Efforts to desegregate public schools are gathering steam across the country, prodded by both grassroots pressure and the federal government. U.S. Education Secretary John King said recently that school segregation is “a critical question for our country,” and called on advocates to “seize the moment.”
The conversation certainly has taken hold in New York City. Our series Integration 2.0 looks at possible solutions to persistent division in the school system, and we found one school specially engineered to reflect the city population as a whole, and specifically the Fort Greene, Brooklyn, neighborhood it calls home.
The student body at Community Roots Charter School currently is 39 percent white, 33 percent black, 20 percent combined Hispanic and Asian, and 8 percent "other." These numbers closely track its school district, District 13, which runs from Downtown Brooklyn to Bedford Stuyvesant. Residents in the district are 40 percent white, 40 percent black and 20 percent Hispanic and Asian, according to recent U.S. Census data.
By contrast, traditional public elementary schools in the district are much more segregated: only four have white enrollments greater than 20 percent. P.S. 67, which shares a building with Community Roots, has two white kids out of a total of 228 students.
Why is Community Roots so different? For starters, its co-founders deliberately chose a racially and economically mixed neighborhood, and developed a curriculum in which children discuss race and stereotypes starting in kindergarten. Then they recruited families from nearby public housing projects, Head Start centers and pre-kindergarten programs by pledging to make an integrated school with strong academics.
But co-founder and principal Alison Keil said getting a diverse mix of kids in the door wasn't enough.
"When you have people coming from all different neighborhoods to come to school together, they have no reason or way to get to know each other unless you sort of rip the top off the school and say the school is going to be the community," she said.
This is why Community Roots stays open late for regular get-togethers like family sports or arts nights, cooking classes for parents, teacher-arranged "play dates" for kids who don't know each other well. 
By all measures the school is popular. More than 700 students applied for 50 kindergarten seats this year. But that has raised another challenge: for all its racial diversity, Community Roots is falling short on economic diversity. Only 25 percent of its students qualify for free lunch, far less than in the surrounding public schools.
Keil acknowledged the economic balance was off. She said the school changed its admissions criteria a few years ago so that 40 percent of students must come from nearby Ingersoll, Whitman and Farragut housing projects. She's hoping this will lead to a greater socioeconomic mix.
Prof. Priscilla Wohlstetter, who teaches education policy and social analysis at Teachers College - Columbia University said maintaining an integrated community is a constantly evolving experiment. One that's not so easy to replicate.
"It’s not something you can impose on a school," Wohlstetter said. "Decisions about how to form a community both for adults and for students really needs to be guided by input from the people who are going to be part of that community."