The city's public advocate is calling for the schools chancellor to hire a chief diversity officer to combat segregation in public schools. NY1's Lindsey Christ filed the following report.
City schools are considered among the most segregated in the country. Take downtown Manhattan, where PS 397 is filled mostly with white students, while just a short walk away, PS 1 is mostly Asian and PS 15 is almost entirely black and Hispanic.
"The Department of Education, unfortunately, does not have a comprehensive plan to address this," said Public Advocate Letitia James.
James said Wednesday that the city needs to hire someone to focus on increasing diversity within individual schools across the entire system.
"Now I'm not talking about another level of bureaucracy. I'm talking about a chief diversity officer who will evaluate our current policies and practices, such as zoning, enrollment, class size and co-locations," she said.
Recent attemps to improve diversity by redrawing some neighborhood school zones..have been controversial. On the Upper West Side, parent opposition has forced the city to repeatedly delay a rezoning decision that was due a year ago.
The public advocate didn't have specific proposals for how the schools could be desegregated. She says that's what the chief diversity officer would figure out.
The city's Department of Education dismissed the proposal as simplistic, saying, "The buck stops with the Chancellor and she's asked her senior leadership team to work on these important efforts through operations, programming, instruction and policy."
The Department of Education says it's working on a comprehensive plan to address school segregation and will release it later this school year.