The Whiter, Richer School District Right Next Door
August 1, 2019
By: Adam Harris
Source: The Atlantic
The Waterbury School District is quarantined within man-made, invisible walls, partitions that hug it on each side, forming taut, if unnatural, boundaries on the map. The school district, in Waterbury, Connecticut, is touched by eight other districts, each one whiter, more affluent, and receiving more dollars than Waterbury itself. Take the Wolcott School District, for example, where 87 percent of students are white, and which spends $2,000 more per student than Waterbury, which is 82 percent nonwhite; or the Plymouth School District, which has a racial makeup that’s comparable to Wolcott’s, and which spends $3,500 more per student. More wealth, more white students, more resources for those kids.
Waterbury is surrounded by what EdBuild, a nonprofit focused on equity in school funding, calls an isolating border; the group defines an isolating border as one that divides one school district from another that is at least 25 percent whiter and receives at least 10 percent more funding per student. What’s happening in Waterbury is not unique. Across the United States, in 42 states, there are 969 of these isolating borders, according to EdBuild’s recently released report. The average disparity in funding along these borders was roughly $4,000 per student. Waterbury, the group found, is the most isolated school district in the country.