Denver schools have resegregated sharply since the end in 1995 of court-ordered busing to integrate students, according to a Harvard University study released today.
Denver Public Schools’ student population is 57 percent Latino, 20 percent white and 19 percent black, says the study, commissioned by the Piton Foundation in Denver. But individual schools don’t hold to those demographics.
“You have white students who are concentrated in schools with other white students,” said researcher Chungmei Lee with Harvard’s Civil Rights Project. “Latino students are especially isolated.”
The average Latino student attends a school that is 71 percent Latino. And in a district that is one-fifth white, more than one-third of white students attend schools where they are in the majority.
White students resegregated rapidly after the desegregation order was lifted, the study says.
In 1995, 14 percent of white students attended schools where they were in the majority. Within two years, the number doubled – 31 percent of white students were attending schools where white students were the majority.
Superintendent Michael Bennet was quoted in the study as saying the numbers don’t surprise him.
“They are trends that I think most folks in Denver would not be surprised about either,” he said.
Bennet said he is committed to improving academic programs to “cultivate the kind of diversity in the student body that we all want.”
In 1973, Denver became the first northern city ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court to desegregate after a lawsuit alleged that schools in the Park Hill neighborhood were intentionally segregated to separate white students from minorities.
It was the first Supreme Court ruling that recognized the rights of Latinos to desegregation, the study says.
“The end of the desegregation order in 1995 further exacerbated the segregation levels of minority students at a time when the Anglo enrollment was already dropping in DPS,” the study says.
The school district is enrolling a decreasing proportion of the metropolitan area’s population, from 21 percent in 1990 to 19 percent in 2003, the study says. Jefferson County is experiencing a similar trend, while percentages in other surrounding counties, including Douglas, are increasing.
“The movement of families (mostly Anglos) to the suburbs and away from urban Denver further exacerbates the racial isolation of students in Denver County,” the study says.
The trend is happening in cities across the country that were once under desegregation orders, said Gary Orfield with the Civil Rights Project. But Denver is one of the only cities where the Latino population is significantly segregated from other groups, he said.
Just 6 percent of white students in the Denver metropolitan area enroll in Denver Public Schools, the study says. In comparison, 44 percent of black students and 39 percent of Latino students in the metro area attend schools in the district.
The Civil Rights Project used statistics for the entire metro area to show not only the racial makeup of the Denver school district, but the changing demographics of the city and surrounding counties.
Denver’s 1974 Poundstone Amendment, which prohibited city annexation except by approval of voters in each county that was giving up land, guaranteed Denver Public Schools would become even more segregated, Orfield said.
The study does not advocate another busing order.
“I don’t think anybody wants to go back to that,” said Alan Gott lieb, education program officer for the Piton Foundation, a private foundation dedicated to improving education in Denver. “Without going back to busing, there are just creative ways to create options for families.”
The challenge is to draw middle-class families into the public school system, Gottlieb said. Several schools in the district have high percentages of students on free and reduced-price lunch programs and are heavily minority, yet the surrounding neighborhoods are “getting more gentrified all the time,” he said.
At Bryant Webster elementary school in northwest Denver, principal Patricia Salazar has added sixth, seventh and eighth grades as well as a dual-language program in hopes of attracting more middle-class families. Enrollment, which had dropped from 580 to 360 in three years, is back up to 504, Salazar said. The school is 93 percent Latino.
“What we wanted to do was look at what are the needs of the community,” she said.
The middle-school classes and the Spanish-English program already have waiting lists, Salazar said.
The study analyzed census and school-district data as well as reports from the National Center for Education Statistics.
Staff writer Jennifer Brown can be reached at 303-820-1593 or jenbrown@denverpost.com.
