New York City just restarted school integration after years of stalling, and two of the five districts it picked to lead are right here: District 13, covering Fort Greene and Brooklyn Heights, and District 16 in Bed-Stuy. Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels is launching working groups to build what he calls “academically rigorous, safe and integrated schools,” reviving a fight that set off some of the ugliest public meetings in the city around 2019 and then mostly died.
The five districts running working groups are District 13 (Brooklyn Heights and Fort Greene), District 16 (Bedford-Stuyvesant), District 25 in North-Central Queens, District 3 on the Upper West Side and West Harlem, and District 7 in the South Bronx.
The word “integration” does a lot of work, and people hear very different things in it. What is launching is narrow. These are working groups, not a busing order or a rezoning. Each one is made up of teachers, principals, parent leaders, and community organizations, convened by the district superintendent, meeting monthly through the year to write a custom plan for their own district’s inequities. Nothing is being imposed from above yet. The whole design is to have each neighborhood draw up its own version.
The city is also pointedly defining integration as more than a racial headcount. Samuels framed it as diversity of ability, income, and language, and tied it directly to resources. “A truly integrated school offers more than demographic diversity,” he said. “It provides accelerated and remedial coursework, robust arts programming, multilingual learner services, IEP specialists, mental health support, and an engaged family community.” His sharpest line was the mission statement: “If one of our students first encounters peers from different backgrounds when they go off to college or start their first job, we have failed them.”
That framing is not an accident. Pairing integration with “academic rigor” is the city trying to answer the fear that sank the last push, the worry among families that integration means their kid’s school gets worse. Local elected officials lined up behind it, including Council Member Crystal Hudson, whose Fort Greene and Clinton Hill district sits inside the new District 13 group, who said strong schools “are built with communities.” The Integration Coalition, which has pushed this for years, welcomed the move but noted that concrete integration efforts have been “stagnant for far too long.”
This is the opening move, not the result. If you are a parent in District 13, 16, or 25, this is the rare education process actually built to include parent voices, and the plans these groups write this year are what later decisions will be built on. Find out who your district superintendent and Community Education Council are, and get in the room now, while the proposals are still blank pages. The families who show up for the boring working-group year are the ones who shape what the loud year looks like later.
Featured image: Courtesy youtube.com
