Schools

No District 28 Schools Represent Local Diversity, New Study Finds

None of the 55 public schools studied were representative of diversity in the district, which runs from Forest Hills to Jamaica.

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FOREST HILLS, QUEENS — Zero schools in District 28 are representative of the local population, a sobering new data analysis has found.

None of the 55 public schools studied were representative of ethnic and racial diversity in the district, which stretches from Forest Hills to Jamaica, according to an analysis of 2018-2019 school enrollment and demographic data by the Citizens' Committee for Children of New York, a nonprofit advocacy organization.

For a school to be deemed representative in the nonprofit's assessment, a school's enrollment by race and ethnicity had to fall within 10 percentage points of its corresponding districtwide statistic.

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Just over a third of District 28 schools, however, were classified as somewhat representative. Those include J.H.S. 190 Russell Sage in Forest Hills and P.S. 099 Kew Gardens, according to a map of the nonprofit's findings.

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The 36 unrepresentative schools included P.S. 175 The Lynn Gross Discovery School, which is 65-percent white, and P.S. 101 School in the Gardens, which is 44-percent white, the Citizens' Committee for the Children of New York found.

In the 2018-2019 school year, roughly 15 percent of the district's students were white, 30 percent were Asian, 28 percent were Hispanic and 21 percent were black, enrollment data shows.

District 28 — which includes Forest Hills, Kew Gardens, Rego Park and Jamaica — didn't have the highest percentage of unrepresentative schools among Queens school districts: That title went to District 27 in southeast Queens, where a whopping 73 percent of schools were deemed not representative.

But District 28 is the site of a just-launched effort to diversify zoned middle schools, whose students have to live nearby to be eligible to attend. Meetings about the plan kicked off this month.

The district is one of five school districts citywide that received a grant from the city to boost schools' diversity. The city's Department of Education hired the firm WXY Studio to direct the planning process.

"Even though we are diverse as a district, many of our students from different ends never get to know and interact with each other," former district superintendent Mabel Sarduy wrote in the grant application.

A 20-person working group, whose members are largely anonymous, is responsible for helping draft recommendations for the diversity plan.


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