2 Brooklyn Schools in Gentrifying Area Will Get New Zones
7th January 2016
Education officials on Tuesday approved a plan to redraw two Brooklyn school zones, shifting a neighborhood of rising wealth from a mostly white elementary school to a mostly black and Hispanic one.
Watch that ‘neighborhood of rising wealth’ quickly turn into another ‘mostly black and Hispanic one’ as the yuppies bail.
The Department of Education proposed the rezoning to alleviate crowding at the mostly white school, Public School 8. But the debate over the move has raised thorny issues of race, class and gentrification in a quickly changing part of Brooklyn.
I’ll just bet it does.
P.S. 8’s current zone encompasses Brooklyn Heights, a prosperous neighborhood, and Dumbo, an area of former warehouses now filled with multimillion-dollar apartments. The rezoning, which will take effect in the 2016-17 school year, shifts Dumbo from P.S. 8’s zone to the zone that serves Public School 307 in Vinegar Hill. Currently, the P.S. 307 zone is small and includes part of a public-housing project, the Farragut Houses.
I guess the ‘Dumbo’ area is well named. I’m sure that’s what the purchasers fo those ‘multimillion-dollar apartments’ are feeling right now.
Though they are less than a mile apart, the schools have vastly different populations: Sixty percent of P.S. 8’s students are white, and only 16 percent are from families that receive public assistance, according to state data. Ninety percent of the students at P.S. 307 are black or Hispanic, and the same proportion are from families receiving public assistance.
We’re from the government, and we’re here to screw you.
Some parents in Dumbo said they were reluctant to send their children to P.S. 307, citing its low test scores.
I would imagine the crime statistics are of more significance than ‘low test scores’.