Fairfieldworksto reduce racial imbalance in schools, but is CT law outdated?

Jul. 30—Experts said the state desegregation law places Connecticut in "unique" territory of enforcing a racial balance across its school districts that overlooks modern methods of school integration, involving funding through a more socioeconomic lens instead of one that places students into racial categories.

"The policy is only about moving and shifting chairs," said David Kirkland, the founder and CEO of forwardED, a company that develops equitable education strategies. "It's not a racial equity policy. It's a kind of cosmetic act that we see that came out of the desegregation era that does little to nothing to really change the status quo."

The Fairfield school board is in the process of reviewing three options to resolve its imbalance via redistricting before adopting newly redrawn school district lines by the 2024-25 school year. Parents have argued that each option places an excessive burden on students of color, who would feel the greatest impact of mandated transfers, leave their friends and travel longer commutes to class. McKinley would have the highest number of student transfers under the "traditional redistricting scenario" that the board has yet to eliminate, according to the proposal from the firm redrawing district lines.

Kirkland said the desegregation law takes the "wrong focus" in applying diversity to education. He said a redistricting process built on a basis of racial quotas treats students more like "objects" than people with respective identities and education needs.

"It's a kind of cosmetic act that we see that came out of the desegregation era that does little to nothing to really change the status quo," he said.

Connecticut's "racial balance law" dates back to 1969 when the General Assembly passed the legislation. Desegregation in the United States had been in effect for roughly half a decade and one year had passed since race riots swept across the country.

The law was intended to preserve civil rights in the state with a legal prohibition of racial segregation in Connecticut's schools. The legislation, at the time, would mark a stringent stance against the racial injustice that the Civil Rights Movement sought to erode from American society.

Laura Anastasio, an attorney for the State Department of Education, said she and Michael McKeon, the department's director of legal and governmental affairs, met with Fairfield Superintendent Michael Testani earlier this month about the school district's options. Testani said he discussed adding a magnet school to the district with the department as a potential element of the racial imbalance-induced redistricting, but he added the opt-in school would be a "gamble" that could falter in the case of low interest.

"The racial imbalance is only increasing at that school," Anastasio said of McKinley. "And the message from the state board is 'Hey, you've had 16 years. You need to fix the problem, and you need to go back to the community and really dig into and have those difficult conversations about how you're going to address this.'"

Anastasio said Fairfield will need to reassign students from schools to achieve racial balance, but the impacts should not be concentrated on a single group of families from racial minority backgrounds. She said whatever the solution looks like, the town must comply with the state law by its fall 2024 deadline or face legal action from the department.

"I don't think it's a good thing to isolate your kids into one particular school no matter how pretty the school is or how nice it is," she said. "I think that's a mistake."

She said she has received emails from parents saying they're "afraid" to send their child to other schools in Fairfield because of potential bullying, amplifying the need for Fairfield to invest in diversity measures within its school system.

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Testani said the district's attention to bullying applies for all transferring students, not just those leaving a single school. He said district officials and school administrators need to ascertain the counselor or social worker who greets new students, the Parent Teacher Association's outreach to parents and the principle's interaction with incoming families to ensure a smooth transfer process.

"Say there's 400 kids leaving their schools, going to another school, we have to ensure the transition is smooth for all of them, not just certain ones," he said. "All kids need to feel welcome. We don't want bullying of any students, whether they're in their current school or not."

Anastasio said the town should review the training and diversity of its public school teachers to ensure its schools can welcome students of all backgrounds. She said the town also needs to replace a DEI position in its public school system after hearing the position is no longer filled.

"If they need professional development, and they need assistance in finding the appropriate programs, we're happy to help them with that," she said. "We have a lot of resources available at the state level that we can share with Fairfield. They need to ask for it so we're there to help."

Fairfield Board of Education Chair Jennifer Jacobsen said the number of transfers out of McKinley is difficult to avoid because of the space utilization limits in the building and the need to comply with state law. McKinley would sit at 82.1 percent utilization under the traditional redistricting scenario that the board is considering, according to a proposal from the consultant drafting the plans.

She said she hopes to collaborate with the town to tackle the racial imbalance issue facing the school district from a town-wide diversity perspective.

"It's also a broader culture in our town, town-wide, and ensuring that we recognize and celebrate the diversity that we have in Fairfield and build that from grassroots up and top down from our administration not only in the district but in our town," Jacobsen said.

Experts in education contend that Connecticut's racial imbalance law still clings to an outdated legislative standard in which desegregation was the baseline for a tolerable education. They said a more effective approach would address areas of socioeconomic need instead of pulling children out of their own neighborhoods for school.

Stephanie Monroe, a U.S assistant education secretary under former President George W. Bush, headed the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights after the Supreme Court ruled against a pair of public education policies in Seattle and Louisville that used race to regulate enrollment numbers. The court held that the racial classifications in public school enrollment policies must be "narrowly tailored" to either "remedy the effects of intentional discrimination" or to enhance student diversity in higher education, the latter of which the court struck down with its affirmative action decision last month.

Monroe said public school enrollment policies should be race neutral instead of adopting racial quotas so families can choose the community makeup and specialized resources that would best serve their children. She said improvements to educational performance comes from funding that supports public schools in areas of need, not relocating students to other parts of a school district.

"These are challenges that we had and probably still have today with people putting kids in certain categories, either based on race, based on performance, based on perception and really not giving kids the opportunity and the access and equipping them with the tools that they need," she said. "So I feel like that needs to be our focus."

Monroe said during her childhood years in Baltimore during the city's race riots, her mother pulled her out of the Baltimore school system. But the largest change Monroe remembers inside a new, unfamiliar and much whiter classroom environment boiled down to community.

"They were almost like social workers to steer me towards other opportunities," Monroe said of her teachers in Baltimore. "If people were having challenges, sometimes the teachers would come over and help with the homework. There was a lot of this one-on-one community-based organization that, when I moved to a predominantly white school, that did not exist."

Jamel K. Donnor, an education professor at the College of William and Mary, said Connecticut should supplement its desegregation law with an education integration policy that accounts for socioeconomic status, especially in a predominantly white town like Fairfield, where a student body that's 40 percent comprised of racial minorities is considered racially imbalanced.

He said the state's policy needs to understand the differences among racial demographics to form the basis of racial equity in school districts like Fairfield.

"Some of these policies also haven't necessarily evolved with the times again because it was pretty much Black-white binary whereas now you have this influx of diverse student populations," he said.