Death by Drowning

When the doors of northwest Miami's Orchard Villa Elementary School swung open last month, only 18 pupils trooped in. Rattling about in the nearly empty school, which had been built to accommodate 430, were 14 whites and four Negroes, whose mingling was part of Florida's first attempt at integration. Last week the Dade County school board took action toward ending even that trickle of integration--not, as has happened in other Southern communities, by damming it up, but rather by drowning it out.

Although 67 white children in the Orchard Villa district had been transferred to segregated schools elsewhere, parents of the remaining 14 were generally satisfied with the integrated setup; indeed, with so few pupils, their children were getting far more attention than those in other schools. But that, said the school board, was too costly, and so it voted to relieve overcrowding at nearby, all-Negro Holmes School by assigning more than 100 Negro children to Orchard Villa, along with Negro teachers to replace the white staff. Seven white children were withdrawn from the school, and the others seemed likely to follow. If the school board, as expected, opens Orchard Villa to all Negro children in the neighborhood, Florida's barely begun integration experiment could be swamped right out.

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