In a school district that serves over 95,000 families from kindergarten through twelfth grade across 37 zip codes, there will be diversity in our classrooms. At my coastal high school, one out of every four students will take the bus to school from far outside the school’s attendance boundary, highlighting the joys and challenges of inhabiting many different communities. Schools and teachers must be mindful of the struggle of traversing the county to go to school, and find ways to support students when their struggles manifest in the classroom or on the athletic field.
Ximena is one such student who has walked the delicate balance between home and school community.
Ximena, a student in my ninth grade English class, decided that after her first year of high school, she wanted to be part of the school community in more than the coming-and-going way she had been until that point. She hadn’t taken risks like that before, but decided along with her best friend that they would audition for the cheer team. We printed her application at lunch and filmed her routine until she felt audition-ready. Her brother would pick her up after work that day since she’d miss the school bus, and the city bus to her side of town wouldn’t run that late.
She was brave to audition and her chances were slim, because somehow the only girls who ever make cheer are those raised down the street, whose parents donate to the school association and sell pizza at football games. Ximena didn’t have a chance, but I still pretended to be shocked when she didn’t make the team.
Among other reasons Ximena may not have made the team, she barely cleared the 2.00 GPA requirement and had accrued excessive absences and truancies, sometimes being marked absent for 2-3 weeks at a time without any documented reason.
When you actually talked to Ximena, though, all of these things were explainable: she was a big sister to a new infant and her mom was dealing with serious postpartum depression; Ximena was waking up in the middle of the night to feed the new baby and handling drop-off and pick-up of her two elementary-aged cousins that also lived in her household. She lives far outside the attendance boundary for our high school, and has “choiced in” to the neighborhood since middle school, where her mom decided that it was more important for Ximena to receive a good education than to be tempted by “poor choices” and “bad influences” at the middle school and high school that served her zip code.
This is a common belief in some neighborhoods of San Diego Unified School District, where taking a bus to a school outside one’s attendance area has been relatively common for students in the district since 1977, when court decisions required 23 schools to be systematically diversified, as their enrollment showed clear segregation by race.
The district has existed since 1854, where it began as a one-room schoolhouse in central San Diego.
The district has evolved over the last 170 years to a network of 117 elementary schools, 24 middle schools, and 17 high schools, which serve 95,000 students and their families. These schools serve a vast array of communities across San Diego, and while there have been some fluctuations, racial boundaries have not changed much since 1977 when courts mandated desegregation (23 years after Brown vs. Board of Education asked school districts to make these moves with “all deliberate speed”).
San Diego Unified’s response to these mandates was to introduce a program that bused almost 10 percent of students in the district outside their neighborhood schools, sending white students to Southeast San Diego schools that typically served black and brown students, attracting them to these schools with unique magnet programs, and sending black and brown students to coastal schools that served majority white populations until that point.
This busing program has experienced some changes over the years, but the premise remains: anywhere from 8,000-10,000 students across San Diego Unified get on a school bus each morning to ride to school 40 minutes outside their neighborhood, and take that bus back to their neighborhood each evening, ready to do it all again the next day.
The program was once lottery based, but beginning in the 2019-20 school year, it became a School Choice for All opportunity, where any family could apply to any school area in the district.
Most of the movement occurs out of neighborhoods in southeast San Diego and into coastal and northern neighborhoods, perhaps subconsciously enforcing the idea that something is inherently wrong with your neighborhood school if you live south of the 8 Freeway.
Ximena is one of four hundred students whose families have made the difficult choice to leave their neighborhood and come to my high school.
One in every four students in my classes had a much longer trek to school that morning, and will have a much longer trek home that evening. They are limited in the extracurricular activities in which they can participate, because they must be able to make the late bus home, which is only as late as 5:00pm.
They are limited in what they can participate in in their own communities, because for half of the school year, by the time they get home, it’s well past dark.
What many of these families sacrifice for a better opportunity for their children is the ability to participate in anything extra, and that can result in a lack of connection to both the school community and the home community. It is a difficult choice to move out of one’s neighborhood school, but I believe families make the best choices they can for their children.
I believe students want to make the best they can out of any situation. When our students take the bus every morning, sometimes arriving to school late or getting home late by no fault of their own, it is really difficult for them to participate in any extracurricular activities. One potential solution could be broadening access to clubs and even intramural sports during the school day, so students have a wide range of opportunities to connect with their peers at school, maximizing the hours they spend on campus and growing that connection to school. The psychological benefits of being involved are significant: a study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health found that students who play team sports in grades 8 through 12 have less stress and better mental health as young adults.
I believe teachers already do the best they can to provide a warm and inclusive environment that helps students to feel connected to their school community, but we can always try even harder to include students who overcome barriers that may be invisible to us, like their mode of transportation to school.
Students bring a wealth of knowledge from their home and personal lives, and it’s even more important to leverage those personal experiences in the classroom when there is such a diversity of experiences from which all students can learn and appreciate.
All students, regardless of where they live and how long their commute to school is, deserve to feel connected, supported, and safe at school.
Credits:
Created with images by Hanvizi - "school bus" • coachwood - "Two teams of cheerleaders standing on the tsideling cheering during football game" • Alberto GV PHOTOGRAP - "bus on the road school yellow sky orange Miami Florida usa " • Chet Wiker - "An offensive player with the ball is being chased by the defense. Girls varsity lacrosse game in early Spring in Upstate NY." • Angelov - "Little girl standing by a big school bus door with her pink backpack."