Program Aims to Keep Schools Diverse as New York Neighborhoods Gentrify
Brooklyn Arts and Science Elementary School is one of seven New York City public schools taking part in an Education Department initiative aimed at maintaining a racial and socio-economic balance at schools in fast-gentrifying neighborhoods. Todd Heisler/The New York Times
How white is too white? At the Academy of Arts and Letters, a small K-8 school in Brooklyn founded in 2006 to educate a community of “diverse individuals,” that question is being put to the test.The school — along with six others in New York City — is part of a newEducation Department initiative aimed at maintaining a racial and socio-economic balance at schools in fast-gentrifying neighborhoods. For the first time the department is allowing a group of principals to set aside a percentage of seats for low-income families, English-language learners or students engaged with the child welfare system as a means of creating greater diversity within their schools.
Many of the principals aggressively pushed for the initiative with the schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, who like Mayor Bill de Blasio has disappointed school diversity advocates by failing to make integration a priority during her tenure. Ms. Fariña approved the plan in November.
For the past several years the principals have worried that their institutions — designed to be racial and economic melting pots, but now attracting more white and middle-class families — will “tip” over into majority white, middle-class schools.
In its early years, Arts and Letters, for example, was more than 90 percent black and Hispanic, reflecting the Brooklyn neighborhoods around it, including Bedford-Stuyvesant, Clinton Hill and Fort Greene. More than 80 percent of its students qualified for free or reduced lunch.
But the school gained a reputation for its humanities curriculum, its science lab and its focus on the arts. And newcomers changed the demographic mix of its surrounding blocks. In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Clinton Hill and Fort Greene, the white population rose 120 percent from 2000 to 2010 and the black population fell by 30 percent, according to the Center for Urban Research at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Now, Arts and Letters has become one of Brooklyn’s hottest schools. Half of the school’s kindergartners are white; a mere 12 percent qualify for free or reduced lunch. That has its principal, John O’Reilly, worried.
“I love the fact that so many white affluent families would want to send Program Aims to Keep Schools Diverse as New York Neighborhoods Gentrify - The New York Times:
