Segregation still dogs state schools
Denver, other districts deal with issues that involve high-poverty areas in particular
The Denver metro area is home to some of the most segregated school districts in the state — and the nation — not because of Jim Crow-like laws but deeprooted economic and racial schisms that keep white, black and Latino students separate but not equal.
Fissures have run through Denver Public Schools for decades, caused by housing segregation and the way school boundaries are drawn, school officials say. Those conditions often force students of color into high-poverty schools where teacher turnover is high, fewer teachers are licensed and advanced coursework is limited. The district has announced a new initiative to address the issue and promises to consider all possible solutions.
Two decades of court-ordered busing of students and other actions, including enlarging school boundaries through enrollment zones, have done little to help
integrate Denver’s K-12 campuses.
“It’s just not played out like everyone hoped,” said Leslie Colwell, vice president for K-12 Education Initiatives for the nonprofit Colorado Children’s Campaign.
Her group recently tagged DPS as the most racially divided district in the state. Students of color made up 77 percent of DPS enrollment in the 2016-17 school year but the average white student in the district attended a school with 53 percent students of color, according to the Children’s Campaign’s Kids Count study.
Racial or economic segregation can exist almost side by side in DPS. A mere 2 miles separate Steele and Valverde Elementary schools, but students of color make up only 17 percent of the student population at Steele, compared to 95 percent of students at Valverde.
Academically, say officials, segregation — and its related variables — contributes to a massive achievement gap among poor and minority students. For example, Valverde received the district’s lowest academic ranking, red, in 2016, while Steele got the highest, green.
Data show that when the court-ordered busing of students ended in 1995, many DPS schools quickly resegregated along racial and ethnic lines, said Colwell. A year after busing ended, the student body at Manual High was 41 percent black, 15 percent Hispanic and 44 percent white, said the Kids Count report. Last year’s student population showed a dramatic shift in the school population, which is now 40 percent black, 48 percent Hispanic and 6 percent white.
“There was a rapid resegregation,” Colwell said. “It happened so quickly.”
The rapid gentrification of some Denver neighborhoods is amplifying the issue. Rising housing prices are driving low-income and often minority families out of old neighborhoods, where they are being replaced by more affluent white residents. The Highlands neighborhood, for example, went from two-thirds Latino to two-thirds nonLatino white since 2000, according to the city.
Similar changes are occurring in long-affordable neighborhoods such as Five Points and Globeville, officials say. Increasingly, this results in major reductions in the number of school-age children in these neighborhoods.
The percentage of Hispanic students enrolled in DPS has decreased by 3 percent since 2012, while the percentage of white students has risen by the same percentage, according to a 2016 DPS report. Meanwhile, 71 percent of white students attend high-performing schools while only 44 percent of Latino and 45 percent of black students do, the report said.
Although the gap between low-income and wealthier students attending high-performing schools has narrowed, issues surrounding segregation and gentrification prompted DPS this month to take action. Officials called for a six-month study on how to drive racial and economic integration policies on school boundaries, school choice and consolidation of some schools, enrollment and academic programs. A 42-member committee is tasked with devising recommendations and officials say all suggestions will be considered.
DPS Superintendent Tom Boasberg said segregation is not quite as bad as it’s portrayed in the Kids Count report, which he says is based on old data. Still, he said neighborhood makeovers and segregation must be tackled.
“Our schools are more diverse than a decade ago,” Boasberg said. “They are also far from our goal and significant economic forces are working against us. The rapidly rising cost of housing and the gentrification of neighborhoods is making our work more difficult and all the more important.”
One option to address segregation includes a more heavy-handed approach to school choice, similar to programs used in areas of Florida, North Carolina, Illinois and California, among other states. “Controlled choice” allows parents to rank schools by preference, but kids are assigned to schools by the district, which allows officials to try to balance the number of poor and better-off students on each campus.
Students in Louisville, Ky., and surrounding suburbs, meanwhile, are bused across the county based on leaders’ efforts to create more diverse schools in a highly segregated city.
The DPS committee, Strengthening Neighborhoods Initiative, will focus on neighborhoods that are reeling with sharp declines in school-age children, Boasberg said.
“Some neighborhoods are losing 50 percent of their school-age kids. Places like the Highlands and Curtis Park … along with Globeville and Swansea are seeing huge declines in as little as three years,” he said.
The committee’s work will require a big-picture mentality, Boasberg said. “Integration of our schools is intimately linked to changes in housing and neighborhoods. We are dealing with far-reaching demographic changes and we really need to step back and make sure parents will have high-quality schools within their reach.”
Modern-day segregation is so complex that it will take persistence and patience to solve, said Matt Cook, director of public policy and advocacy for the Colorado Association of School Boards.
“There is not a silver bullet-type of solution out there,” Cook said. “In many cases, for instance, transportation is the key issue. You can’t get kids to a quality program and that leaves them stuck in a low-performing school.”
“You just have to keep chipping away at it,” Cook said.
Greeley-Weld School District was among eight other districts highlighted by Kids Count as “highly segregated,” a designation that makes school officials bristle.
Sixty-one percent of Greeley-Weld’s students are Latino and about 8 percent come from other minority populations, mostly because of the large number of refugees living in the community, said district spokeswoman Theresa Myers.
Many district students also live in low-income families; 66 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.
“The problem in our district is not really segregation on our part, but the fact that some white parents have chosen to take their students to charter schools,” Myers said. “Our charter schools are much less diverse than our traditional schools.”
There has been a slight shift toward more white and more affluent students attending Greeley’s traditional schools, but “that is parent choice and there isn’t a whole lot we can do” to accelerate or otherwise change that, Myers said.
Busing has a long and controversial history in Denver,
and 36-year-old Anita Banuelos hopes the district will avoid that option when trying to address current segregation issues.
“It’s funny, you talk to white people about how busing affected them and most said it was a good experience,” said Banuelos, who was bused to a predominately white elementary school in southwest Denver in the early 1990s. “But for a lot of Latinos, it wasn’t such a great experience for them.”
Banuelos, who works as an aide for Denver City Councilman Jolon Clark, said she was called “Taco Bell” and “Chaquita banana” as a student. “That was hard. I was just trying to go about my business and be a good student, but you get targeted,” she said.
Banuelos, who is a mem- ber of the DPS Strengthening Neighborhoods Initiative, wants any integration plan that may be adopted to consider cultural backgrounds. “You can’t just drop a kid into a school and say, ‘OK, here you are.’ You can’t do that anymore, because it won’t work.”
Segregation can drive a wedge between school districts, as is the case with the Sheridan and Littleton districts. The nonprofit EdBuild recently said the border between Sheridan and Littleton is among the most economically segregated in the nation.
Littleton Public Schools has a poverty rate of 9 percent, while Sheridan 2 School District has a poverty rate of 49 percent. And in the 2016-17 school year, students of color made up 27 percent of Littleton’s students, while students of color comprised 87 percent of Sheridan’s students.
Sheridan schools superintendent Michael Clough said the economic disparity shows up in schools as a result of changes in funding. State restrictions on school spending, like the Taxpayer Bill of Rights and the Gallagher Amendment, cut the amount of revenue districts can collect for classrooms.
To get extra funding, districts must ask local property owners to approve higher taxes.
“People who have more wealth are more likely to fund their local schools,” Clough said. “The system needs to be changed, but the real movers and shakers in this state are not interested in doing that.”
One result in his district: Sheridan often becomes a training ground for good teachers who move on to other districts, he said.
High-performing and dedicated students often leave Sheridan schools as well. Brianna Martinez, 18, is one of them.
Martinez’s parents recognized early on that if their daughter was going to succeed academically, she would have to attend schools in nearby Littleton and not the neighborhood schools in Sheridan.
“It just seemed like Littleton had more to offer her in the classroom,” said Phil Martinez. “Their schools were always scoring at the top in testing, and Sheridan’s were pretty close to the bottom. That move seemed to pay off.”
They applied for open enrollment and switched Brianna to a Littleton middle school where she quickly flourished. She recently graduated with high honors from Heritage High School and is headed to Utah State University in the fall.
“The fact she was around other kids that also wanted to do well helped push her,” Phil Martinez said.
“I never regretted doing this,” Brianna Martinez said. “It seemed like the right idea at the time, and I think it has worked out for me.”