red schoolhouse from the hearse and laid it in front of a mock headstone" as a eulogy to the concept of the neighborhood school. Staff writer Jerry Cohen of the Los Angeles Times reported that: A lengthening shadow hovers across the sunny, foothill community of Shadow Hills, the shadow of racial tension.. . . a pervasive bitterness has spread through the quiet neighborhood. . . Neighbor is set against neighbor ;. . . old friendships have dissolved.. . . Even churches and youth groups, the Boy and Girl Scouts, have been splintered by bitterness. Root of the discord is the dispute over which junior high school Shadow Hills children should attend. The Times article was attacked by Edward L. Fike, editor and publisher of the Record-Ledger newspaper of Sunland-Tujunga, who wrote, "The suspicion grows and grows that the Board of Education by a one-vote margin knowingly sacrificed the Shadow Hills neighborhood upon the altar of forced integration as demanded by agitators and by the U. S. government as its price for federal aid." Nine years later, the boundary change was said to have actually led to a drop in enrollment at Maclay, as parents, both White and minority, moved their students elsewhere, sometimes through falsifying addresses and sometimes through a so-called statement of residence in which parents asserted their children would be living with somebody else five nights a week within a different school's boundaries. About this circumstance, Mike Castro of the Los Angeles Times wrote: Mrs. Edna Susank, principal of Mt. Gleason Junior High in Sunland, said that discussions with parents when a false address is discovered reveals an adamant attitude, sometimes with table thumping, that they will not send their child to an inferior school. Cross-district busing, 1977–1981 Sunland-Tujunga residents were foremost in a fight against mandatory busing for the purpose of school desegregation in Los Angeles. On January 21, 1977, an estimated 4,000 students—about half the total enrollment—stayed away from classes at nine Sunland-Tujunga schools as parents, led by Samm Ferris of Sunland, staged a one-day boycott to protest any idea of mandatory busing. About 35 "concerned mothers" picketed three elementary schools, as well as Mount Gleason Junior High and Verdugo Hills High schools. In May of the same year, Donna Kent of Sunland-Tujunga became president of the local chapter of Bustop, a citywide group opposed to the busing program. She said her chapter managed to raise