Prometheus 6

I don't mean to be TOO cynical...

Though Greenwich’s population of 61,000 is 90 percent white, according to the census, nearly a quarter of the public school system’s 8,800 students are black, Hispanic or Asian. Yet their representation in many elementary and middle schools is lopsided.

Still, Connecticut's school superintendant is doing the right thing.

Few parents are openly criticizing the goal of diversity, but a group calling itself Concerned Citizens of Greenwich has run full-page advertisements in local newspapers asking that neighborhood schools not be made to suffer in the rush to bolster other schools. Dr. Sternberg said she had received a flood of e-mail messages, including many that took a “hateful, bullying tone.” In a recent essay in Greenwich Time, she cited one e-mail message from a parent who complained: “The children are exposed to racial diversity in middle school and high school and in their extracurricular activities. ... We don’t want our elementary school-age children used to neutralize the makeup of another part of town.”

Otherwise, them poor white kids are going to be lost come junior high school.

Wealthy Connecticut School District Starts to Grapple With Racial Imbalance
By ALISON LEIGH COWAN

GREENWICH, Conn., April 4 — More than half a century after the landmark desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, this overwhelmingly white and wealthy town is beginning to confront the yawning racial imbalance in its cozy, well-groomed neighborhood schools.

Every year since 2000, the Connecticut Department of Education has sent Greenwich — along with other towns like West Hartford and, more recently, Fairfield and Groton — warning letters citing specific schools in danger of violating state laws on racial balance by having student bodies far less diverse than their districts over all.

Those districts and a dozen others are bracing for another round of warnings after the Education Department reviews this year’s list on Thursday. But little changes from year to year, and the state has rarely, if ever, followed through with sanctions like withholding money to force changes.

Now, Greenwich’s new superintendent — who until last summer was the state education commissioner, responsible for enforcing the racial balance law — has vowed to get serious about spreading minority students more equally among the district’s 14 elementary and middle schools, rankling many parents for whom top-notch education without widespread busing was a major incentive to buy expensive homes here. The superintendent, Betty J. Sternberg, has convened a 44-person task force to tackle the problem, bluntly declaring, “Our schools are becoming more segregated.”

“There will always be people who love their neighborhood schools, and that’s fine,” Dr. Sternberg told teachers last month at the Old Greenwich School. But, she said, “we’re getting to be an increasingly segregated town,” adding that she hoped residents, even without pressure from the state, would “embrace the value of being educated in a diverse setting.”