Due to a history of racist housing policies, and the intentional expansion of Highway 101 to create a barrier between East Palo Alto and Palo Alto, the racial gap increased drastically in the 1950s. [1][2] In the 1970s, the Office of Civil Rights found that the East Palo Alto school district violated the desegregation laws and forced the schools to desegregate or lose federal funding. [3] However, despite decades of attempting to desegregate the schools in East Palo Alto by bringing in more white students from surrounding schools in Menlo Park, Redwood City, and Palo Alto, this was largely unsuccessful as many white parents did not want to send their children to schools in East Palo Alto. [4] As a solution, the affluent neighboring cities around East Palo Alto forced the closure of East Palo Alto’s high school, Ravenswood High School. [5] Immediately afterwards, for the next 10 years, a group of East Palo Alto parents filed a lawsuit claiming that the students from East Palo Alto were receiving unequal educational opportunity, which eventually settled in a Settlement Order including the Voluntary Transfer program (or Tinsley Program, named after East Palo Alto mother, Margaret Tinsley). [6][7]

In 2015, Palo Alto High School's publication, the Campanile, interviewed Tinsley students and discussed the history and impact of the Tinsley Program which can be read in the article: East Palo Alto education

In 2020, the Menlo-Atherton Chronicle documented how the Tinsley Program was received at Menlo Atherton High School and can be read in the article: Menlo-Atherton's Race Riots