By AMANDA HOFFMANN
According to the 88-page report, which covers education, health, and the economy, "Over the decades, countless national studies have confirmed that kids do not do well in segregated conditions. They do worse in segregated schools than in integrated ones." The overwhelming majority of students in Oceanside and Island Park are white — 88 percent in Oceanside and more than 73 percent in Island Park, according to the district's 2006-07 school report cards filed with the state.
That year — the most recent for which data is available — 5,466 of the Oceanside School District’s 6,194 students were white. A total of 460 were Hispanic, 169 registered as Asian/Native Hawaiian/other Pacific Islander, 91 were black, five were American Indian/Alaska Native and three were multiracial.
That same year, the Island Park school district had 736 registered students, and 540 were white. There were 157 Hispanic students, 20 categorized as Asian/Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander, and 19 blacks.
"One of the most interesting things is people don't know the extent to which segregation exists in our communities," said the director of the Long Island Index, Ann Golob, adding that the Island's 125 school districts are segregated not only by race, but by income. The explanation, Golob said, stems mainly from how Long Island was settled.
"Long Island was segregated almost from its inception," said Elaine Gross, president of ERASE Racism, which focuses on research, policy development and education. "We had government-sanctioned housing segregation."
Racial covenants, which forbade occupancy of homes "by any person other than members of the Caucasian race," Gross said, prevented communities from developing in an integrated pattern. "A lot of people moved out to the Island knowing full well that they wanted to escape diversity and move to an all-white community."
This set the stage for segregated school districts. "If you look at the school district lines, they mirror these segregated communities," Gross said. This is why, she said, segregation on the Island tends to be between districts — with one district nearly all white and a nearby district comprising mostly minority students — rather than segregation within a single district, which is illegal.
The legal conundrum, according to Lawrence Levy, the executive director of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University, is that laws prevent segregation within a school district, but are powerless to compel integration between small separate districts. "Because we have these small school districts, you legally could not do much to eliminate segregation in the schools.”
Segregation between districts could be minimized by combining them into larger districts, Levy said.
Levy, who grew up in Valley Stream, said that as a white student in a non-integrated school, he was at a disadvantage. "As a white person, I grew up in a cocoon,” he said. “I didn't have contact with people different from me, and it limited me and made it harder for me in the real world. It penalizes not only minority children, but white children, too."
Golob said that in order to make way for change, Long Islanders need to understand the reality of the situation, examine what other areas have done to integrate and determine how those solutions could be applied on the Island. "By dividing up the region into so many tiny school districts, we profoundly impact the opportunities available to poorer students who are predominantly black and Latino in our region," said Golob.
Golob cited the Index's findings, that 75 percent of the Island's 125 school districts have fewer than 5,500 students and nearly 36 percent of the 125 districts cover less than five square miles.
"Not surprisingly, your poorer school districts are those that are predominantly black and Latino," said Golob. "Those are the districts that typically have the least amount of funding because they have the least ability to raise funds."
To illustrate this disparity, the Index studied the cost to homeowners in each district to raise revenue by $250 per student. Based on a home valued at $450,000, the Index found a homeowner on Fire Island would pay an extra $1.72, whereas a homeowner in Brentwood would have to ante up $325. A homeowner in Wydant would pay $314,but a homeowner in Locust Valley, which has about the same number of students, would pay $47. Island Park homeowners would pay about $50, Oceanside homeowners would pay closer to $125.
"We know that selling people on the idea of district consolidation is a tough one," Golob said.
The idea of consolidation was met with resistance in Island Park last December when a state tax-relief commission headed by Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi recommended consolidating school districts with fewer than 1,000 students in an effort to slow the steady rise of property taxes countywide. Island Park Superintendent Edward Price estimated that the district had approximately 700 students enrolled in kindergarten through eighth grade, but Price said, combining districts would be difficult because of the intricacies of salary and contract negotiations, which vary between districts.
Other solutions suggested by the Index include magnet schools, which would be comparable to Nassau BOCES' Long Island High School for the Arts in Syosset, which is open to all students interested in the performing arts.
"The best, most practical way is to create magnet schools in some of the poorer communities that would attract kids to come there and maybe spend half the day,” said Levy. “Nobody has to go to a magnet school — it's supposed to have such good programs that parents want to send their kids to those schools."
Levy said that the Island has been slow to build magnet schools because parents are concerned that some of the best students in a district might leave to pursue programs only magnet school can offer.
Another way to integrate students would be through a voluntary inter-district transfer program, which, Golob explained, started during the 1960s in Hartford, Conn. In such a program, students from the suburbs are invited to attend schools in urban centers, and urban students are invited out to the suburbs. "The programs have been very successful and the students have done really well, and they've been going on a heck of a long time," Golob said.
But experts acknowledge that it isn't going to be easy to change years of segregation. "The challenge you have is when this has been going on so many years, there is not an expectation that it could be different or should be different," said Gross. "A lot of combinations of ignorance and fear feed on themselves ... Because [integration] didn't happen naturally, it requires intentional actions — people have to really go out of their comfort zone to be in a diverse environment because it’s so much easier to keep things the way they are."
Despite these hurdles, Levy said, it is critical for the Island to integrate its schools to give students the best possible educational experience." We need to not worry so much about race and religion and ethnicity," he said.
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