How a New Jersey district could be the new national model for school integration – POLITICO

“If you’re going to take your child out of their neighborhood school, then how are you not going to help them get to the school that you’re putting them in?” said Meghan Mortenson, a Maplewood parent whose first grade son will be without busing this fall.

Mortenson said that because her son and younger daughter will be attending a school that’s 1.9 miles from their home and because the school’s before- and after-care programs are full, she won’t be able to return to her own teaching job and will need to stay home to transport them to and from school.

The situation in South Orange-Maplewood is being closely watched by advocates and education experts as New Jersey remains embroiled in a landmark school segregation lawsuit. A successful integration program in South Orange-Maplewood could become a model for communities across the state, and lessons learned could prevent other districts from making the same mistakes.

“We are a community that has committed to progressive values of racial equity and integration for 25-plus years in a sea of racially isolated communities,” said Nancy Gagnier, executive director of the South Orange/Maplewood Community Coalition on Race. “If we can’t do it, if we can’t prove that it can be done and be a model, it’s a problem for the rest of the country.”

The road to integration

South Orange and Maplewood are no strangers to integration. Efforts to integrate the diverse suburban communities, separated by less than two miles, date back to the early 1960s.

According to national data, the communities today are about 53 percent white, 32 percent Black, 7 percent Hispanic or Latino and 4 percent Asian. But despite generations of well-documented attempts to overcome housing and school segregation, four of the district’s five elementary schools remain mostly white, while one — Seth Boyden Elementary — is mostly Black.

There’s also an achievement gap. According to data from the statewide school performance reports, Black students in grades 3, 4 and 5 have underperformed compared to their white and Hispanic peers on state standardized tests, though to be sure, those Black students performed better than the statewide average.

Though residents of the two towns have spent decades repeatedly trying to integrate their schools, every previous attempt came with its own issues, which is why the district continues to combat segregation, Gagnier said.

The reason these issues persisted is interlinked with the two towns’ broader challenges with integrating their neighborhoods, said Nichole Nelson, a graduate of Yale University’s doctoral program in history who researched integration efforts in South Orange and Maplewood.

Nelson said that while there have been cosmetic changes to the racial makeup of the two towns over the years, local leaders and civic associations “were focused more on … moving Black people to white neighborhoods, instead of reinvesting in Black neighborhoods.”

That method, she said, “depends more, unfortunately, on white Americans’ comfort,” and hasn’t produced long-term results for Black communities.

The persistent equity gaps between Black and white residents, combined with the sustained commitment and unique history of community buy-in for integration efforts in the two towns got the attention of Michael Alves, a giant in the world of school desegregation efforts.

Alves’ fingerprints are on the desegregation programs in Cambridge, Mass., Wake County, N.C., Seattle, Little Rock, Ark., and dozens of other districts, including nearby Montclair, N.J.

He suggested the South Orange-Maplewood district try something new — integration based on socioeconomic status and proximity rather than just race.

What makes South Orange-Maplewood’s integration initiative different, and “innovative” as Alves puts it, is that it’s not a so-called controlled choice program like those in Cambridge and Montclair.

Parents cannot rank their school preferences or transfer their children to another school after they’ve been placed. Once a child has been assigned to a school, that’s their school — and potentially any younger siblings’ school — for the duration of their elementary career. The two towns share one high school.

That lack of choice has angered some parents who say they feel left out of district decisions and don’t have a hand in their kids’ education. But South Orange-Maplewood Superintendent Ronald Taylor said that’s the point: Parental choice does introduce some self segregation.

The district’s integration program “has to be followed consistently and equitably for everyone,” Taylor said.

“We want our families to be happy, but at the same time we cannot offer even a single exception, because that would be inequitable and against the policy of the board and also against the spirit of intentional integration,” he said.

‘You’re on top of something big’

Using Census data and self-reported income information from parents, Alves and demographer Nancy McArdle worked with district leaders in 2020 to develop and beta test an algorithm to assign students to one of the district’s five elementary schools. The algorithm takes into account a student’s socioeconomic status, distance from a school, race and any siblings already attending other schools in the district.

The results, Alves said, are “very promising,” though he said he’s not at the point where he feels comfortable “bragging about it.”

Alves said it usually takes at least three years of implementation to assess how a program is working and whether it could be effective elsewhere. This coming academic year will be year three of South Orange-Maplewood’s program.

“New Jersey right now is so important,” Alves said. “You’re on top of something big.”

According to a one-year review of the program, the new algorithm reduced both socioeconomic and racial/ethnic isolation in the district’s elementary schools, and significantly reduced racial/ethnic isolation at Seth Boyden, the most racially isolated elementary school.

The algorithm is not flawless. According to the one-year review, wealthier students were more likely to attend their neighborhood schools than poorer students who were more likely to be assigned to schools outside of their neighborhood.

Low-income Black students were traveling the longest average distance (1.3 miles), and nearly 10 percent of all students were placed at schools more than 3 miles from their home, with low-income students having longer routes to school than high- and mid-income students.

The experts also found that because older siblings had been assigned under an earlier, more segregative attendance boundary framework that placed students in their nearest neighborhood school, assigning kindergarten students to their siblings’ schools “tends to perpetuate segregation.”

Taylor said that overall, the program has been “a tremendous success” and has received little pushback from the community until the busing policy change.

Eliminating courtesy busing, Taylor said, had been under consideration for three years as the district began discussing the new integration initiative that was expected to cost more with each year. But hearing from parents who said they feel were blindsided by the decision and burdened by the loss of busing has the school board “researching,” whether to bring it back, he said.

“If the board was to move forward with reversing or modifying this, it would have to be applied equally to every parent in the same circumstance,” Taylor said. “It was courtesy, and not all parents in that circumstance received that courtesy.”

How the district and parents respond to the busing change will be pivotal. Angry parents venting in Facebook groups, packing school board meetings and authoring op-eds could drive how the rest of the country views South Orange-Maplewood’s integration program.

Taylor and Alves said this next year will be crucial to assess whether the integration program could be implemented in other districts across the state or country.

“Many integration efforts start strong, and then they wane,” Taylor said. “Our goal was to really establish an innovative, sustainable approach.”

Gagnier said the journey toward integration has been slow but purposeful and the community still has a ways to go.

Integrating classrooms in the one district high school — especially advanced placement classrooms — is “still a battle we are working on,” Gagnier said.

“This is a community that has really been so dedicated to this. We’re not perfect at it. And change has been slow and for many people it didn’t happen for them,” Gagnier said. “But we’re not giving up.”