Keeping Score: A Year Inside a Divided Brooklyn High School
Nearly seventy years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, our public schools effectively remain segregated. And, by some measures, New York City has the most segregated system in the country. For a group of high schools in Brooklyn, change has long seemed impossible. But now those schools are putting their hopes in an unlikely place: sports.\nThe John Jay Educational Campus in Park Slope, Brooklyn, houses four public high schools. Three of them have a student body with a Black-and-Latino majority; the fourth is disproportionately white and Asian. For a decade, students from all four schools shared a cafeteria and a gym but played on two separate sports teams\u2014sometimes even competing against one other. Last year, the athletics programs merged, and the hope is that this change will break down some of the divisions between students. Angelina Sharifi, a student who plays volleyball, said that a team has to mesh in order to win. \u201cAnd meshing is, like, the best feeling ever\u2014having a pass, set, swing, that fits perfectly with one another,\u201d she said. \u201cThat kind of unspoken connection that comes with volleyball is super-satisfying for me.\nThis is a story of how students and adults grapple with enduring inequities, and how the merger is playing out on the girls\u2019 varsity volleyball team.\xa0\u201cI want this to work. I really do,\u201d the student Mariah Morgan said, \u201cbecause it has the potential to be incredibly anti-racist.\u201d\nThis reporting originally aired as part of the podcast \u201cKeeping Score,\u201d a co-production of WNYC Studios and\xa0The Bell.