Govt. Delays $262,000 For Busing Study

Harvard's request for federal funds to study and subsidize Operation Exodus may be in trouble.

Parents from Exodus--which buses hundreds of Boston's Negro students from their neighborhoods to less crowded, predominately white schools -- and researchers from Harvard will spend the next two days in Washington trying to find out just how much opposition there is and defending the project.

They will confer today with Office of Education officials who are studying the $262,105 proposal. Tomorrow, at a meeting arranged by Sen. Edward Kennedy, they will talk to Commissioner of Education Harold Howe II.

Under the proposal, Exodus would subcontract with Harvard for the duration of the study (at least a year) and receive money to bus 1,000 students, pay staff salaries, hire consultants, and buy office equipment. The study would try to measure the effect that busing has had on the performance and attitudes of Exodus children and on the feelings of their parents.

Officials Unhappy

Federal officials are believed to be unhappy that almost 60 per cent of the money requested for the project would go not for research, but for running Exodus. They also question whether the research is significant enough to fund at a time when the war in Vietnam is limiting overall Federal support of education.

James E. Teele, assistant professor of Sociology at the School of Public Health, who would do research on Exodus, and Ed School researchers who would also work on the project argue that it would be one of the first large-scale studies of the effects of racial imbalance and racial busing. And unless Exodus is operating smoothly, they argue, there will be nothing to study.

Exodus gets no support from the Boston School Committee. The parents who organized it have managed to raise money in the Boston area and, more recently, from foundations. But they have been hoping they can get federal money--some through Harvard and some for which they have applied on their own -- to run and expand the program during the next one or two years.