West Hartford has been informed by the State Department of Education that too many of its black and Hispanic students are being sent to two of its schools.
State law requires districts to report their student demographics for each school. If any school has 25 percent more minorities than the district average, the community must submit a plan to address the imbalance within 60 days. Greenwich, Groton, Fairfield, and Bristol officials were also informed for at least the second consecutive year that they need to reduce the racial isolation in at least one of their schools.
West Hartford — which has 10,500 students — has too many of its minority students attending Charter Oak International Academy and Smith School. About 75 percent of the students enrolled in those schools are minorities, compared to 37 percent of the districts overall minority enrollment.
Additionally, two other schools are on the threshold of having too few minority students. Seventeen percent of Bugbee School and 20 percent of Morley students are minorities.
Jacqueline was CT Mirror’s Education and Housing Reporter, and an original member of the CT Mirror staff, joining shortly before our January 2010 launch. Her awards include the best-of-show Theodore A. Driscoll Investigative Award from the Connecticut Society of Professional Journalists in 2019 for reporting on inadequate inmate health care, first-place for investigative reporting from the New England Newspaper and Press Association in 2020 for reporting on housing segregation, and two first-place awards from the National Education Writers Association in 2012. She was selected for a prestigious, year-long Propublica Local Reporting Network grant in 2019, exploring a range of affordable and low-income housing issues. Before joining CT Mirror, Jacqueline was a reporter, online editor and website developer for The Washington Post Co.’s Maryland newspaper chains. Jacqueline received an undergraduate degree in journalism from Bowling Green State University and a master’s in public policy from Trinity College.
