Segregation in NYC's Schools by Basma

Segregation in NYC's Schools by Basma - July 2022 Scholarship Essay

New York’s schools are the most segregated in the nation. Every year from Pre-K to 2nd grade, my mom moved me to a different school in search of a school with a rigorous curriculum and book clubs. In second grade, she realized that school didn’t exist within a 7-mile radius. From second grade to eighth grade, I go to P.S 187--where clubs cannot exist outside of recess.
In fourth grade while helping organize the books in the back of the classroom, I told my teacher, “Ms.Mitchell, these baskets are all broken. I think we need new ones”.
She angrily responded, “I know.”
She was barely getting paid enough to live in a studio apartment in New York. Now she would have to pay for many new baskets along with the pizza for the pizza party and the Valentine's Day candies and the markers and the erasers.
The only time we are taught about racism is with To Kill a Mockingbird, where our White teacher reads aloud the n-word. While education failed us to teach anything about fatphobia or Islamophobia or homophobia, students on the playground say, “Ew she’s so fat, she broke the stool she sat on” and “You’re Muslim? Aren’t you a terrorist. Where’s your bomb?”. Students foster their insecurities at school. My three siblings and thousands of New Yorkers have faced the same dilemma.
The only way to escape the local school systems is to attend schools that are well-funded and well-resourced. These opportunities often translate into significant commutes across the segregated landscapes of cities and towns. To learn about better schools and to have a chance at accessing these rarified spaces, one often needs extra private tutoring and access to a car. This all costs money that families in low-income communities do not have.
I want to become a politician to help remedy this issue. To fix the inequity, I would contact district officials to meet to figure out ways in which this issue can be worked on in legislative channels. Then, I would need to form an organized group to translate the problems and the repair to elected officials. Allies would be crucial at this point and real change would only happen when the community comes together. The third step would be to create a presentation, media campaign, protest, and petition to inform and influence the powerbrokers. The fourth step would be to ensure we are being heard. The fifth step would be to keep the pressure on the people in power and follow, help, and guide them to take steps to bring better education systems to schools in low-income neighborhoods.