State presses Fairfield to address racial imbalance in schools
FAIRFIELD — State education officials are pressing Fairfield Public Schools to address the racial imbalance at McKinley Elementary School.
Fairfield school officials said the plans to tackle the problem were sidelined by the pandemic and the fallout that arose after schools returned to normal, but that progress is going to be made under the plan it is operating with now.
But, in a state Board of Education meeting on April 4, members pushed back on Fairfield’s plan.
“You’re not going to get out of this without understanding what’s underneath it in terms of what has to be done,” Robert Trefry, a state BOE member and Fairfield resident, said. “I think what you’re trying to do is really in the best interest of each kid as you see it. It’s just not going to get you out of this racial imbalance problem by the direction you’re going in.”
The state labels schools as racially imbalanced when the proportion of minority students for any school exceeds 25 percentage points more than the comparable proportion for the school district. At McKinley Elementary School in Fairfield, 2020-21 school year statistics show the minority population at 56.65 percent, higher than the entire district’s minority population of 26.4 percent by approximately 30 percentage points.
McKinley was tagged as imbalanced back in April 2007, but has made little progress on closing the imbalance since then. Past strategies have opt-in and magnet programs, but neither have been successful.
Officials said McKinley has only fallen below the 25-percent threshold once since being designated at racially imbalanced — in 2012.
In 2017, the school board submitted a plan to solve the issue by redistricting. That idea received conditional approval from the state board.
This is not something Fairfield would do lightly, especially given the opposition the idea has encountered from McKinley parents.
Fairfield Public Schools hired a consultant, Milone and MacBroom, to come up with options on how to address the racial imbalance via redistricting. Its report, presented in February of 2020, presented four options.
The first redistricting option involved using Jennings Elementary School as a district-wide early childhood center and pre-kindergarten facility. The second scenario would see pocket redistricting to reduce racial imbalance at McKinley while keeping pre-kindergarten at Stratfield Elementary School and Fairfield Warde High School.
The third called for five pre-kindergarten classes, each moved to Holland Hill and North Stratford elementary schools. The fourth option would create six pre-kindergarten classrooms at Warde, two at Holland Hill and two at North Stratfield.
In November of 2021, Fairfield presented an updated racial imbalance plan to the state Board of Education.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Fairfield school board chair Christine Vitale said, the board had the goal of addressing a number of facility’s challenges, including the racial imbalance, and were moving forward with plans to address them. She said the board does not view McKinley as a problem.
“You’ve heard it before and I will say it again, it is our most diverse school, but it’s something that we celebrate, and is something that we are incredibly proud of,” she said, adding the board’s goal is to create diversity at the other 10 elementary schools in town without having to tear apart its system.
Vitale said schools shutting down, and later going hybrid, during the pandemic changed the landscape. Since returning to normal school, she said, it has been a struggle for the district to return to pre-COVID issues.
“Our focus is on getting our kids back in school and then finding where they are, both from an academic perspective, a social-emotional perspective and meeting those needs,” she said. “Moving forward on the racial imbalance plan was not a top priority.”
Vitale said that is where the district stands, and it struggles with wanting to keep the community together while also bringing diversity throughout the district. She noted that Fairfield recently hired a diversity, equity and inclusion director in part to tackle an achievement gap between Black and Hispanic students and white and Asian students.
Vitale also pointed out that two elementary schools in town — Holland Hill and Mill Hill — needed to be renovated, which delayed the district moving forward with redistricting. Summed up, the board does not have the bandwidth to address the issue this year, but Vitale said it has created a facilities committee to look into how it utilizes its schools.
Trefry pointed out that, because of how racial imbalances are calculated, diversifying other elementary schools will not help them much. Vitale said she understood that, and noted that redistricting, while a last step, is not off the table.
“It may happen for other reasons, but we are also very sensitive of moving students (that are happy and supported where they are),” she said.
Trefry suggest Fairfield’s school board meet with state officials to go over the district’s plans and how it might play out.
“I think you need to spend some time kind of really understanding the problem or understanding the need to comply with the regulations,” he said. “What you’re doing may not get you there.”
State board member Malia Sieve said the racial imbalance is a full-district issue, and is not just about McKinley.
“You can’t solve this problem without impacting the rest of your community,” she said. “There’s not really anything new to what’s being told to us that hasn’t already been said and used as excuses previously.”
Speaking to an earlier point from Vitale, Sieve said the district is not wanting to move students at McKinley who are happy and supported where they are is a problem because the students are underperforming in their academics.
“By not making some very hard decisions — I’m not underestimating the difficulty of those decisions — we continue to be here year after year,” she said. “My concern about the timeline you’ve provided is that it gets us to where we were the last time. We were here before.
I have little if not zero faith that decisions are going to be made to make the changes that actually address this problem.”