The cafeteria, located in the basement, had no windows. About half of her classrooms didn’t have windows, either. “It felt kind of jail-like,” Nunes, now a first-year student at Howard University, told Vox. “It felt like the building itself was trying to keep you in.”
And the lack of resources went beyond the physical space. Laptops for students were often old or broken. Students struggled to get access to the classes they wanted. For example, the school could only afford to offer art or music in a single year, not both. “You’d have to pick,” Nunes said, “and by ‘you’d have to pick,’ I mean the school made the decision for you.”
Looking back, she said, “there were a lot of opportunities where I think young people could have been learning or engaging with content better, but they didn’t really have the chance to.”
What Nunes experienced isn’t out of the ordinary — it’s the norm around the country. While affluent school districts can afford to offer students everything from the latest technology to a range of advanced classes, schools in lower-income areas often struggle to provide the basic necessities. That gap has become a chasm during the Covid-19 pandemic, when something like a cafeteria with no windows becomes a very real health hazard.
And because of the legacy of housing discrimination, especially against Black Americans, the poorest schools in the country disproportionately serve Black students and other students of color. “Since genocide and enslavement built the country, there have been intentional systems put in place to bar, particularly, Black children from quality public schools,” Khalilah Harris, acting vice president for K-12 education policy at the Center for American Progress, told Vox.
Nationwide, majority-nonwhite districts get $23 billion less in funding every year than CONTINUE READING: How school funding can help repair the legacy of segregation - Vox