Magnet Lottery Rigged For Suburbanites

Nefiteria Harris, a 38-year-old mom, dreams of sending her two younger children to Davis Academy for Arts and Design Innovation Magnet School. But a system tilted to suburban families keeps getting in the way.

Harris saved up to make the move from Newhallville to the Amity neighborhood two years ago, just four blocks away from the elementary school, in hopes of landing spots there. She regularly stops by to ask administrators whether any seats have opened up. She continues to play the school lottery each year, always ranking Davis as her top choice.

Each time, her kids have been waitlisted. Rather than walking her kids to school each morning, Harris now has to drive her kids to King-Robinson Inter-District Magnet School back in Newhallville, because the school bus won’t pick up pre-kindergarteners like her youngest daughter.

Harris said she’s frustrated by the district’s lottery process. She wonders why living in the neighborhood hasn’t earned her the advantage she thought she was promised. She wants to know who’s filling up the school instead.

In her case, it was likely kids from suburbs like West Haven, Hamden, Ansonia and Meriden who got in ahead of her.

That’s because at Davis — as at five of New Haven’s other inter-district magnet schools — more than half the open desks last school year went to students who live outside the city.

“It’s a slap in the face. I pay my taxes just like everyone else,” Harris said. ​“It’s just wrong. Especially when we’re busing kids in from other towns, I feel that’s unfair.”

In an ongoing look at New Haven’s 16 inter-district magnet schools, the Independent found that far more open seats are being reserved for suburbanites than school administrators have previously admitted.

In total, only 53.8 percent of last year’s 2,194 placements went to students who actually live in New Haven, even though, by law, the district could be giving 75 percent of the seats to city residents.

65% Suburban Set-Aside

According to data released to the Independent through the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act, only one school — the now-shuttered Cortlandt V.R. Creed Health & Sports Science Inter-District Magnet School — was within the 65 percent set-aside for suburban students that officials say they’ve been using as a recruiting goal.

Six schools were way off that target, giving more than half their seats to out-of-towners: New Haven Academy at 57.1 percent, Mauro-Sheridan at 53.8 percent, High School in the Community at 52.1 percent, L.W. Beecher Museum School at 51.4 percent, King-Robinson at 51.4 percent, and Davis at 50.5 percent.

At the Board of Education’s Governance Committee meetings over the last two months, a school board member has pressed district administrators to maximize local enrollment, filling up 75% of the spots with city children.

Tamiko Jackson-McArthur, the committee chair, argues that too many New Haven families are being turned away from schools right in their backyard.

Marquelle Middleton, the district’s choice and enrollment director, countered that the inter-district magnet schools need to keep a buffer to make sure they don’t exceed the 75 percent maximum for city students, potentially putting funding at risk. 

In a chart he provided to board members, Middleton pointed out that one school is already on the cusp: High School in the Community, where 74.9% of students live in New Haven.

Middleton left one school off his list: Engineering & Science University Magnet School, where only 51.9% of the students live in New Haven.

Middleton also argued that the district could lose up to $2.8 million in inter-district magnet school funding by reducing suburban enrollment. That’s because the state pays out more than twice as much money for suburban students, at $7,085 for an out-of-towner versus $3,000 for a city resident, through magnet school grants.

(In total, including the Educational Cost Sharing formula, the primary mechanism for distributing state aid, with magnet grants, Connecticut pays roughly $12,550 for each city resident and $8,385 for each suburban resident in its inter-district magnet schools.)

From talking with principals, Middleton said that could mean eliminating ​“many critical full-time arts instructors” at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School; at least three teachers at Hill Regional Career High School; and a literacy tutor, a part-time dance instructor and art staff at Davis.

Additionally, New Haven could eventually see even more funds withheld if the inter-district magnet schools are not racially integrated. The state has imposed penalties on Hill Regional Career High School and Metropolitan Business Academy and put other schools on notice for not making substantial progress toward having a minimum of 25 percent white, Asian-American or Native students.

This legislative session, however, the state gave cities like New Haven, who aren’t parties to the Sheff v. O’Neill litigation, a two-year reprieve from that rule.

Middleton suggested leaving the current recruiting goal — keeping 65 percent of desks for New Haven students — in place, saying that the district could use the extra time to improve the ​“quality and look” of schools.

“Beyond the money, beyond the 75 – 25, our choice process needs to be improved to empower those students who didn’t get in,” Middleton said. ​“The thing we have to focus on is the quality of all our schools. Students in New Haven feel like our magnet schools are better, but we need to make all of them feel proud of their school.”

“They’re Rigging It”

In Harris’s case, Davis held 62 spots open for New Haven children and 67 spots open for suburban children.

Once the algorithm was run, the district actually ended up placing far fewer students at Davis, even though the school is not at capacity. It accepted 46 kids from New Haven and 47 kids from the suburbs.

“They’re rigging it,” Harris said. ​“They pick they numbers they want, because they say they’ll lose money if it’s not done in a certain way, that they’re going to lose the grants or whatever it is they’re getting. They’re manipulating the system.”

The closest Harris has come to nabbing a spot — at a school that roughly 350 other parents also listed as their favorite — was when her son was placed third in line for a sixth-grade desk.

After losing out a second time, Harris went to the school to ask why she wasn’t able to get either of her kids in, despite living so close by. ​“Even with a neighborhood preference, it’s still a lottery,” she said they told her. ​“We’ll try.”

Her kids didn’t get into any of their four picks this year, even under a revamped lottery that’s supposed to discourage parents from gaming the odds.

They’ll stay at King-Robinson until she tries applying again. Harris said that she likes the school, crediting its ​“great teachers,” but she said it’s a ​“huge inconvenience” to have to drop her kids off at 7:30 a.m., before she turns around to drive back to her job in West Haven.

“You’re being told you have neighborhood preference, you pick your number-one school closest to you, and you don’t even get a shot. They put you on this so-called waiting list, and it never moves,” she said. ​“The children in New Haven should have first-choice.”

Harris said that she wishes New Haven would return to the system of neighborhood schools that she remembered from her childhood, when she went to Lincoln-Bassett and Betsy Ross.

“Back when I was in school, they didn’t have a lottery. If you lived in that neighborhood, that was your school,” she said. ​“If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.”

But hadn’t there been something wrong back then? Weren’t students racially isolated?

Harris said she felt that wasn’t as big of a problem now. Thinking of her neighbors on Westerleigh Road, she said New Haven’s housing is much more integrated than decades ago.

“You have all races in this neighborhood now,” she said. ​“Everyone is pretty much here.”

Plus, Harris added, the introduction of school choice hadn’t undone segregation in her old neighborhood school.

“If anything, it’s making it worse,” she said, as Yale-affiliated parents moving into Science Park can now opt out of sending their kids to a neighborhood school like Wexler Grant or Lincoln Bassett. Last school year, both schools were as racially isolated as ever, with Black and Hispanic students making up 95.7% of Wexler Grant and 94.6% of Lincoln Bassett.

National Phenomenon: School Choice & Gentrification

What Harris noticed about the demographic disconnect between New Haven’s streets and schools matches what experts say is playing out across the country in a link between school choice and gentrification.

When parents are given the opportunity to opt out of a neighborhood school, college-educated white households become twice as likely to move into highly segregated communities of color, one look at national data found.

Similarly, in Charlotte, N.C., when students in failing schools were given the ability to transfer out for missing test-score benchmarks, housing prices shot up as wealthier residents moved in and sent their kids out of the attendance zone, another study found.

“It’s just ridiculous. To me, it seems like they’re doing it for everyone else but New Haven,” Harris said. ​“It’s hard because of the hours that I work to go to those meetings that they have at the Board of Education. I don’t even know if it would make a difference. It’s terrible, and it’s unfair.”

Darnell Goldson, the school board president, said the administration should be more transparent about how and why it’s allocating seats to the city and the suburbs.

“I’m disappointed in our administration for not focusing on this and not providing the general public and the press the information that they’re asking for, for deliberately leaving out information and for forcing the public and the press to find it for themselves,” he said.

Goldson said he doesn’t think it’s right for New Haven to be responsible for racially integrating the state’s schools. He says that the district should focus on ​“rebuilding our neighborhood schools,” rather than ​“chasing after these dollars” that suburban students bring to the system through the magnet school grant.

“The suburbanites and the government were able to hustle the cities by making them responsible for integration. We’re now fighting to bring them into the city; we’re the ones who are upset. They don’t care one way or the other,” Goldson added. ​“I am vowing to address this as a major issue this year.”

Over the coming weeks, the Independent will continue to look at the various ways that New Haven’s 16 inter-district magnet schools have changed public education throughout the region. Do you have a story you’d like to tell us? Is there something about the schools that you want to know? Get in touch by emailing tips_photos@newhavenindependent.org. The Independent will not share nor publish anything you tell us without first obtaining your explicit agreement.

Previous stories:

• Suburbs Profit Off New Haven’s Magnets
• Experimental School Rediscovers The Magic