NEWS

JCPS student diversity shows steady gains

Allison Ross

@allisonSross

Even though the Jefferson County Public Schools continues to have a more diverse student population, some of its schools lag behind, according to an analysis by USA Today.

However, the district paints an overall portrait of increased racial and ethnic diversity, especially compared to some schools elsewhere in the nation that are backsliding into resegregation, the numbers show.

"Jefferson County Public Schools has been considered a leader in the efforts for diversity among large school districts," said Raoul Cunningham, president of the Louisville branch of the NAACP. "Now does that mean we have everything right? No. Obviously. ... We are very much aware that diversity is not across the board in all schools."

The USA Today analysis created a 0-100 school diversity index for K-12 public schools across the country that measures the chance that two randomly chosen students in a school will be of different races or ethnicities. The analysis uses 2011 data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

JCPS schools ranged on that index from a low of 35 at Medora Elementary — where nearly 79 percent of students at the school were white in 2011 — to a high of 73 at Rutherford Elementary. Rutherford in 2011 was about 35 percent white, 30 percent black, 12 percent Hispanic and 20 percent Asian, according to the NCES data. (The NCES reported Hispanic as a race, not an ethnicity.)

"Our goal is to make sure our students have a well-rounded experience and are well-rounded individuals," said Rutherford principal Kenya Natsis, who said more than 70 languages are spoken in her school thanks to a large influx of immigrants in surrounding neighborhoods. She said Rutherford faces challenges that other schools in JCPS do not, but "we see this as a challenge to prove to other schools that if we can do it, you can do it, too."

A balancing act

Bob Rodosky, JCPS's chief executive director of the Office of Data Management, Planning, and Program Evaluation Services, said the district tries to do a balancing act of offering parents and students choices on where to attend school while also focusing on diversity.

He noted that keeping schools diverse can be a challenge as populations shift over the years or as a school gets a particular reputation that draws in certain demographics.

"One of the things about student assignment is that people move. Buildings stay where they're at," Rodosky said.

Understanding demographic shifts at particular JCPS schools can be complex, given the district's oft-tweaked system of diversity indices, magnet programs, shifting demographics and student assignment plans.

Rodosky noted that the recent change from six to 13 elementary school clusters also has affected demographics since 2011.

The discussion of diversity in schools is becoming an ever-more-important topic as the profile of public school students changes. For the first time ever this school year, white students are in the minority, according to the U.S. Department of Education. That shift is also reflected in JCPS, which last year for the first time had a majority-minority student body.

The USA Today data shows that the diversity index increased in the majority of JCPS schools from 2001-2011 as the district itself became more racially and ethnically diverse.

But a few schools saw more homogenization in that period. For instance, Maupin Elementary was about 49 percent black, 45 percent white, 3 percent Asian and 2 percent Hispanic in 2001, giving it a diversity index of 55. A decade later, its diversity index had dropped by 11 points as its student population rose to 73 percent black.

In 2013, according to JCPS data, Maupin's enrollment was 82 percent black.

"Maupin is one of the schools that has struggled with a diversity issue for years," Rodosky said.

He said the district has tried several programs to try to attract parents and students to the west-end school, but they've been unsuccessful in attracting students for long. He said the latest endeavor is to put a School of Innovation at Maupin. The Catalpa School program, a Waldorf-inspired arts school, will start at Maupin next year.

Still, the decreased diversity at Maupin is a far cry from some of the stories being told in other parts of the United States.

Resegregation

In the years since the end of court-ordered desegregation in school districts across the country, many schools have struggled to keep from lapsing back into de facto resegregation, with schools that were once well integrated now having predominantly minority populations.

For example, Central High School in Tuscaloosa, Ala., has been the focus of media attention as the school has slipped from being a success story of integration into having an almost entirely-black student population.

In the late 1970s, a court order forced Tuscaloosa to integrate two largely segregated schools into one, called Central. According to the USA Today data, the diversity index of that school was 48 in 1991.

But two decades later — and more than a decade after Tuscaloosa was freed from the court-mandated desegregation order and the school district chose to split the integrated school into three smaller schools — the school had a diversity index of 1, with a 99.6 percent black student population in 2011.

"We've seen an increase in segregation by race and poverty that's been substantial across the country since the 1990s," said Gary Orfield, a professor at the University of California-Los Angeles and co-director of the Civil Rights Project. "We're going the wrong direction all across the country."

Orfield, a school integration expert, has worked as a consultant with JCPS on its diversity plans in the past, and commended the school district for continuing to focus on having diversity in its schools.

"They're doing much better than most school districts across the country," Orfield said. "They've had an unusual long-term commitment to having diversity."

Of course, JCPS's push for an integration plan since the lapse of its own desegregation order in 2000 has not come easily or without growing pains.

In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the district's old desegregation policy, saying it focused too much on individual students' races. Since then, the district has been making adjustments and tweaks to a new plan that uses a combination of race and socioeconomic factors, such as income and education, of a student's neighborhood to try to help keep schools integrated within a range.

At one point, it moved to six large elementary school clusters in hopes of creating a more diverse pool of students for schools, but in the past two years has moved to a 13-cluster system after complaints about long bus rides and other issues.

"Not too many larger school districts come back seeking alternate ways to get to the same goal of achieving diversity (after having their plans struck down)," Orfield said. He said that while there was originally a lot of opposition in Jefferson County, he said the community has since embraced diversity efforts in schools more than many other communities.

At Rutherford, diversity is the norm. In one classroom, a group of six fifth-graders — only one of whom is a native English speaker — have a discussion about how to respectfully get a point across when they disagree with someone on a point.

"In life, you have to be able to work with all different kinds of people," principal Natsis said. "This is an opportunity to grow our kids."

Reporter Allison Ross can be reached at (502) 582-4241. Follow her on Twitter at @allisonSross.