On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared in Brown versus the Board of Education that separate schools for blacks and whites was inherently unequal. Now, in 2004, two San Jose Unified School District board trustees are talking about what this decision has meant in their own lives, for Willow Glen schools and for the San Jose Unified School District.

Willow Glen resident and governing board trustee Carol Myers claims there is more segregation in the San Jose Unified School District today than in 1984, when the Ninth Circuit Federal Appeals Courts ordered the district to desegregate its schools, stating that it was "guilty of intentional segregation of Latino students."

Although 20 years later the courts have discharged the district of its obligations, saying it has fulfilled its court-supervised requirements, Myers said the problem still exists, only now its form has changed from racial discrimination to socioeconomic in nature.

According to Myers, only 50 percent of the 1,463 high schoolers living within the Willow Glen boundaries actually attend their neighborhood school—Willow Glen High School—while the remaining students within the district attend either private or other public high schools outside District 3, which encompasses the Willow Glen area. Data from desegregation surveys show that 296 Willow Glen youths go to performing-arts magnet Lincoln High School, 182 go to Pioneer High School and 164 travel every day to Gunderson High School, while the balance attend San Jose Academy, Leland or private schools.

"Busing didn't work back then," Myers says, talking about segregation in schools before the Brown decision. "And it doesn't work now."

Myers is worried that when students leave Willow Glen, so does parent participation, and then there is no one to advocate for better neighborhood schools. Myers is an outspoken critic of the newest parameters set by the district, a voluntary integration plan that is based on "geo-codes"—ZIP codes—that are used to determine the socioeconomic status of the students when they indicate their choice of high school.

And while 50 percent of students are leaving the Willow Glen High School boundary, this is in stark contrast, Myers says, to the 7 percent leaving the Leland High School boundary and 33 percent leaving the Pioneer High School boundary. Both of the latter two schools, located in the Almaden Valley area, are noted for having the highest Academic Performance Index (API) test scores in the district.

Yet Myers claims that the district is protecting the schools in Almaden Valley because it is an "affluent area, while Willow Glen High School ends up taking everyone else's problems."

Myers may not be pleased with the district's desegregation policies, but fellow governing board trustee Jorge González—one of the original plaintiffs in the desegregation case against the district—sees them differently.

He readily admits that for years, the district was in denial about Latino segregation. Now, he says, administrators understand the importance of desegregation and educating Latinos "because they make up 50 percent of the district."

"I believe through all the conversations, terminology and goals that have been set, now we are all really talking about it," he says. "We probably have more Latinos fulfilling graduation requirements than other districts."

González, 57, also says that a child doesn't need to get on a bus to get a quality education. According to González, all district high schools have a "comparable level of quality."

And school segregation is a issue he knows about firsthand. He emigrated from Mexico to Southern California in 1959. As a nonwhite student who spoke only Spanish, instead of attending a predominantly white, middle class junior high school that was the school closest to his home in Ventura County, he rode past it every morning on a bus to a mostly black, Latino and working-class-white junior high school.

In high school, however, he attended the school closest to his home. Only then did he realize he'd been purposely segregated during junior high. It was also during his high school years that he became more educated about Brown versus the Board of Education because of the growing African American equal rights movement. He started to read as much as he could on the issues surrounding school segregation and discovered that even though the benchmark Supreme Court decision had changed segregation on the surface, he still wasn't accepted at his high school.

"There were kids who were told by their parents not to hang around Mexicans," he says.

He remembers quickly catching up with his peers academically in high school, getting involved in sports, becoming an honor-roll student and being elected student body president. Yet even after all these accomplishments, his student government teacher took González aside one day and told him that he should go into the Army instead of college after graduating from high school.

"I had a track scholarship and was president of the student body, yet she still didn't see past my race," he says.

While he was growing up, he says, many "Caucasians" thought Mexicans were mainly just fieldworkers, living in Ventura County to pick fruit. González says that during the early 1960s, the Mexicans weren't even allowed to drive the tractors; it was a task given only to white workers.

"There was a lot of racism at that time," he says. "It made you wonder where people were coming from."

Although the Brown decision was a benchmark for equal education for all races, he says Latino students were the "invisible minority" for a long time. When his own child entered San Jose schools in the mid-1980s, González took an active role in the district by forming a Latino parents group to engage families in open discussion on educational issues.

This was the catalyst that lead him to run for a position on the San Jose Unified School Board in 1996.

"I think education is the great equalizer," he says. "Children have more potential than many people realize."

González says he wouldn't be where he is today—a school board member with a master's degree and an adjunct professor at San José State University—without the 1954 benchmark Supreme Court ruling.

"That decision opened doors for everybody," González says. "I might be a clerk in some store today if it hadn't happened."