [Colleary] Because they want programs. [Reporter] There are differences between Cambridge and Lowell. Cambridge owns many of its own buses now and half the drivers work for the city. Cambridge's success has made it a national

model from San Jose, California to Little Rock, Arkansas. [Visitor] --teachers unionized? [Colleary] Yes. [Reporter] Today a delegation from Rochester, New York took notes here before starting their own voluntary desegregation plan. [Visitor 2] --system ahead of the waiting list because they were already there and dragged down? [Reporter] But up in Lowell, some see the Cambridge model as nothing more than a back door way of duplicating Boston's mandatory desegregation plan. [George Kouloheras] Centralized enrollment is a euphemism for forced busing. I'm opposed to it because I feel it doesn't do anything to the children socially or academically. [Colleary] Thirty five percent of the students are bussed, but you can't call it forced bussing because if people pick schools not in their district, then we have to bus them to go to those other programs. So you can't say it is a forced busing, it's a busing almost by choice. [Reporter] It's a lot easier to sell something if people already want to buy it and Cambridge kids were getting a good education long before voluntary desegregation started. In a way

every school here is a magnet. Cambridge may be a national model but not every place can be Cambridge. For the 10 O'Clock News I'm Christy George.