SCHOOL BUS

Desegregation to teachers...

By Karen R. Long

After the buses make their trips across town and the pupils enter their homerooms, roughly 4,500 Cleveland teachers will start the school year:

The teachers say that what happens in the classroom not on the buses will determine whether desegregation succeeds.

In interviews in the last several weeks, teachers divided into two camps on their approach to desegregation: colorblind or colorsensitive.

Carl E. Locke, a teacher at John Marshall High School who was involved in desegregation in Tennessee, takes the colorblind approach.

"We deal with students as students," he said. "We don't see colors, we see students. Whoever

is in the classroom we'll teach. We have a job to get done."

Wiltha J. Morrow, a security guard at John F. Kennedy High School, said, "Children are children. If the parents leave them alone, the kids will be fine."

But some teachers called this approach naive. "People have to realize there are differences," said JFK history teacher Julia C. Beckham. "When you are raised in a racist society, you can't help but be tinged by racism. And teachers project their attitudes in the classroom."

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Ms. Beckham said Cleveland teachers need human relations training how to be consistent in discipline and fair in a classroom where pupils' abilities have already been marred by unequal education.

But Locke said neither workshops nor leaflets can change bad attitudes.

Teacher Ann Breil said she thinks well-meaning teachers can avoid costly classroom mistakes by being aware of language differences.

For instance, punk in white English means hoodlum. Punk in black English means homosexual.

"I've seen white teachers call boys punk and then wonder why the kids go crazy," Ms. Breil said.

One person who used her classroom to allay racial fears is Linda E. Perez, a second grade teacher at Iowa Maple Elementary School.

While teaching at the now-closed Paul Bellamy Elementary School, Ms. Perez said she turned a namecalling incident into a exercise among children.

She had her pupils sit cross-legged in a circle on the floor, sat down with them and began asking individuals what they liked and about their family.

"You'd be surprised what comes out in relaxed situations," Ms. Perez said. "Kids arrive at the conclusion themselves that they are very similar.

"I told them the story of the 'Beautiful Black Princess.' They had never heard a black fairy tale. I said, 'Yes, there really are black princesses,' and then we'd talk about Africa. They were amazed."

Getting high school pupils to relax their racial suspicions is much harder, teachers said.

Michael F. Charney, a teacher at Franklin D. Roosevelt Junior High School, said a school with a racially mixed student body often

is still segregated.

"When I was teaching at South High five or six years ago, all the cafeteria tables were segregated," he said. "A whole system of blackwhite tends to grow up. Tennis tends to be white, for example, and basketball tends to be black."

To crack these barriers, Charney is trying to set up interracial peer groups in the desegregating schools. He wants to reach the leaders among football players, drill team members and even the dope-smoking circle with programs to help pupils accept each other.

He noticed at South High that the fundamentalist Christians did the best job of ignoring race: Those black and white pupils could talk together about Jesus.

"It's much more complicated that

just getting the kids to school safely the first day," Charney said.

For her part, Ms. Breil plans to use an alphabetical seating chart to prevent pupils from segregating themselves in her history classes.

Locke characterized the Marshall staff as apprehensive of the wholesale change this September but willing to try it.

Teachers have a ways to go, Charney said. "Even the teachers' cafeterias tend to be fairly well segregated," he admitted.

Ms. Beckham predicted a healthy side effect to the increased scrutiny of Cleveland schools this fall.

"A lot of people in Cleveland schools don't really teach," she said. "People are going to have to clean up their acts very quickly. And I think that's great."