Unlike many, if not most of the Southern areas, Boston’s busing program was confined to the city limits, which was also partly why Boston became so explosive during the mid to late 1970’s when mandatory school busing was implemented there. A Metropolitan solution was considered in a number of areas including Boston, but it got scrapped. People in Boston’s all-white suburbs would not accept it, and Boston’s black community, already small, and fearful that the limited amount of influence and power that they had, would be “diluted in the sea of suburbia”, also rejected it.
However, the Boston area also had a METCO program (I forget what the letters stand for), in which black students from Boston were bused in to a number of the outer-lying bedroom communities, including my old hometown, which implemented METCO later. The METCO program was a voluntary program aimed at inner city students from Roxbury, Mattapan and North Dorchester who wished to participate in it, and a great many METCO kids benefited by getting a better education at better schools in wealthier communities.