Standing P.A.T.

"I don't care," said eleven-year-old Ann Marie Dark. "My parents do." Ann was one of 148 students transferred, for reasons of racial balance, from a New York City junior high that has been 95% white to a school whose pupils have been 71% Negro and Puerto Rican. Her parents are members of P.A.T. (Parents and Taxpayers), a group of New York City citizens, almost all of them white, who are determined to block the Board of Education's experimental program for breaking down de facto segregation. Getting the school year off to an angry start, they stunned the nation's largest system with its third massive boycott in eight months.

New York City's public schools have 1,000,000 students, 43% of them Negro and Puerto Rican and the rest white. More than 275,000 students stayed home on the first day of last week's boycott, as 2,000 sign-waving pickets ("We'd rather fight than switch") massed at 125 schools; on the second day the number slipped to 233,000. During Negro-led boycotts last February and March, aimed at pressuring the school board into desegregation, 464,000 and 268,000-students stayed out.

School Board President James Donovan, who had angrily opposed the Negro-staged boycotts and suffered much criticism from civil-righters as a result, announced that he would ask district attorneys to investigate whether all three boycotts were criminal conspiracies to violate the state's compulsory education law. Yet some Negro leaders were talking of new counter-boycotts, and whites were planning a march on city hall.

Superintendent of Schools Calvin Gross denounced it all as a "perfectly preposterous game in which everyone plays to see who can damage education most by saying they are attempting to improve it." But the P.A.T. protest proved that Negro militants no longer hold an exclusive franchise on pressuring school officials through destructive boycotts, and the argument over school desegregation has thereby reached the hottest point yet. Moreover, with both Senate candidates, Republican Kenneth Keating and Democrat Bobby Kennedy, cautiously lining up with the whites, the embattled Board of Education has lost political support.

Still, after the boycott, most of the newly transferred white and Negro students went peaceably to school. Pledged Superintendent Gross: "We are going ahead with our plans without the slightest change."

-All New York City boycott totals include a presumed 100,000 legitimately absent.

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