A Chance for Boston Schools

Today in the School Committee elections Bostonians face a clear choice between progress and stagnation. Mrs. Louise Day Hicks and her confederates William O'Connor and Thomas Eisenstadt propose to ignore the fact that Negro enrollment rose by 1900 last year, and white enrollment fell by 1500; they encourage the belief that all Negro children can be crammed into Roxbury's ancient schools.

While some 300 Roxbury parents are scraping the bottom of the barrel to bus their children out of ghetto schools, the School Committee coolly sanctions overcrowding in Roxbury--and in white Charlestown. While white neighborhood schools accept Operation Exodus peacefully, the Hicks alliance refuses to heed this lesson.

Mrs. Hicks and Co. are now sitting on $29 million in construction funds, raised by a 1963 bond issue. They are ostensibly engaged in looking for a site for the new Boston English High School--while an ample, centrally-located, available site in Roxbury stares them in the face.

Hicks, O'Connor, and Eisenstadt ignore the new Massachusetts Racial Imbalance Law. Their fellow incumbent Joseph Lee proposes to comply with it by shipping Negro children out to suburban school systems.

Only Arthur Gartland among the incumbents has stuck out his neck in favor of innovation. He has voted for the Roxbury site for Boston English, he has voted to recognize the problem of de facto segregation, he has voted to set immediate plans in motion for complying with the state Racial Imbalance Bill. He is joined on these issues by his four fellow candidates of the Citizens for Boston Schools: Melvin King, Velia Dicesare, John F. X. Gaquin, and George H. Parker, King, a Negro and a Roxbury social worker, would at long last give ghetto residents a voice in school planning.

Gartland and King, at least, have a chance of getting elected. The CRIMSON strongly supports all five of the Citizens' candidates.