Bussing in the 1980s
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Austin has its own experience with the program of bussing, or moving students and teachers from one school to another. Running from Fall 1981 to Spring 1987, teachers and students from the more wealthy west-of-35 schools were moved into the less wealthy East Austin schools like Metz Elementary and Blackshear and vice versa. Lupe Ramos, a teacher trained in bilingual education, remembers the earliest days of this program in Austin when she taught at Sunset Valley and later Metz Elementary.
Metz, Ramos recalls, was paired with Barrington Elementary. What she remembers most from this time is not the interactions between teachers or the politics of the situation, but the joy of seeing the children together, and:
“...learning from each other, respecting each other. I think there was more learning from the children themselves. It seemed like there were the adults that had all these preconceived notions and myths that continued…[a former student] said that she felt that during bussing is when she learned, that she loved that part as a child. And maybe that would be somebody int he future, maybe you can talk to about bussing and how that affected children. I know that I don’t remember after that how children were affected because it didn't help the achievement gap. That’s one thing that it didn’t help.”
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From Ramos’ own account, the benefits were largely emotional, or non-quantifiable, which may have played a role in the later elimination of the bussing program. A 1980 article in The Austin Citizen also focuses on the emotional aspect of bussing on the children. Quotes from students and statements like, “The red haired youngster… seemed perfectly comfortable with his east Austin classmates,” emphasize some sort of unity among the children, regardless of difference.
However, the same cannot be said for all bussing participants, as Ramos remembers the divide between the teachers of Metz and the “Anglo” teachers from west Austin. Focusing on bilingualism at Metz, Ramos talks of how oftentimes the transplanted teachers did not have the ability or desire to help retain the children’s first language. She describes the pairing as a “mismatch” and people’s lack of desire to change their own perspectives. In her own words:
“They wanted the children in English, you know what I mean? And when some of us were pushing back saying, ‘No, we can have it both ways.’ They can learn English at the same time that they’re learning Spanish, so that’s where the conflict was, going back to dual-language.”
Such incidents with bussing and this patronising outlook towards Metz may be linked to the overall attitude of the Austin Independent School District towards Metz and other East Austin schools. When Ramos links the bussing program to the broken promises AISD gave after the end bussing to Metz and other “Priority Schools,” such as more administration, it’s clear that to some faculty the reactions to the bussing program and its non-quantitative developments were linked to a larger problems between Metz Elementary and AISD.
Furthermore, Mary S. Black notes in her doctoral thesis on Mexican-American parent parent involvement that parents suing AISD saw the response by AISD as not just disappointment with quantitative results. Instead, they argued in court after the end of bussing in the spring of 1987 argued that the post-bussing landscape of school assingments held onto to pre-bussing segregationist thought and placed minority students like those at Metz at a disadvantage as a now (1987) 98% Mexican-American school.
Notably, there is less material to work with when talking about the bussing program at Metz Elementary. These large gaps in material may tell another story about how this time is looked back on. Is it a period of time that produced few objects, or is the bussing program and its ‘failure’ something which is deliberately unrecorded? These answers are just some of the possibilities for why so little about this program and its impact on Metz remains.