University of Virginia Library

'Soundings'

Lane Replacements Planned

By John Casteen

The Charlottesville school
board's plan to replace Lane High
School with two high schools deserves
more critical attention than
it has yet received, especially from
the University community. The
proposal is to build one school on
the north side of the route 250
bypass adjacent to McIntyre Park
and the other on a tract near Forest
Hills Park, off Cherry Avenue. Each
school would enroll between 1000
and 1200 pupils, and both would
offer essentially the same courses.

This plan is suspect for several
reasons, not the least of which is
that it seems dangerously likely to
extend rather than prevent racial
separatism in the schools. It is
important to remember in this regard
that Charlottesville's overall
record on school integration is not
altogether good, and that a large
part of the city's white population
still opposes school integration. In
1958, as part of Virginia's ill-considered
"massive resistance" to integration,
Charlottesville's schools
were closed. Since 1958, Rock Hill
Academy, a private, all-white
school founded to circumvent
school integration, has operated in
apparent prosperity, with more
than a few of Charlottesville's elite
sending their all-white children to a
protected all-white school. The
public schools have successfully integrated
(with prodding from the
federal government), but the private
alternative and the hostile
climate that gives it life continue to
be viable forces in local education.

With this background, school
location is an important matter,
especially when two schools are
proposed to replace one. A northside
school will tend by virtue of
its location to serve the city's relatively
plush, all-white northern
and western suburbs. It will enroll a
few Negroes from the Preston
Avenue-Rose Hill Drive area, but
only a few. A south-side school, by
contrast, will tend to serve the
black community in the downtown
area, on the northeast of the University,
and on Ridge Street, along
with the middle-class and lower
middle-class white neighborhoods
along Cherry, Belmont, and Jefferson
Park Avenues. Both schools
would undoubtedly be integrated,
but one school would tend to become
upper middle-class and white
while the other would tend to
become lower middle-class and
mixed. More to the point, though,
Negro children from the city's
poorer sections would be kept
pretty much together while whites
from the better sections would be
together in another place.

There is, of course, reason to
doubt that a total high school
enrollment of 2000-2500 justifies
two high schools. Virginia's larger
cities have for many years operated
schools of about this size without
difficulty, and Charlottesville itself
now operates only one high school.
Previously, there were two high
schools, Lane and Burley. Burley,
the Negro high school, was phased
out when the city and the county
(which had operated it together)
opted for single-school operations.
It stands to reason that a larger
school can offer a wider range of
subjects, operate a more extensive
library, and take advantage of a
larger, more flexible campus or
building. It stands to reason also
that two identical smaller schools
will frequently overlap services and
cost more for duplicated administrative
and maintenance staffs;
they will also tend to offer less
extensive ranges of subjects simply
because they will have smaller
faculties, libraries and physical
plants.

The school board has offered
several reasons for wanting two
schools, and many of them make
good sense to knowledgeable
educators. The board's reasons have
nothing to do with separating the
races; they are practical reasons.
One is the possibility of merger
with Albemarle County. As a
reason, however, this is weak stuff.
If Charlottesville builds two
schools, and if there is then a
merger, the new city will have not
two schools clustered together, but
three, because Albemarle High
School is just west of the city on
Hydraulic Road. If possible merger
is a factor, it makes better sense to
operate one school in the present
city and plan to build additional
schools in west and north Albemarle
County where population is
growing rapidly. Another reason for
two high schools is that the city
already operates two junior high
schools, each of which is near one
proposed high school location. But
junior high schools are less complex
than high school location. But
junior high schools are less complex
than high schools, requiring less
specialized faculties, libraries, and
plants, and serving younger
students who perhaps need to be
closer to their homes. Simply that
there are already two junior high
schools is no reason for there to be
two high schools.

No one denies that Lane is
overcrowded and somewhat dated;
it obviously needs to be replaced or
extensively changed. And no one
asserts that the idea of two schools
is categorically bad; there may well
be good reasons, not yet reported
in the press, to subdivide the high
school population. But two schools
are a dangerous idea, especially in a
town with Charlottesville's history
and social make-up. The school
board would undoubtedly try to
draw school boundaries which
would integrate both schools, although
the city's population distribution
would tend to maximize
black enrollment in one school and
minimize it in the other. The school
board would probably not fall back
on the now exhausted gimmick of
"freedom-of-choice." Its recent record
relative to school integration is
a healthy one which deserves praise
and respect.

Lane High School, as now constituted,
is a strong force toward
inter-racial cooperation and understanding.
Its students and faculty
are obviously trying hard to make a
strange new experience work for
both blacks and whites. To go back
to the old way of gerrymandering
boundaries, to risk reseparation of a
school population that has finally begun to draw together - especially
when the school system is
small enough to permit a single high
school - strikes me as a very sad
prospect.