An April 13 Stranger feature by public school teacher Sean Riley led to some very heartfelt reminiscences about the days when Seattle schools were better integrated through busing.
An April 13 Stranger feature by public school teacher Sean Riley led to some very heartfelt reminiscences about the days when Seattle's public schools were better integrated through busing. DAVE VALEZA

If you missed Seattle public school teacher Sean Riley's great feature on how this city gave up on busing and allowed its schools to become alarmingly resegregated—well, you gotta go read it.

But the comments it inspired are also fascinating and worth your time.

In addition to some thoughtful arguments over how best to re-integrate Seattle schools, there are a number of heartfelt reminiscences about what it was like to be bussed in Seattle back before we abandoned that policy.

Maybe I'm partial to these stories because I was bused around Seattle, too, as a public school student. But I think anyone interested in the past and future of public education in this city should check them out. (Especially with a mayoral education summit coming right up.)

From Slog commenter AutumnES:

I too am a beneficiary of the busing program in Seattle. As a student in the 80's and 90's I attended schools like Van Asselt, Sacajawea, McGilvra, and in junior high Eckstein and high school at Garfield. I met so many different kids from all different walks of life. I had friends from all over the world. My best friends were descended from India, Mexico and more. As a child of mixed colour I never felt isolated as a person of colour in my classes or in my school. And the notion of the world being a cultural mosaic was easily engrained in my conscious and being. Ultimately integration allowed me to feel comfortable with people of all races. I had lots of varied friends that today I am still in contact with. Had there not been integration, I would never have had the same experiences or opportunities. As a poor child of the Black Community busing providing me with meeting individuals that came from elite backgrounds as well as poor kids like me. The opportunity provided me to see what else the world had to offer outside of the Black Community, and everyday as we drove past the many different neighbourhoods and districts I got to see more of what Seattle had to offer. I am definitely a better person for my experiences as a youngster and I hope that Seattle will take up its own programming again and reintegrate to create opportunities for students of all races.

From Slog commenter Kalakalot:

Another beneficiary of Seattle Public Schools busing here. I moved to Seattle from an even whiter place (Olympia) in 11th grade. I wanted to go to Garfield because of the music program, and attending a diverse high school was probably the single most formative experience of this white girl's adolescence. If I hadn't gone to an integrated school in a historically black neighborhood, I probably wouldn't know what it feels like to be the only person of your race on a bus, or in a store, or in a restaurant. I wouldn't have gone to class with a guy who lived a in waterfront mansion and a guy who lived in a van. I wouldn't have seen how the local cops always seemed to find a reason to hassle the black kids but left the white and Asian kids alone. I'm a better person for it.

From Slog commenter Constantine Singer:

Thank you. I grew up on Queen Anne and was bused to South End schools my entire career—Whitworth Elementary, Southshore Middle, and Franklin High—from 1977 through 1990.

I cannot agree with you more strongly. I loved bussing. I loved the bus. I loved the schools. I loved my experience. I loved being a part of a city that wasn't all the same. I loved learning with and from people from different perspectives and it has informed my choices throughout later life.

I teach in a comprehensive High School in South Los Angeles now, where our students are 70% Latino, 30% Black, and 100% poor. A very few of my students have seen life outside of Watts for any length of time and even fewer have truly interacted with those with different experiences (I've had multiple students tell me wistfully that they've always wanted a white friend).

I live in one of the few racially and economically diverse areas of Los Angeles (though gentrification is taking its inexorable toll), and am blown away by those I meet who think that, somehow they are better off living in "safe" areas where they are able to not be afraid. I wonder why they feel like that and then I remember: In Seattle, in the 1970's and 1980's, integration worked and we had a small generation that was raised without fear of the other.

What a sad loss.

Not everyone responded this way, of course. Slog commenter Seastars:

I don't disagree that my white daughter, in fact a student of author Riley's, misses out on cross-cultural communication opportunities by attending a largely white school in a largely white, middle-class neighborhood. (This is the same school whose PTA offered a "White Trash Tea Party" for the 2013 school auction - the Blaine PTA saw nothing racist/classist and didn't cancel the offering until the Stranger reported on the issue. Ignorant privilege is rampant in Magnolia.) But I'm so grateful that my daughter's NOT bussed. I was, in the 1970s in Lynchburg, VA, for more than two hours daily—under district desegregation requirements, I wasn't allowed to attend my already-too-white neighborhood school. Forty years later, my daughter walks four blocks to her school and thus has 2-3 hours per day available for extracurricular education. Bussed kids like I was can't enjoy after-school playdates with classmates, violin lessons, or daily swim team practice. They are perhaps gaining cultural empathy (while gabbing, napping or being bullied; I remember endlessly reading), but at high cost to family time and their nonacademic interests. I guess like many liberal Seattleites, I favor diversity, but not with a price of my taxes or time.

And Slog commenter Guyinjeep16:

Growing up in Ballard in the late 80's and getting bussed to Cleveland High School in South Seattle was an amazing waste of time for our entire family and was really hard on my single mother trying to raise two children by herself. I did not know one family at the time that liked being bussed to another part of the city. I was really shocked to see the comments so in favor of bussing.

I had friends that were African American, Hindu, Asian, right there in Ballard. I was separated from these childhood friends who got to go to Ballard High School, just down the street. Riding on a bus just so I could sit on a bus with other white students? Absolutely ridiculous.

Wasting two hours a day waiting for busses and sitting on roads breathing in exhaust fumes is just not something I think should be dealt with for families who don't want to deal with it.

If we want to integrate then lets do it by creating neighborhoods which can promote that type of diversity.

I just had a conversation again recently with friends and family and we heartily laughed at how utterly ridiculous it was to waste so much time sitting on a bus, and how difficult it made our lives at time.
Then the laughing even got more intense as we remembered that we had all kids of races right there in Ballard, whom I grew up with, that we no longer got to see on a regular basis.

So here is a big no vote for bussing people around the city in the name of diversity.

More comments here.