Skip to main content

Family by Family, How School Segregation Still Happens - The New York Times

posted onApril 30, 2017
>

Article snippet: Elana Shneyer and Adam Kaufman live a few hundred feet from Public School 165, the Robert E. Simon School, on West 109th Street, at the edge of Morningside Heights in Manhattan. When they started looking for a kindergarten for their son, who will start in the fall, the school was an early stop. That made them unusual. Although their neighborhood is diverse, the children who go to P.S. 165, its zoned school, are mostly Hispanic and low-income. Most of the white students who live in the area it serves attend school elsewhere. But Ms. Shneyer and Mr. Kaufman, who are white, liked that the school had a Spanish dual-language program and that its kindergarten classes had only 10 to 15 students. They also knew they had options. Community School District 3, where they live, has a long history of giving parents alternatives to their zoned schools. So the couple also looked at the Manhattan School for Children, a progressive school that is open to all children in the district. The couple loved the school’s approach, particularly its commitment to integrating children with physical disabilities. But there was one thing that made them uncomfortable: While most of the students in District 3 are black or Hispanic, nearly two-thirds of the students at Manhattan School for Children are white. “We noticed that, and honestly, to us it was less appealing,” Ms. Shneyer said. She went to public school in District 3, at P.S. 75, the Emily Dickinson School, on West End Avenue between 9... Link to the full article to read more

Emotional score for this article