A Semester After Brooklyn's Contentious School Rezoning, No Change: Report

VINEGAR HILL, BROOKLYN — It's been almost a semester since the city implemented its plan to alleviate the wait list for the mostly white, upper-middle-class PS 8 in Brooklyn Heights and force some families in the PS 8 zone to instead send their kids to nearby PS 307 in Vinegar Hill, which serves predominantly low-income black and Hispanic kids.

The loftier goal at hand: to desegregate at least one of the city's racially divided school districts.

However, according to a Gothamist investigation, PS 307 hasn't shown a significant change in demographics this semester in its pre-K and kindergarten classes (the only grades that would have been impacted so far by the city's integration efforts.)

As of Oct. 31, 2016, Department of Education data reviewed by Gothamist showed that out of 47 pre-k students at PS 307, fewer than 10 were white. Out of 58 in the kindergarten class, fewer than 10 were white.

Last year, there were exactly 10 white students in pre-K and fewer than 10 in kindergarten.

(For any number under 10, the DOE reports it as "under 10" instead of using single digits, due to privacy issues, according to Gothamist.)

As Patch reported back in January, PS 307, a plain brick building in Vinegar Hill, is currently filled mostly with low-income black kids — many of them from the Farragut Houses, an affordable-housing project across the street. PS 8, one mile west, is a much-clawed-over campus in tony Brooklyn Heights whose notorious 2015 kindergarten wait list launched a thousand helicopter-parent panic attacks.

While there may be very little change to PS 307 now, city education officials have stressed that the rezoning plan is expected to take at least five years to reach its full potential. The ultimate goal of the plan is to accept 100 new kids, per grade, into PS 307.

DUMBO resident and PS 307 mother Eliza Porter, who is white, told Gothamist she's hearing positive buzz from younger parents about PS 307. "The buzz that I'm hearing from families a little bit younger is at least go tour it,” Porter told Gothamist. "Go look at it first before you make any decisions. Because touring it could change the biases that you have based on its location."

The waitlist at PS 8 is now empty, as the city hoped it would be, according Gothamist. However, it's unclear how many of the families zoned out of PS 8 sent their kids to PS 307 instead.

Many parents of PS 307 kids, a majority of them residents of the Farragut Houses public-housing complex next door, were peeved at the rezoning. They were skeptical it would benefit their community, and doubtful it would actually end in harmonious integration.

Farragut Houses native Debra Stuart, a career parole officer, said at the final rezoning vote in January: “Schools have been systematically segregated into areas of people of color, and that hasn’t been a problem [until now]." She said she was worried PS 307 wouldn't remain a sanctuary for the community that built it, and that local kids would be pushed out by more affluent newcomers. "I am tired of better things being brought into the community and the community being denied those better things,” she said.

Lead image via Google Maps