At the End of the Bus Ride: A Teacher's Tale

At the End of the Bus Ride: A Teacher's Tale is an inside view of school desegregation in the districts where Janet Morgan taught over a period of two and a half decades. Morgan sheds a stark and chilling light on how black students and educators fared when the bus ride came to an end, and they walked into a new and sometimes hostile environment.

With wit and poetry, Morgan artfully shares stories and anecdotes filled with the comedy, tragedy, and absurdities of race that found their way into the school with bombast. The most hopeful and inspiring pieces of the story came from interactions with students.

Drawn into the controversy, as a social studies teacher, around racial comments Jimmy the (Greek) Snyder made about black athletes, and his firing by CBS, Janet Morgan endured a lengthy suspension from her teaching position but distinguished herself as the teacher solely responsible for the establishment of an Academic Freedom standard for public school teachers in New York state.

Janet Morgan's first teaching job was as a social studies teacher at William Carr Junior High School in Whitestone, Queens, New York. From 1977 to 1996, she taught social studies in the high school and the middle school in the Malverne School District on suburban Long Island. Janet Morgan has published articles on her teaching experience spanning many years.

She published her first article in Integrated Education: Race and Schools, an education journal published by the University of Chicago. The article ''Sensitive Native or Native Sensitivity,'' an account of a classroom experience with her integrated eighth grade American History class is the basis for one of the book chapters. Other articles contributing to material in the book are, ''Putting Quota and Quality in Perspective,'' published by Contact Resources in their magazine Contact. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst published her article about the union experience of black teachers in a racially-mixed school in their education quarterly Equity and Excellence.

Janet Morgan is retired and resides in Georgia.