Florida schools are becoming increasingly segregated, according to a recent study by Tallahassee’s LeRoy Collins Institute. More than a third of black and Hispanic students attend schools that are 90 percent nonwhite. And a large majority of their classmates are poor.

The Institute looked at 30 years of policy making and found the percentage of white students in public schools has dropped from 68 percent to 40 percent since the 1980s. Hispanics have quadrupled as a share of enrollment to 31 percent while the black share has remained steady at 22 percent.

The most highly segregated schools were found in Tallahassee, Miami, Tampa, Orlando, and Jacksonville.

The trend, according to the report’s author, Gary Orfield, a professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Education, finds affluent white students have increasingly disappeared from a majority of Florida public schools.

The percentage of schools where whites are a minority nearly doubled to 54 percent. And those schools serve large majorities of students living in poverty — 68 percent of enrollment. In schools where whites make up less than 10 percent of enrollment, the poverty rate is 82 percent.

The data indicates a typical black or Hispanic child is 1.5 times more likely to go to a school with a higher share of classmates living in poverty than the typical white child.

“This is an opportunity, hopefully, to discuss (whether) this is where we really want to be?" said Carol Weissert, director of the Collins Institute.

The report identifies different factors that contribute to the trend, including where people live. And the trend begins with courts pulling back from the issue in the 1980s.

Weissert said that left what school a child will attend to local governments and the Legislature.

Sen. Bill Montford, D-Tallahassee, found the report alarming. He told a panel discussion that the Florida Legislature has passed measures that allowed the re-segregation of public schools.

“If you ask what is our goal? Right now we are saying its choice. But we haven’t looked at the impact those choices have had on the traditional public school,” said Montford.

Montford, a former high school principal, declared the Collins’ report required reading for Florida legislators.