NY TIMES
Naia Timmons, a junior from Harlem, stood surrounded by classmates in the middle of the street outside Beacon High School as hail began to fall.
She shouted into a bullhorn: “I continue to recognize the privilege I had of escaping the system that many of my friends could not.” Naia identifies as black and white.
Her classmates chanted “End Jim Crow” and “Education is a right, not just for the rich and white.”
Roughly 300 students walked out of Beacon on Monday to protest its high-stakes admissions process, which they said has exacerbated segregation in the nation’s largest school system.
The protest at Beacon, one of New York City’s most selective public schools, illustrates the widening scope of the push for school integration. It has shifted away from the narrow issue of how few black and Hispanic students are admitted to the city’s eight specialized high schools, including Stuyvesant.
Beacon’s student population is about half white, a striking anomaly in a public school system that is nearly 70 percent black and Hispanic. Beacon is not a specialized high school — it has no admissions test — but its highly competitive admissions process requires students to assemble a portfolio of middle school work, admissions essays and high standardized test scores and grades. It is one of the most selective schools in New York: Last year, there were over 5,800 applications for 360 ninth-grade seats.
Beacon has a higher percentage of black and Hispanic students than Stuyvesant — about 32 percent compared to 4 percent at the specialized school — but also a higher percentage of white students, fewer Asian students and a lower percentage of students living in poverty. The school’s parent-teacher organization raised over $685,000 for the school last year, according to data released on Monday.
Earlier this fall, thousands of parents lined up outside Beacon for hours in the rain on a Tuesday afternoon, just to get a glimpse inside the school. The application deadline for the city’s public high schools is this Friday.
After Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to diversify schools failed this summer in the State Legislature — which controls admissions to the specialized schools — attention began to move to admissions policies in the high-profile schools that Mr. de Blasio actually oversees. Mr. de Blasio’s daughter, Chiara, attended Beacon.
The high school, in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan, is now at the center of a push for large-scale desegregation that Mr. de Blasio’s administration has not endorsed.