Sweeping School Desegregation Plan Approved in Brooklyn

City officials approved a plan to overhaul admissions in one Brooklyn school district on Thursday, in one of the most striking examples of desegregation under the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Middle schools will no longer grant admission based on grades, test scores and attendance across District 15, which spans Park Slope, Red Hook and Sunset Park. Enrollment in the coming school year will instead be based on a lottery system that offers preference to English language learners, students from low-income backgrounds and those in temporary housing.

The plan was developed through public engagement sessions over the course of a year, with input from parents in the district, which is more racially diverse than many others. Students currently enrolled in middle schools across District 15 are 42 percent Hispanic, 31 percent white, 12 percent Asian, and 12 percent black, according to city officials.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza applauded the effort to make classrooms more reflective of both the racial and economic diversity in the district, and said the plan could serve as a “template” for other districts.

"It's a top-down, bottom-up approach,” he said. “From the top, we're signaling that we want communities to do this work and that we'll pay for it. We'll invest in this work."

The plan's approval was announced at M.S. 51 in Park Slope, a school that had been attended by both the mayor’s children. He said he worked with other parents on a plan to better integrate schools in the district 15 years ago, but received “the coldest shoulder” from the Department of Education.

“You can feel in the air that momentum for diversity is growing, momentum for change is growing,” he said. He noted that there has been a similar change in the admissions policy in District 3, which spans the Upper West Side and Harlem. That plan, when it was in the proposal stage, received far more vocal push back from parents. They were concerned that grouping students with varied academic achievements would lower education standards.

Lenore DiLeo, principal of M.S. 51, said teachers are prepared for more diverse classrooms.

She said that if teachers are supported, "I know that they can do greater things to a greater extent to meet the needs — whether it's culturally or academically — to meet the needs of all the students in this district."

Eliza Seki, a seventh grade student involved in developing the desegregation plan, said schools aren’t just about learning from textbooks.

"If everyone has the same experience and the same background, no one is going to learn about things that are going to happen in the real world, especially in such a diverse city,” she said.  

Seki said she felt it was important that students like her had a say in the plan. Those leading the charge sought input from across the district, but Neal Zephyrin, a member of the district's community education council, said that the black, Hispanic, and Asian parents who predominate in Red Hook and Sunset Park had been less involved than white parents in Park Slope.

At a recent dismissal time at the Red Hook Neighborhood School, WNYC spoke to more than a dozen parents. Not one had heard of the plan.

In the next phase, the Department of Education will reach out to parents and inform them about their children's school options.