NYC, facing segregated schools and new class size law, could find an answer in Brooklyn

New York City public schools, vexed by persistent racial segregation and a new state law mandating smaller classes, could find an answer in the recent “successful” merger of two schools in Brooklyn, according to a new report from the city comptroller and the group New York Appleseed.

The report holds up as a model the Bed-Stuy school Arts and Letters 305 United, formed in 2020 for Pre-K to eighth-graders. It marked what has been called the “intentional integration” of an overcrowded, disproportionately white and affluent middle school in Fort Greene with an under-enrolled, disproportionately Black and low-income elementary school in Bed-Stuy.

“The data shows there's a lot of opportunity to use it elsewhere,” Comptroller Brad Lander said, referring to the work that went into merging the two schools. “And some of it, you might even say, is necessary, or at least there's a momentum to it from the class size law that gives kind of a push in this direction.”

The report comes as city schools face an imminent challenge. A state law passed two years ago requires public school classrooms to incrementally shrink by 2028, with ultimate caps of 20 students for kindergarten through third grade, 23 students for grades four through eight and 25 students for high school.

Jenna Lyle, a spokesperson for the Department of Education, said that the agency appreciates the comptroller and New York Appleseed’s “attention to the complexities in implementing the class size law and strategies for addressing the space challenges.”

Lyle added that the agency will review the report.

A December report from a working group convened by the city Department of Education included dozens of recommendations for how to address the new class size rules. It made a brief mention of potential school mergers. New York City schools Chancellor David Banks, however, has raised the prospect of new consolidations to address under-enrollment and a looming fiscal cliff for the city’s schools, as federal pandemic-era aid expires.

Meanwhile, the chancellor has faced criticism from school integration advocates for failing to address the ongoing segregation of the school system. A 2018 report from the Civil Rights Project at the University of California Los Angeles found New York state was the most segregated in the nation.

According to the UCLA report, 90% of black students in New York attended predominantly nonwhite schools, while Latino student enrollment in predominantly nonwhite schools remained roughly stable at 84%. Almost 2 in 3 Black students and more than half of Latino students attended intensely segregated schools, where less than 10% of student enrollment was white.

Even as the momentum to integrate schools in recent years has stalled, Lander said, the class size restrictions add a financial and logistical incentive and opportunity to chip away at city schools’ stubborn patterns of racial segregation.

The new class size mandate has faced criticism from some parent leaders and the left-leaning Urban Institute amid reports that the new rule will predominantly benefit affluent white and Asian students over low-income Black and Latino students.

But school mergers can help boost resources for Black and Latino students, the report suggests. And they may be a more cost-effective option than constructing new buildings to ease crowding, Lander said. The School Construction Authority recently estimated that building new schools to meet the mandate will cost $180,000 per seat.

The report credited Arts and Letters 305 United with how it went about merging, with a focus on fully fusing the culture and interest of the two prior school communities, rather than allowing one school’s culture and history to prevail.

“One of the things that I love about our school is that we're going to talk about it,” Todd A. Rolle, who teaches spoken word, movement and theater, told Gothamist last summer. “As awkward as whatever it is might be.”

Even still, there were problems. Some parents at Arts and Letters 305 United interviewed for the report criticized a lack of transparency about decision-making and a lack of attention to concerns for the predominantly Black and lower-income PS 305 community. And the COVID-19 pandemic only added to the difficulties of engaging parents and students in the transition process, the report said.

Nine of the interviewees used the word “takeover” in describing the merger. And murals at the PS 305 building that were meaningful to several teachers there were painted over without any notice, the report said.

But the report still found that the integration efforts were overall successful, bringing much-needed resources to both school communities.

Parents from the former Arts and Letters school appreciated the extra space and smaller class sizes. Parents from former PS 305 acknowledged that their students had access to more extracurricular activities and teachers after the merger.

Integration efforts in the nearby District 15 covering Park Slope, Carroll Gardens and pockets of nearby neighborhoods have also yielded early positive results, Lander said. In an effort to integrate schools, the district overhauled its middle school admissions process in 2019 by eliminating the use of selective screening processes.

Despite some difficulties, local middle schools are now more racially integrated and largely performing better, or at least “no worse” than before, Lander said. But similar efforts in District 28 in southeast Queens were met with sharp criticism from local parents.

The schools districts’ divergent reactions to school integration efforts arise from differences in planning, organization and local parents’ buy-in, Lander said. It remains unclear how to best balance the “North Star” of combating racial segregation while ensuring the necessary openness among parents and students, he added.

But at the very least, Lander said, his team’s research suggests Arts and Letters 305 United offers a promising example that “worked.”