Denver district focuses on quality as schools resegregated
Two decades after force busing ended in DPS, district still struggles with integration
Twenty years after a judge let Denver Public Schools end forced busing, Denver schools are again segregated and efforts to encourage natural integration have not generated many results.
A Supreme Court ruling in 1973 made DPS the first northern district to undergo court-ordered desegregation through forced busing.
But with thousands of white families leaving for the suburbs to avoid integration and a legislature that passed laws ensuring Denver couldn't annex land from the suburbs, getting enough white kids to integrate schools was a challenge.
And it remains.
When DPS was freed from the court order in 1995, more than 40,000 white students who had left did not return, and those students who were being shuffled across the city went back to their neighborhood schools despite an option to keep being transported.
(The Denver Post)
Magnet schools, open enrollment and a simplified SchoolChoice process, charter schools and enrollment zones that broaden neighborhood school boundaries all have been part of the district's attempts at encouraging voluntary integration.
Data show that schools that are most concentrated with minority or low-income students are also the ones that are lower performing and harder to staff.
"It will take more than just offering up the choices," said Laura Lefkowits, who sat on the DPS board when busing ended. "We're tolerating some schools that would not have been tolerated in the past."
A report that nonprofit A-Plus Denver provided to the School Board last month shows that 55 percent of the district's schools have concentrations of more than 90 percent minority populations.
Only 29 of the district's 188 schools are considered integrated in the group's report.
Analyzing schools based on the definition the courts used while DPS was under the busing mandate, 58 schools would be considered compliant — less than a third.
"If they're in a low-performing school, that's an equity issue," said DPS board president Allegra "Happy" Haynes. "Sure, I would love, in the process of creating high-performing schools in every neighborhood, to ensure that those kids also had an opportunity to be in an integrated school. IDenver district focuses on quality as schools resegregated - The Denver Post: