The just-opened Denver Green School Northfield sits in a predominantly white neighborhood, but the kids inside represent just about every shade from ebony to alabaster.

That’s by design. In a district that’s still working to desegregate a half-century after the end of the civil rights era, the school is about one-quarter Hispanic, 22% black and 41% white, with the rest of the students identifying as multiracial or Asian.

The Green School stands out not just within Denver Public Schools, but across much of the metro area. An analysis by The Denver Post found that DPS and most other metro-area districts would have to move large numbers of kids to get their schools to reflect the racial makeup of their districts.

“Kids are knowledgeable enough to know that people have differences, but they’re kids enough to know that we’re all learning instruments together, we’re all trying to get through the hall,” said Kartal Jaquette, one of two “lead partners” who act as principals for the Green School.

Nearly 25 years after Denver was allowed to stop court-ordered busing designed to desegregate its buildings, more than half of the city’s public schools are as segregated as they were in the late 1960s, and students complain that others are integrated in name only, with white and Asian students making up the majority of advanced classes.

While Denver Public Schools has made progress in reducing segregation in recent years, some parents and activists question whether focusing on blending students is worth that struggle — or if it would be better to concentrate that energy on equal resources for all schools.

White students are more likely to come from wealthier families and neighborhoods, which makes it easier for their schools to raise money to offer smaller classes, interesting electives and other amenities that schools serving lower-income kids, who are more likely to be black or Hispanic, lack. That can help push schools serving mostly students of color toward a spiral, as more students leave and fewer resources are left for those that remain.

Black parents often tried to get better funding for their children’s existing schools before suing to integrate during the desegregation battles of the 1950s and ’60s, said Hasira Ashemu, an activist with Our Voice, Our Schools in Denver. Even when courts ordered schools to integrate, it was only partially successful, because some white parents took their children and resources to outlying suburbs or private schools.

“Wherever white skin goes, so do the resources,” Ashemu said.

Progress made over last decade

After Denver ended busing in 1995, school choice emerged as the primary method of bringing students from different races and socioeconomic backgrounds together.

While some Denver schools do attract a diverse group of kids, 107 schools — or more than half of the district’s total — have student bodies made up of 90% or more kids of color. Not one white student was enrolled in three schools in the 2018-2019 school year, even though about one-quarter of DPS students were white.

Studies have found that black students were more likely to graduate and earned higher wages as adults if their schools desegregated, and those gains were largely reversed if schools sorted by race again. White students’ achievement wasn’t substantially affected by integration plans, though they were more likely to report being friends with people of other races. Other groups weren’t well-studied.

In the 1973 case that led to busing in Denver, the court found about 38% of black students attended schools that were “deliberately” segregated and had at least 70% black or Hispanic students. While segregation may not be deliberate today, the level of separation between white students and students of color is higher.

Last year, about 63% of Hispanic students and 43% of black students attended schools where 90% of their peers are students of color, Superintendent Susan Cordova said. The district has made progress since 2006, when about 70% of Hispanic students and 55% of black students went to schools where they make up such a large majority, she said.

White students are more likely to be surrounded by other white kids than they were in 2006, mostly because the district has more of them now than it did then, Cordova said.

The district is using a variety of strategies to promote integration, including prioritizing low-income students at certain schools and giving out more bus passes to high school students who need to cross town, Cordova said. They also require all schools in a zone to take a share of students who moved in after the choice deadline, who tend to be more “mobile” and have more needs, she said.

It took some thought and effort to build a diverse school, Green School’s Jaquette said. When the new school began enrolling students for sixth grade over the winter, its leaders visited the farther corners of the Stapleton enrollment zone to convince diverse families to give it a try. The ability to offer busing within the zone also was a major factor in increasing diversity, he said.

“Without transportation, it would be difficult to have a diverse school here in Northfield,” Jaquette said.

And within the school, the staff encourages kids to mingle by setting core classes to have roughly the same balance of students of different ethnicities. They also hold weekly events like a bottle-flipping contest or a lip-synch battle to build team spirit, Jaquette said.

Poverty creates vicious cycles

Jessica Dominguez, lead housing organizer for the Interfaith Alliance, said disparities between predominantly white schools and those serving mostly students of color date back to redlining, the practice of denying loans to people in neighborhoods deemed poor credit risks. The term comes from maps created in the 1930s that colored neighborhoods that housed primarily African Americans or poorer white immigrants in red.

“We concentrated poverty. We disinvested in these neighborhoods,” she said.

Dominguez, who used to work at Denver’s Columbian Elementary, said schools serving those neighborhoods typically have a more challenging student population, but parents may not take that into account. Those who can send their children away from what they think is a poor-quality school, leaving behind a greater concentration of students with high needs and fewer resources to serve them, she said. Columbian serves more than 90% students of color and ranked in the middle on DPS’ performance rating system.

Sajied Guss, who attended East High School before graduating from Manual High School in 2018, said he saw the vicious cycle in action. His graduating class at Manual, which has been on the state’s accountability clock due to low test scores for years, had only 54 students.

“It’s going to take a miracle, a blessing and something from ‘The Wiz’ to keep the school open,” he said.

Despite Manual’s poor academic reputation, Guss said the environment was more supportive than at East High, where an administrator told him that he would follow his mother, who dropped out of high school and struggles with addiction. He isn’t sure if the incident was because of his African American heritage, but he did feel black and Latino students weren’t encouraged to take advanced courses at East.

School choice hasn’t served Manual and other schools made up of mostly black and Latino students, Guss said. If the district wants to integrate, it could require newcomers to gentrifying neighborhoods to at least try their assigned schools before choicing out, he said.

“If a lot of them matriculated into their neighborhood schools, we could have what East has,” he said. “With no kids comes no money.”

Cordova said the district encourages parents to consider their neighborhood schools, but also is trying to increase access to high-performing schools. Struggling schools have access to more money and support from the central office, she said, including incentives for teachers to work there and help to “tell their story” during open enrollment. About half of Denver students attend their neighborhood school.

“It’s the first goal of the Denver Plan that we have great schools in every neighborhood,” Cordova said.

Schools mirror segregated housing

Denver Public Schools isn’t the only district with an imbalance. Seven other metro-area school districts also are a long way from racial balance, and would have to move at least one in every five white students to a more diverse school if they wanted each school to reflect the overall community.

The Post used demographic data from the Colorado Department of Education to calculate the racial balance of schools in 13 districts in the Denver area. Most districts in the metro area have at least a few schools where students of color make up more than 90% of the population, and 11 buildings in Jeffco Public Schools have student bodies that are more than 90% white.

Diana Wilson, a spokeswoman for Jeffco Public Schools, said the district focuses on providing the same level of education in all schools, regardless of who attends. Most parents send their children to their neighborhood school, though it isn’t clear if more would make a different choice if transportation were available, she said.

“My perspective is people take their kids where it’s most convenient,” Wilson said.

Tracy Dorland, deputy superintendent at Adams 12 Five Star Schools, said the district runs for about 11 miles along Interstate 25 in western Adams County, and neighborhoods along the way vary in affordability and racial composition.

About 37% of Adams 12 students would have to move to a different school for all schools to match the district’s demographics. Most families choose their neighborhood schools, though a few choice into charters or magnets, she said.

The emphasis is on supporting schools that have more challenges, by expanding access to preschool, adding more counselors and offering more training for teachers and administrators, Dorland said. In 2019, only one Adams 12 school was on the state’s accountability clock for low performance, and 38 were in the highest achievement category, she said. The other 10 were in the middle.

“The strategies we’re employing to support equal access are working,” Dorland said.

Some districts’ demographics make it virtually impossible to produce integrated schools. In Adams County School District 14, for example, 90% of students are kids of color. The only way to produce schools without racial isolation would be to swap some children with another district.

That idea hasn’t been attempted on a large scale since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1974 that districts couldn’t be required to bus students across their own lines, unless the lines had been drawn to achieve segregation.

Choice alone doesn’t produce integration

Amy Wells, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, said districts have to be proactive if they want to integrate schools. Typically, letting families choose a school isn’t enough to overcome the legacy of residential segregation, though offering transportation and making an effort to recruit students from majority black or Hispanic neighborhoods can help, she said.

“It requires a district to say, ‘This is a big priority for us,’ ” Wells said.

Those who want to go further can redesign their attendance zones to combine more students from neighborhoods with different racial and economic demographics, Wells said. It’s illegal to assign any individual student to a school based on race, but districts can consider the demographics of an area when deciding where to draw boundaries if their goal is integration, she said.

Casey Cobb, a professor of education policy at University of Connecticut, said schools might give preference to students from certain neighborhoods in a lottery system, offer strategically placed magnet schools to appeal to a variety of people, or even strategically combine schools with different demographics if they need to close buildings

“I think they only work when there’s some attention paid toward race and other characteristics like students’ socioeconomic backgrounds,” he said. “Neighborhood can be a proxy.”

Not everyone agrees that integrating students needs to the top priority, however. Resources are a bigger issue, because whiter schools tend to be more affluent and can raise money to hire more teachers, install new equipment or offer higher-level courses, said Ashemu, the activist with Our Voice, Our Schools.

DPS could somewhat level the playing field if it required schools to pool their fundraising dollars and share them, though parents in richer schools probably would still resist, he said.

“Black people were never fighting for integration because they were excited to sit next to white children. It was always a matter of resources,” Ashemu said.

While black and Hispanic children might do just as well if they had more resources in their existing schools, because they already have extensive exposure to white culture, white children often haven’t directly experienced other cultures and won’t get that unless they spend time with kids who are different, Ashemu said.

“This creates a huge blind spot,” he said.

It’s difficult to sort out the effects of desegregation itself and of having more resources, and the two don’t have to be in opposition, Cobb said. Students benefit from access to each other’s social networks, which allows them to learn about things they wouldn’t have experienced through their own families’ contacts, he said.

“I would say that, in the end, that separate but equal has not worked,” he said. “The social capital goes beyond just that issue of resources.”