83.7% Of Creed Students Get Top Choice

After the state punished their school for lacking racial diversity, many Creed High students are heading to more integrated magnet schools this fall.

That could create a new problem.

The school system has been rushing to find new schools for Cortlandt V.R. Creed Health & Sports Science High School’s students because the school itself is being shut down this month. And even though many got their top choice, the redistribution of mostly black and brown students from Creed could undermine the district’s ongoing effort to desegregate schools for the entire region.

The state will track the students transferring out of Creed, understanding that they may shift racial diversity in New Haven’s inter-district magnet program next year. But long-term, the influx doesn’t make it any easier to bring in white suburbanites, whom the district needs to avoid financial penalties at 14 state-funded magnet schools that are currently non-compliant with state formulas for integrated school populations.

In a rushed lottery process that ended last week, the district found a way to squeeze in seats for nearly 240 students dispersed by the Board of Education’s decision to close Creed. Principals managed to make room even at some of the most sought-after magnet schools, like Cooperative Arts & Humanities and Hill Regional Career.

During a Board of Education’s meeting Monday night at Celentano School, school officials shared data about where Creed students ended up and previewed plans for diversifying all its schools.

In the first round of placements, 83.7 percent of Creed students landed their top pick, said Sherri Davis-Googe, the director of school choice enrollment. Another 7.9 percent got their second choice; 3.3 percent, their third choice; and 1.7 percent, their fourth choice.

After hand-wringing by parents, who worried their kids would be dropped into a big high school, and objections by two board members, who felt the plans for reshuffling students were too vague, the percentage of Creed students who got the school they wanted turned out to be surprisingly high.

“I think it worked out better than we hoped,” Davis-Googe said. ​“Because there are so many high schools, we could spread them across.”

The district was able to accommodate so many of Creed’s students by pushing the capacity of its inter-district magnet schools to the limit that would not require more teachers, Davis-Googe explained. She added that many high schools also had empty desks in the upper grades.

Only 3.3 percent couldn’t nab any spots, Davis-Googe added. Those eight kids — seven freshmen and one sophomore — have been assigned to the city’s two comprehensive high schools, Wilbur Cross and James Hillhouse, while they see if they can get off the waitlist.

“More than likely, they’ll get in,” Davis-Googe said.

State Oversight

As they accept Creed transfers, New Haven’s inter-district magnet high schools will get some extra leeway from the State Department of Education (SDE).

In a letter last month, the SDE had said that, by October 2021, every inter-district magnet high school needed to catch up with the ​“racial isolation” standards defined after Sheff v. O’Neill, the Connecticut Supreme Court’s landmark ruling that ordered the desegregation of Hartford area schools.

To diversify, magnets receive extra state funding — $7,085 per suburbanite; $3,000 per local — to reserve at least a quarter of their seats for students from surrounding towns.

According to the latest regulations, they can’t be more than 75 percent black or brown.

That is, unless the SDE’s commissioner gives them a waiver because city schools are trending in the right direction on race or increasing diversity in other ways, such as integrating across geography, socioeconomics, English-language learner or special education status, achievement and other factors.

Currently, only one high school (Engineering & Science University Magnet School) is technically compliant, but even that could change next year with kids from Creed scattered to every school.

The state has said it will give the district some wiggle room to meet its targets.

“We’re working closely with the state,” Davis-Googe said. ​“They know we closed a school. As long as we’re making growth, they’re going to be understanding.”

But in the meantime, the SDE also asked the district to come up with a ​“more robust” marketing strategy that includes reallocated school budgets, a revamped website and a social media presence, Superintendent Carol Birks said Monday. It also directed the district to look at adding middle-school athletics.

How Parents Pick

While the SDE is giving the district some leeway to get its numbers up, more racial isolation in New Haven’s schools could make it harder to attract white students in the future, national research indicates.

“All things equal, all parents prefer that their children go to a school where their race is the majority,” said Patrick Wolf, a professor of education policy at the University of Arkansas, after reviewing a forthcoming study. ​“Well, that’s a problem, right? For integration purposes, something has to give. It’s part of the challenge of developing and maintaining racially integrated schools.”

While most parents won’t explicitly say that race matters in how they pick schools, especially compared to academics, their behavior often belies how much demographics matter.

In Washington, D.C., for instance, parents using an online tool to look at schools clicked on racial composition first more frequently than any other criteria, including test scores, according to a 2002 study. On average, those parents chose schools that were whiter than the district as a whole, the study also found.

Parents may have been relying on a strong, proven association between racial isolation and academic performance in most American schools today, but demographics still factored in even when ranking hypothetical schools, another 2016 survey concluded.

A high proportion of black students, even in a theoretical school, held as a ​“consistent and significant” deterrent to white parents’ likelihood to enroll their kids, the authors, Wichita State University’s Chase M. Billingham and Northeastern University’s Matthew Hunt, wrote after surveying 860 parents.

Only one-fifth of white parents surveyed said they’d pick a low-performing school where more than 60 percent of the students are black, yet more than half said they’d pick the same low-performing school where less than 20 percent of the students are black. Overall, the most common choice for white parents was a high-performing school with less black students.

Billingham and Hunt suspected parents might still by using race as a ​“proxy” for school quality, so they added details about the building’s age, security protocol and test scores to the mix.

More than demographics, those factors could be huge turn-offs for parents, the study found. However, even after controlling for those variables, the portion of black kids in a school still made a difference in parents’ choices.

School choice, Billingham and Hunt concluded, could worsen racial segregation, especially because districts were largely prohibited from considering race in their lotteries.

But ​“the results do suggest some hopeful strategies for districts striving to pursue integration,” Billingham and Hunt wrote. ​“Providing substantial renovations to school facilities, improving test scores, and finding ways to reduce the overt presence of intimidating security … will not eliminate all white parents’ reluctance to enrolling their children in majority-black schools, but these measures will soften that reluctance among many.”

As Creed’s closure causes other city high schools’ demographics to fluctuate, New Haven will get a chance to test Billingham and Hunt’s conclusions. Only this time, the choices by parents in Cheshire, Orange and Guilford won’t be theoretical.