Palm Beach Desegregation Strategy Falls Short

By Peter Schmidt

The Palm Beach County, Fla., school system is rethinking its experiment with a novel desegregation strategy: exempting integrated new housing developments from forced busing.

The approach has proved far less effective than hoped, district officials said last week, adding that it likely will be overhauled or abandoned.

The 127,000-student district had sought to promote the racial integration of housing and schools through the use of "interlocal agreements" between the school system, local communities, and housing developers. The pacts provided that, as long as new housing developments met certain racial-integration guidelines, the children of their residents would be exempted from the district's mandatory-busing program and...