While reading this article about segregation in New York City schools today, I began to reflect on my own education experiences. I grew up in a very white neighborhood on Staten Island, so when I began school in P.S.6 practically all the students in my classes were white. Of course there were a few minority students, but I can’t remember there ever being more than 4 in any class of about 25 students. Then in middle school I went to an entirely white Catholic school, just about everyone in the room of 30 was Irish or Italian-American.

The most diversity I was exposed to was in high school. I was blessed enough to have attended Staten Island Technical High School, which was definitely one of the most diverse schools on Staten Island. I remember however, in the last of my high school years, the debate began over the exam for the specialized high schools. Mayor DeBlasio wanted to change the SHSAT admissions exam to make it more fair to minority students. I worked hard to do well on that admissions exam, so when the threat of change came I grew curious over why. According to DeBlasio, the exam included sections such as scrambled paragraphs and logical reasoning, which would not be taught in a typical classroom setting so students could only learn them from private tutors. After looking into this further however, I found the problem isn’t the private tutors available to students who are more well off, it is the funding of intermediate schools and the programs available to students.

In my neighborhood, the public intermediate school offers a free after school tutoring session for the SHSAT; lower income neighborhoods cannot afford to offer this same program. It is for this reason that when the exam did change this past fall, the racial distribution of acceptances did not change at all. It all comes back to money; schools that receive better funding can provide more programs for their students to succeed.