EDUCATION / STOPPING WHITE FLIGHT : Group Campaigns to Improve Image of Public Schools : An ex-schoolteacher joins the movement to discourage middle-class parents from relying on private academies.

Maud DeLes Lancaster is a product of public schools in Jackson, Miss. In the early 1970s, she watched as more than two-thirds of her white classmates fled to the segregation academies that sprang up when Jackson was ordered to integrate its schools.

And today, as she prepares her 3-year-old daughter to enter kindergarten at her neighborhood public school, she finds herself again bucking the trend among middle-class, white families like hers. But this time, she’s hoping to bring many of those middle-class, white families along with her.

Lancaster is one of more than 300 people in Jackson with the same goal who have joined Parents for Public Schools.

“Many of the people who have chosen not to attend public school have never stepped into the door,” Lancaster said. “It’s like a girl who gets a bad reputation. . . . It may not be true, but what can you do to stop it?”

CAMPAIGN GOALS: What the group is doing is staging a massive campaign to stress how good the schools are. They are using television commercials, newspaper ads and billboards featuring prominent citizens who send their children to public school and touting the financial wisdom of forsaking the city’s expensive, all-white private schools.

The effort was organized in March with the help of Mississippi Secretary of State Dick Molpus--whose two children attend Jackson public schools--and has raised more than $200,000 for its media campaign.

It is too soon to tell whether the campaign will significantly alter the racial composition of the 33,000-student school district, which is almost 80% black. But more informal efforts have succeeded in increasing white enrollment at several schools in mostly white northeast Jackson.

A former public schoolteacher, Lancaster took part in one of those efforts last year when she discovered that many of her neighbors planned to send their children to private schools. So she formed a group with others “who liked the idea of a neighborhood school” to support Boyd Elementary, the local public school, which is more than 65% black.

Her group, and others like it, merged with Parents for Public Schools, which relies heavily on parent-to-parent networking--arranging public school tours for preschool and private school families, hosting parties and play groups, and visiting local preschools to talk with parents.

Lancaster is quick to caution that the campaign is not about “saving” the city schools through an infusion of white students.

“We’re not trying to bring in more white people for our own comfort level or to make the schools any better,” she said. “The schools are already good. I just feel that all of us, children from all walks of life and experiences, should be able to go to school together.”

White flight--or middle-class flight, as some call it--is no new phenomenon in urban districts. In some cities, like Jackson and Los Angeles, the loss of families moving to suburbia was exacerbated by whites fleeing from cross-town busing used to desegregate schools.

IMPACT: Efforts to stem that flight also are not new, although virtually all of them have been sponsored by school districts or business and community groups.

“This is very much an issue that has come to be of concern nationally,” said Barbara Probst, executive director of the New York Alliance for Public Schools, a coalition of business, education and community leaders that began its campaign to “raise awareness of public school as an option” in New York City in 1982.

Molpus said his office checked with “every major urban center in America” and found no similar parent-based effort under way anywhere. “But since we’ve started, we’ve gotten calls from all over the country--New Jersey, New York, Louisiana--from parents asking how to start their own groups,” he said.

“I’ve been involved in educational reform for all my career, but I’ve never seen anything with the power of this,” Molpus said. “If this works, we think it can serve as a beacon for this nation. It really is a symbol of hope and unity for the public school system.”