Chancellor Kamar Samuels is forming local working groups to create proposals that advance school integration and academic rigor in their districts, he announced Wednesday.
The plans are expected to focus on racial diversity, but also differences in disability or socioeconomic status, or in home language, according to a news release. The working groups will have about a year to put forward their proposals.
“If the first time you are connecting with somebody across difference is when you show up in a dorm room, or when you show up at a workplace, we would have really failed you as a young person,” Samuels said during a launch event with the author Heather McGhee. “That to me is why this idea of true integration is really important.”
For all its diversity, New York City remains home to one of the most segregated school systems in the country. Despite that, school integration efforts stalled under former Mayor Eric Adams and President Trump’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion.
The working groups kicked off in five school districts, with the goal of expanding citywide by 2028. The first cohort is Districts 3, 7, 13, 16, and 25, including the Upper West Side and West Harlem, South Bronx, Brooklyn Heights, Fort Greene and Bedford-Stuyvesant and North-Central Queens.
Superintendents are convening the groups of parents, teachers, principals and local organizations. The working groups will meet each month to develop local proposals. The chancellor said his priorities were developed in consultation with parents in an effort to combat attrition from the public schools.
“Families when — if you ask them — do you want a diverse school or not? ‘Sure,’ they’ll say, ‘Of course, yes, of course, we want that,’” Samuels said. “But when it comes down to (school) choices, safety and academic rigor really dwarfs the idea of a diverse school.”
District leaders will then work with the system’s central office to review data and evaluate how it could be used to support school integration, according to the release. After that analysis, Samuels insisted he doesn’t have defined end goals in mind.
“I can’t say what are the specific things that are going to come from the working groups,” Samuels told the reps. “You are going to really think about and co-decide on what the big problem is that you’re working on. Then once you do that — they’re called working groups for a reason, they’re not talking groups — we need to get to what are we going to do?”
Before he became chancellor, Samuels as a local superintendent was a proponent of International Baccalaureate programs that provide a rigorous education without separating students. He’s also looked as enrollment declines as opportunities to merge schools to create more diverse student bodies.
Mayor Mamdani said on the campaign trail he was in favor of delaying Gifted and Talented admissions to older grades. Mamdani and Samuels also recently released an immigration-focused comic book as part of the social studies and civics curriculum, which tries to reflect students from diverse backgrounds.
Close to 62% of students in the city’s school system are Black or Hispanic, and 22% have a disability, according to local student demographic data. Students and their families speak more than 180 languages.
Nyah Berg, the executive director of New York Appleseed, a group that supports integrated schools, said the launch of the working groups was “an actionable, concrete step toward moving any type of needle forward on addressing segregation.”
“This is a necessity to get where we supposedly want to go,” Berg said.