Opinion ID: 500653
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Failure To Close or Rezone Longfellow

Text: 117 The Longfellow Middle School, located in Southwest Yonkers, has long been the Yonkers middle school with the highest percentage of minority students. In 1950, though only 12% of its students were minorities, these students constituted 41% of the City's entire minority middle school population. Housed in a relatively small facility with no outdoor recreational space, by 1969 the school had become underutilized as Burroughs Middle School was opened one mile away and the attendance zone for Longfellow shrank. The drawing of the attendance zone line between Longfellow and Burroughs decreased the number of white students attending Longfellow, and the increasing minority population of Southwest Yonkers led to increasing numbers of minority students. In 1967, Longfellow's student population was 38% minority; after the opening of Burroughs in 1969, Longfellow became 50% minority. By 1973, Longfellow had become 79% minority. 118 The combination of its disproportionately high minority student population, its inferior physical facilities, and its underutilization caused many education officials and community leaders to urge repeatedly, beginning at least as early as 1967, that Longfellow be closed. The Board rejected all proposals either to close Longfellow and transfer its students to other schools that were less heavily minority, or to expand Longfellow's attendance zone so as to achieve a desegregative influx of nonminority students. For example, in 1977, when the Board planned to close the nearby Burroughs as a middle school, the Longfellow PTA urged the Board to return to Longfellow the predominantly white area that had been rezoned from Longfellow to Burroughs in 1969; such a realignment would have made use of Longfellow's excess capacity and had a desegregative effect. The Board rejected this suggestion, deciding instead to reassign the Burroughs students--even those who lived within one mile of Longfellow--to Emerson Middle School, two miles away near the northwest corner of the City, or to Whitman Middle School, four miles away near the northeast corner of the City. Though the Board initially reached this decision while an overall school reorganization plan recommending the closing of Longfellow was under consideration, it adhered to the decision after the reorganization plan had been rejected, stating that Longfellow might still be closed. 119 Other proposals recommended closing Longfellow and reassigning its students to Mark Twain Middle School, located in the southeast corner of East Yonkers, some three miles from the site of Longfellow. The proposal had both fiscal and desegregative merit, for Twain was operating at less than its stated capacity, and it had only a 2% minority population. The Board refused, however, stating that the distance the students would have to travel to reach Twain would be too great and that Longfellow students' parents would not have the ability to carpool their children or pay for the necessary transportation. In fact, however, many students already within the Twain attendance zone were required to travel some 2 1/2 miles to school, and a one-way distance of some four miles had not deterred the Board from reassigning some Burroughs students to Whitman. Further, though the Board had arranged transportation several times in other circumstances, it made no effort to explore this possibility with respect to the proposed reassignment of Longfellow students to Twain. Finally, the net cost of providing transportation for reassigned Longfellow students would have been relatively low, both because the Board could have saved some $500,000 per year in operating and faculty costs by closing Longfellow, and because under New York law the state would have provided 90% reimbursement for transportation expenses incurred for purposes of school desegregation. 120 In sum, from the late 1960's, the Board rejected proposal after proposal for the reassignment of more white students to Longfellow or of Longfellow minority students to schools with lower percentages of minorities. It declined to desegregate Longfellow on the ground that the school might be closed; but Longfellow was not closed, even in 1976 when the City's well publicized fiscal crisis required the Board to close several schools. At the time this suit was commenced, Longfellow remained in inferior physical facilities, operated at 31-40% of its capacity, and had a minority population of 94%.