Our schools are becoming more diverse, but …

When I graduated from Summit Hill High School in 1957, I am not sure that I had ever heard of the word “diversity.” There was not one Hispanic or black student among the 130 of us who were enrolled in grades 10-12 that year.

While there was little to no racial diversity in the four Panther Valley communities, there was a robust ethnic diversity including Irish, Poles, Italians, Slovaks and Germans, which gave us exposure to other cultures, ideas and cuisines from white foreign countries. Using an official government database, The Washington Post studied the racial makeup of all public schools in the United States as of 2017 and compared the percentage of whites, Hispanics and blacks to those of 22 years earlier (1995).

Diversity is a measure of the overall racial makeup of a school district. A district is considered diverse when no one race constitutes more than 75 percent of the school system’s student population.

The Post said that by 2017, there was a dramatic movement of districts toward diversity compared to the 1995 picture. More than 2,400 districts became “newly diverse” after being “undiverse” or “extremely undiverse” in 1995.

These “newly diverse” districts were typically in smaller communities that had been predominantly white but experienced an influx of students of color, particularly Hispanics.

While none of these districts is in the heart of the Times News circulation area, they are in contiguous districts in the Poconos. Additionally, some of our local districts have become more diverse in the last 22 years, so they are now considered “undiverse” rather than “extremely undiverse.”

The two “newly diverse” districts are Stroudsburg and Pocono Mountain, both in Monroe. The Pocono Mountain district had more students of color in 2017 than whites — 45.8 % white (compared to 86.7% in 1995), 25.3% Hispanic (compared to 5.8%) and 25.6% black (compared to 6.1%)

Stroudsburg had a 54% white student enrollment in 2017 (compared to 91.7% in 1995), 19.6% Hispanic (compared to 5.3%) and 18.8% black population (compared to 3.9%).

Because of growing enrollments of students of color, five of our area districts are now “undiverse” instead of “extremely undiverse” — Jim Thorpe and Panther Valley in Carbon, Pleasant Valley in Monroe; the Northampton district in Northampton County and Northern Lehigh. All of the other districts not mentioned above — Lehighton, Palmerton and Weatherly in Carbon, Tamaqua in Schuylkill, and Northwestern Lehigh — remain “extremely undiverse.”

Not surprisingly, the only historically diverse district in the five-county region is Allentown, one of our area’s main shopping and entertainment hubs, but in that 22-year stretch the percentage of white students dropped from 52.2 % to just 10.7 %, while the percentage of Hispanic students jumped 103%, from 34.3% in 1995 to 69.8% in 2017. The percentage of black students in the district rose modestly from 11.1% to 14.9%.

In its analysis citing decades of research of test scores and graduation rates, the Post concluded that integration determines how well diversity is reflected across the individual schools.

An integrated school leads to better academic performance for students of color without affecting white students’ performance. It also offers cultural and social benefits to all students, regardless of race, the analysis contends. Growing up in an area with virtually no Hispanic or black families put me really behind the curve until I went to college and met and interacted with students of color, which dramatically broadened my education and outlook and prepared me more realistically for the education and business worlds that I would enter.

Hopefully, today’s students will benefit from their school’s increased diverse environment at an even earlier age.

By Bruce Frassinelli | tneditor@tnonline.com