NYC pilot program aims to foster greater school diversity
Gentrification has been coming fast to Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood. The influx of wealthier, white residents is being reflected in the hallways of P.S. 705.
The elementary school is still half black and more than a quarter Hispanic, but Principal Sandra Soto has seen enough change to worry that P.S. 705 was on the cusp of a phenomenon that has occurred elsewhere in the city, where poorer, minority children disappear as their families are priced out of the neighborhood.
“The next thing you know, I have a whole slew of middle-class white families,” she said, while black and Hispanic families are left feeling, “Here we go. We’re marginalized again.”