More like DOE-given.Įven as Redwood was struggling to literally keep its lights on, NYC School Chancellor Richard Carranza was proudly posing for pictures at Millennium High School, one of those icky screened schools that he believes are immoral (now that his daughter has graduated from one).

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but this seems to suggest that things like qualified teachers and well-maintained buildings (i.e., working lights and a minimum of roaches) are the exclusive, God-given right of “rich” schools? Integration could be a way to address disparities in both resources and academic achievement: Studies that show that attending diverse schools can help boost learning for all kinds of students and provide more access to resources like qualified teachers, and well-maintained buildings. “How can that be possible, while we sit here and discuss diversity?”… “Practically everything in the building that the students in ALL three schools use is broken, damaged or in disrepair with no signs of ever being repaired or replaced,” she wrote. She begged for help fixing the school’s auditorium lights, which were dark ahead of a student holiday show, and complained of roaches infesting the gym. Lorraine Reid, the PTA president of Redwood Middle School in Jamaica, recently wrote a desperate letter shared widely across District 28. The issues they were meant to address, however, aren’t going anywhere. In response to the intense pushback, the Community Education Council announced a delay in the public workshops scheduled to commence in January. And that families would be expected to fight for them. To many parents, the DOE was making it quite clear that educational resources are limited. Could it be that white students aren’t the magic cure-all they’ve been touted to be? That some schools can survive perfectly fine with just a sprinkling of them?) (It’s interesting to note that the second-highest-performing middle school in the district, Young Women’s Leadership School, Queens, is 41 percent black, 39 percent Asian and only 3 percent white. The Department of Education has engaged the consulting firm WXY Studio, which advised Brooklyn’s District 15 on making admissions at all middle schools unscreened, to work with District 28 on its integration plan.Ĭommunity meetings have been contentious, with parents arguing loudly over diluting school quality, busing 11-year-olds for long distances and the implication that the only way for students in the southern sector to get a good education is to head north.

Lowest-scoring Redwood Middle School, which is 65 percent black, posts 22 percent of students testing at grade level in English and only 14 percent in math. While the district is quite diverse, the majority of white students attend middle schools in the northern end, while the majority of black students attend in the southern portion.įor example, the district’s top-ranked middle school (out of 13), Queens Gateway to Health Sciences Secondary School, with 25 percent black students, reports almost 90 percent of its population performing at grade level on state math and English Language Arts tests. In 2020, NYC’s school diversity battle came to Queens’s District 28. The New York City borough of Queens was declared the most racially and ethnically diverse of all large counties - those with over 1 million residents - in the United States in 2019.

Vice versa nyc