Charlotte’s newest schools are also among the least diverse
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Only a handful of new schools have opened in Charlotte since the recession. Almost all of them are among the more demographically skewed in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools.
All seven of the new schools that have opened since 2010 have extremely low concentrations of either affluent or low-income students. Half of them have few middle-income students either.
These figures come from data released earlier this month, and gave Charlotte its first look at the concentrations of poverty and affluence in the district’s newest schools. For the last several years, CMS has stopped publishing data on the percentages of students who receive free or reduced-price lunch.
That’s because so many schools have such large percentages of kids who qualify, it didn’t make sense to require paperwork from everyone anymore.
The distribution of high- and low-income students at the new schools is not out of line with what’s experienced through the rest of the district. The list is dominated by schools skewing either affluent or poor.
But new schools are significant for several reasons.
One, they provide a window on the latest housing patterns. New schools are generally built in areas experiencing influxes of new residents. The fact that these new schools have little diversity shows that the city of Charlotte is continuing to build housing along class lines.
And second, they show that CMS won’t be able to solve its diversity problem by simply growing out of it. The district won’t be able to reduce the percentage of segregated schools just by building new, diverse ones.
The list of schools next in line to be built offers few obvious opportunities.
- A proposed new elementary school would relieve Windsor Park, Winterfield and Idlewild — all three low-income schools.
- Another would relieve Bain, Lebanon Road and Piney Grove elementaries. Lebanon Road and Piney Grove are low-income, while Bain is high-income.
- A third new elementary school would relieve Hidden Valley, Grier and Newell — again all low-income.
If the school board is serious about doing something about the issue — and they say they are — they will have to fiddle with the long-established boundaries around older schools.
This prospect is already causing significant anxiety among parents, but the district has still offered few concrete details about what it will do.