Every week for the past month, the parents of 327 Roxbury children have been shelling out $1,260 to get their kids to school in the morning. They are paying for school buses to carry their children out of overcrowded heavily Negro schools, threatened this fall with double sessions, to predominantly white schools outside of Roxbury.

It may be a measure of the frustration in the Boston civil rights movement that Negro parents have finally decided to bypass the conventional forms of protest and do the only thing that can get their children into decent schools. For the last two years de facto segregation has been a focus of the Hub's civil rights activity. There have been two school boycotts, one in 1963 and another in 1964, but the School Committee has refused to recognize the issue.

Finally, the parents got tired of waiting and, just as the School Committee won't recognize their problem, they seem to have resolved not to recognize the School Committee's own authority. They have simply told the School Committee where to get off.

Their defiance didn't develop over-night. It took a history of deliberate inaction and stubbornness to move these mothers. That history illustrates the messy consequences of political exploitation of racial tensions.

Busing isn't new to Boston. Last year, some 1000 children were transported to less crowded schools-at the city's expense. And Superintendent William Ohrenberger had proposed to add another 583 students this fall to ease overcrowding in three Roxbury schools.

The controversy was touched off two months ago when Thomas Eisenstadt, a member of the Boston School Committee, counter Ohrenberger's plan with a proposal to stop all busing designed to end school overcrowding. Later he revised his motion so as to apply only to new busing. The resolution passed 3-2. It looked as if double sessions was the only alternative for the three overcrowded schools.

Up until then, Ellen Jackson, a 31-year old Negro mother in Roxbury, had not been involved in the school disputes. She had been a parent counselor for the Northern Student Movement, but nothing more controversial than that. But Mrs. Jackson had four children in the three affected schools. And so she rose one evening in a Project Headstart meeting to ask that Negro parents mobilize against the threat of double sessions.

Complaining Is No Good

"The schools have always been overcrowded. Parents saw that their children weren't getting promoted and that it didn't do any good to complain to the Superintendent about it," she explained later.

Double sessions would reduce teaching time by 35 minutes a day. In addition, it would impose an extra burden on working mothers, who would have to find baby-sitters to watch the children for an entire halfday. For a mother with one child in the morning session and another in afternoon classes this would mean a full day of sitters.

Late in August Mrs. Jackson called an emergency meeting of Roxbury parents, who organized the Roxbury and North Dorchester Parents Committee. They discussed different possibilities for action, including private busing if the school committee held firm. Two days before school began in September, the RNDPC petitioned the School Committee to reconsider its ban on busing.

Mrs. Louise Day Hicks, the School Committee Chairman, who is noted for her refusal to admit the existence of de facto segregation, answered the parents group. She told them that the School Committee would not rehash the busing question, but promised that there would be no double sessions.

Nevertheless, the Committee had still not announced how it was planning to avoid having classes of 40 or 50 students in the three Roxbury schools.

Five Hundred Strong

The day before school opened, the RNDPC, now 500 strong, met again to set in motion their plans for private busing. Committees set up at the earlier meeting had compiled a list of vacant seats available in various Boston schools. According to a 15-year-old school department policy, any Boston child can enroll in any Boston school with vacancies, once he gets a transfer slip from his neighborhood principal. Since the urban white districts tend to have an older population than the Negro areas, they frequently have vacant places in their schools.