A long-time education leader said that the best way to desegregate schools in the Hartford region is to invest in urban centers.
For the last two decades, the Hartford area has been under a court order to desegregate its schools. One of the solutions was to build magnet schools and encourage kids from the city and suburbs to attend.
But Bruce Douglas, who led CREC -- the public agency that runs 18 magnet schools around the capital region -- suggests there may be too many magnet schools, which can cost upwards of $100 million to build.
"Right now we have enough magnet schools, we should not have any more magnet schools, we probably have more than what we need right now," Douglas said at a recent event at Trinity College in Hartford.
"The way to go, from my perspective, in terms of creating better schools, is to revitalize the city. That's where the investment should be," Douglas said.
Douglas suggested that this new strategy is more sustainable, as it would help desegregate the schools while not hurting the public schools' ability to attract students.
The tension between public schools and magnets has been around for years. The money spent on magnets outside the city is often much more than what's spent on neighborhood schools within Hartford. Magnets have also been accused of taking the best students and then sending the failing ones back to the public schools.
While more minority students are attending integrated schools as a result of magnet schools and other efforts, over half of Hartford's minority students still attend a school where three-quarters of the kids are also minorities.
View CREC's Hartford revitalization plan below:
Douglas said that if more money is spent on urban revitalization, more people would consider moving to Hartford. He resigned from CREC on December 31 to take a job with an international education organization.
