As of October, students of color accounted for 53.8% of all K-12 public school students in Connecticut, the fourth straight year that they are the majority and up 17.6 percentage points since 2009, according to data from the state’s Department of Education.
In the same timeframe, the share of educators of color went up 3.9 percentage points, from 7.8% in 2009 to 11.7% in the current school year. Of the roughly 54,000 educators in the state, just over 6,300 are nonwhite.
Educators identifying as Latino account for 5.1%, followed by Black educators at 4.8% and Asian educators at 1.4%. About 88.3% of all educators were white, accounting for more than 47,000 of the 54,000 educators.
With students of color making up over half of the student body and educators of color lagging behind at just over a tenth, legislators are hoping to increase the educators' share through a program that allows students from 16 school districts to be able to receive up to $10,000 each year to pursue a career in education.
[CT urges students to apply for $10K educator diversity scholarship]
In those 16 school districts, the disparity between share of students of color and share of educators of color varied.
In the Hartford School District in the current school year, of the 16,800 total students, 15,700 are students of color, a 93.4% share. Yet 545 out of 1,700 educators in the district are nonwhite, just below a third. Similar numbers are seen in Bridgeport.
The East Hartford School District has an even larger disparity. Educators of color make up 17.1% of all educators this school year while students of color make up 90.4% of the student body, a 73.3 percentage point difference, the largest of all districts who qualify for the grants.
And since 2009, the earliest year for which data was immediately available, 15 of the 16 districts saw an increase in the share of racially diverse educators. The only one that didn’t was the Ansonia school district, which went from a 6.9% share to 4.9%, which translates to a decrease of three educators of color in 14 years.
While Hartford saw an increase in the share of racially diverse educators, going from 29.6% to 31.6%, the actual number of educators of color dropped by nine since 2009, from 554 to 545. The increase in share was attributed to the total number of educators also dropping, such that the small decrease in nonwhite educators compared to the drop of white educators changed the distribution of the total.
Windham had the largest increase in share of diverse educators, from about a tenth in 2009 to almost a fourth of the total in the current school year, a 13.1 percentage point increase. The Windham district more than doubled the amount of nonwhite educators, going from 36 to 86. Norwich more than tripled, from 14 to 51.