Racial makeup of schools not a new point of concern
By Joey Pitchford
Published in News on December 8, 2016 10:00 AM
The Wayne County public school system remains under review by the United States Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights over a 2009 NAACP Title VI complaint alleging that racial disparities across 26 of the 33 schools in the system have led to an imbalance in quality of education, as detailed in a memo released by NAACP branch president Sylvia Barnes.
This, according to the complaint, is due to the high teacher turnover and difficulty attracting effective teachers that racially non-diverse schools can have.
Title VI is part of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, and prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin in any program which receives federal funding. The complaint was upgraded to what is called a compliance review within the last few years, said UNC Center for Civil Rights lawyer Mark Dorosin.
According to the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, Wayne County Public Schools served a student population in the 2015-2016 school year that was 38.7 percent white, 34.9 percent black, 20 percent Latino and 3.9 percent multiracial. A school was considered "racially imbalanced" if one or more of its demographic groups fell more than 15 percentage points away from the county average.
The most dramatic disparities exist in the Goldsboro High attendance area, which includes School Street Elementary, North Drive Elementary, Carver Heights Elementary, Dillard Middle and Goldsboro High. At each of these schools, the population is overwhelmingly black- anywhere from 87.5 percent at North Drive to 92.6 percent at School Street, with no school reaching more than 3.1 percent white attendance. Those schools also had, on average, lower grades, higher teacher turnover rates and less experienced teachers than schools in other attendance areas, according to 2014-2015 school year data from the NCDPI.
Dorosin said that racial disparities are "the direct and foreseeable result of decisions that school boards make," and the substantial difference between the racial makeup of the county and its schools needs to be addressed.
"The school district itself is actually a fairly diverse district," he said. "So when you see schools that are hyper-segregated, you start to think that people should be looking at those decisions."
Wayne School of Engineering and Wayne Early Middle College High School, two of the highest-performing schools in the county, were 68.1 percent white and 42.6 percent white respectively, even though WSE shares a campus with the 88.8 percent black Goldsboro High.
On the other end of the spectrum, the Rosewood High attendance area, which includes Rosewood Elementary, Rosewood Middle and Rosewood High is overwhelmingly white. Rosewood Elementary's student body was 68.3 percent white, while Rosewood Middle and High were 66.7 and 70.7 percent white respectively in 2015, according to the NCDPI. Those last two, along with WSE, WEMCHS and Charles B. Aycock High also had the five lowest rates of free-and-reduced-lunch across the county -- all but WEMCHS have a majority white student body, and WEMCHS's white population is still nearly double that of Latinos, the school's next-largest demographic.
The five schools in the Goldsboro High attendance area had four of the five highest rates of free/reduced in the county. The area was also the only one in the county where every school qualified for the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act's Community Eligibility Provision, which allows all students within a high-poverty area to receive free lunch.
The NAACP says that all of these factors come together to deny students of color in Goldsboro a quality education. In the 2014-2015 school year, four schools in Wayne County received an "F" grade on the NCDPI's annual school grading scale -- Carver Heights, Dillard Middle, Brogden Middle and Brogden Primary. Each of these failing schools were less than 15 percent white, with Brogden Middle at 13.8 and Brogden Primary at 12.8 percent white respectively.
Carver Heights and Dillard Middle both sat at 2.6 percent white.
Meanwhile, four of the top five schools in the county were mostly white. Wayne Early Middle College High School, WSE, Charles B. Aycock High and Rosewood High all scored in the top five and all had white populations of between 42.6 and 70.7 percent. Meadow Lane Elementary was the only school in the top five where black students held a slim majority of 41 percent, compared to 34.6 percent white.