Districts could impact disparities
By Joey Pitchford
Published in News on August 27, 2017 1:45 AM
The majority of redistricting conversations between Wayne County Public Schools officials have focused on facility use and overcrowding but redrawing lines could also make an impact on racial and socio-economic disparities.
Imbalances between racial and socio-economic groups are not a new issue for WCPS. In 2009, the Goldsboro/Wayne branch of the NAACP filed a Title VI complaint against the system, alleging that racial segregation across Wayne County schools unfairly denied students of color a quality education.
Superintendent Michael Dunsmore said that -- outside of handling overcrowding -- WCPS has not set other explicit goals for redistricting.
If the system were to look at methods used by other districts to encourage diversity, such as busing students to other districts, it would take a lot of legal research and time to accomplish.
With redistricting on the horizon, however, the school system has a unique opportunity to address some of these concerns, said board member Raymond Smith Jr.
"To me, socio-economic diversity is the more prominent issue, because poverty has no race," he said. "It has to do with your attitude toward education. If you're brought up in a middle class or wealthy household, you're more likely to have a positive attitude toward education."
Socio-economics and school performance are directly tied to each other, as students who come from poorer families are less likely to have resources they need both at school and at home. According to North Carolina Department of Public Instruction data from the 2015-16 school year, the four schools with the highest rates of free and reduced lunch -- considered to be an accurate representation of poverty in a school -- were also among the five lowest performing schools in the county. Those four schools, Carver Heights Elementary, School Street Elementary (now School Street Early Learning Center), North Drive Elementary and Dillard Middle, sat within the central attendance area and had free and reduced lunch percentages of between 80 and 85 percent.
They joined similarly low-performing school Goldsboro High in the federal Community Eligibility Provision, which provides free lunch to high-poverty schools. The central attendance area was the only WCPS district that year in which every school qualified for CEP.
Being surrounded by people from all socio-economic levels can go a long way toward helping disadvantaged students develop a love of learning no matter their race, Smith said.
"When I was a student at Goldsboro High, we had people from all walks of life, and the ones that really made an impact on me were the military kids," he said. "To talk to these kids who had gone to countries I'd only read about, who spoke languages I knew nothing about, it enhanced my attitude toward education."
Race and socio-economic status are not completely separate issues, said UNC Center for Civil Rights managing attorney Mark Dorosin, but neither are they exactly the same.
"They are related to one another, certainly," he said. "But it isn't necessarily a one-to-one correlation between the two."
Dorosin, who worked with the NAACP on its 2009 complaint and a subsequent racial study of the schools, said that socio-economics can often be used as a proxy for race. In addition, school systems have more latitude than they often realize to use race as a determining factor in redistricting.
"You can look at the racial makeup of a neighborhood, for instance," he said. "As long as you are not singling out individuals and treating them differently for their race, you can make race-conscious assignment decisions."
In Wayne County, the numbers show that schools with higher concentrations of black students also have higher rates of poverty.
Student populations at the five low-performing schools in the central attendance area are also almost entirely black, far exceeding the overall WCPS representation of 34.9 percent in 2015-16. At Dillard Middle, for instance, the population in that school year was 92 percent black. The school received an "F" rating from NCDPI that year, and failed to meet expected growth standards.
Conversely, schools with lower rates of free and reduced lunch were also higher-performing and more heavily white. Charles B. Aycock High, for instance, had between 30 and 35 percent free and reduced lunch in the 2015-16 school year and received a "C" from NCDPI. That school was 62.8 percent white.
More stark was Wayne School of Engineering, one of the highest-performing schools in the county. With a 68.1 percent white student population in 2015-16, the school had between 15 and 20 percent free and reduced lunch, according to NCDPI.
Since then, the district has debuted a new assignment strategy for WSE intended to increase diversity and bring the school's racial makeup more in line with the county overall.
Finding ways to diversify socio-economic populations is high on the priority list for Smith. He is a member of the newly-formed student assignment committee, which is tasked with developing strategies for redistricting to be presented to the full board. He said balancing out socio-economics has been more of a "side issue" up to this point, and he intends to bring it to the table during upcoming committee meetings.
Dorosin said that redistricting can be a powerful tool for achieving diversity, but only if that diversity is considered a primary goal up front. He cautioned policy makers against focusing too narrowly on goals like facility usage.
"Administrators should not look at these issues separately from diversity," he said. "Schools get a reputation for being under-funded, under-equipped and less white. Then, the parents who can afford it will move away and send their child somewhere else, which leaves the school under-enrolled."
An open transfer policy -- WCPS had one until earlier this year -- makes "white flight" as the phenomenon he described is called, all the easier. An early 2017 analysis of transfer rates in Wayne County found that the most heavily-black schools also had among the highest numbers of students transferring out. At Dillard Middle, 244 students left the school in 2016-17, with only two coming in. Goldsboro High saw 128 leave, and Carver Heights lost 121.
None of those three schools had more than six students transfer in. All three were the most under-enrolled schools at their respective grade levels.
With movement like that in combination with other factors, Dorosin said, commissioners and school board members are soon looking at alternating sets of over- and under-enrolled schools, trying to figure out how they got that way.
Fixing the problem takes a comprehensive approach, one that deals with diversity head on, he said.
"You will not achieve diversity if you don't address it upfront," he said. "You can't just redraw district lines and then look back and see how you did on diversity."