When I was 9 years old, I left my father’s Interbay rental every day at 7:30 a.m. and trudged to the top of Queen Anne Hill, where I caught an orange school bus on a silent, tree-lined street. The bus was filled with white public school students, and the journey southward was 12 miles, taking me through downtown and Georgetown and then up to Cleveland High School atop Beacon Hill. At Cleveland, the older kids were dropped off. Then the bus turned back northward for a short ride to Beacon Hill’s Maple Elementary School, where it dropped off some of the younger kids. After that came a somewhat longer ride north to my own elementary school, Kimball, where the rest of us got off. It took an hour to get me to school, all told, and along the way I would read Gary Paulsen or anthropomorphize container cranes. When the bus door opened at Kimball, I stepped out onto a stark concrete playground. From other buses, other kids would emerge. There on the playground we pooled: Vietnamese kids from South Beacon Hill, black kids from the Central District, rich kids from Mount Baker, poor kids from Rainier Valley, and more white kids from Interbay. It was as diverse as downtown Seattle but with one key difference: We interacted.
In total, 10 of my 13 years in Seattle Public Schools involved long rides on a school bus. Between the ages of 6 and 9 alone, I logged thousands of miles looking at the city from a green vinyl seat. This is true for thousands of Seattleites. Seattle Public Schools used busing from the late 1970s through the mid-2000s in the hopes of achieving racial integration. To give just one snapshot of the program’s breadth: In 1980, mandatory busing involved 12,000 of the district’s 54,000 students.
These days, when I tell my busing history to the white and usually privileged around me, most have no idea that Seattle once prioritized integrating schools.