Nia McGee doesn’t want to wake up at 5:30 each morning.

The 15-year-old freshman said she would rather sleep in and take advanced courses at a school nearby on Houston's south side, like Sterling or Worthing high schools, than take a bus 10 miles away to Bellaire High School.

She and her parents say she would not have access to rigorous classes and a college-going culture if she stayed in her neighborhood. So, like thousands of Houston ISD students in minority neighborhoods, she hops on a bus and heads to the west, and whiter, side of the city.

“Schools on the other side of town seem to have a better education system than the ones on our side of town,” McGee said. “The ones on our side of town are being closed and don’t have the same resources. They don’t make us their priority.”

School choice was pioneered in Houston during the 1970s as a creative fix to segregation. The current system, however, has exacerbated racial and economic segregation in one of America’s most diverse cities, a Houston Chronicle analysis has found. The result is a two-tiered system that showers some schools — particularly those in whiter and more affluent areas — with students while starving others.

Tensions over magnet programs and school choice flared again in January after former Superintendent Richard Carranza proposed overhauling HISD’s system in an effort to provide high-quality magnet programs in every corner of the district. Carranza's abrupt departure from the district has left the most dramatic of proposals in limbo, but some trustees and advocates say the existing system is unsustainable for schools in minority and lower-income communities.

NO CUTS: HISD magnet program gets a reprieve as budget hole shrinks

The discrepancies in student transfers, perhaps, is most stark in the district’s 23 comprehensive high schools — those with a defined zone from which they draw students. Among the Chronicle’s findings:

• Only four Houston ISD comprehensive high schools are in neighborhoods where a third or more of the residents are white, but the majority of students who transfer into comprehensive high schools chose those. In 2015-16, 4,894 students transferred into Lamar, Bellaire, Heights and Westside high schools, while 4,073 transferred into HISD’s 19 comprehensive high schools located in more diverse neighborhoods.

• While HISD’s school choice system was created to better integrate schools, that has been achieved at only a handful of high school campuses, according to research from the Brookings Institute. The student body at Lamar High School was about 32 percent black, 36 percent Hispanic and 24 percent white in the 2016-17 school year, according to HISD demographic data, making it more diverse than the neighborhood that surrounds it, which is 68 percent white. Meanwhile, Austin High School located in Greater Eastwood was more than 95 percent Hispanic, not quite 0.9 percent white and about 4 percent black, while about 20 percent of residents in the neighborhood that surround it are black and 3 percent are white. Wheatley High School educated just two white students that same year.

• White students rarely transfer into comprehensive schools located in minority communities. In 2015-16, only about 80 white students transferred into the 19 HISD schools located in neighborhoods with larger populations of color, while roughly 3,945 Hispanic and black students transferred into the four HISD comprehensive high schools located on the city’s west side.

To be sure, students across the district have benefited from school choice. Students like McGee have the choice to leave schools they perceive as low-performing to take advantage of academic offerings elsewhere.

School choice is not the sole reason local schools are segregated — existing housing segregation plays a major role.

However, Russ Whitehurst, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute’s Center on Children and Families, published a study in December on how school choice can exacerbate segregation if it is not thoughtfully executed. His research found Houston ISD has a higher average of racial imbalances in schools than other large, urban school districts, and schools here often do not match the demographic makeups of their surrounding neighborhoods, skewing more white or more minority.

“It’s a two-tiered system that privileges parents with motivation and time to get their child into a school they prefer but leaves behind kids and families who can’t jump through hoops,” Whitehurst said.

Often it is black and Hispanic students having to clear obstacles in order to attend better-regarded schools.

EXODUS FROM MINORITY NEIGHBORHOODS

While public school advocates often point to charters as the ones that suck students away from neighborhood schools, the vast majority of HISD students who leave their zoned jump to other campuses through the district’s school choice system.

Only about 11.5 percent of high school students who live within HISD chose charter schools or schools in neighboring public school districts. About 54.7 percent of students attend the school they are zoned to, but more than 33 percent attend another Houston ISD comprehensive school or a magnet-only school.

Across all grade levels, about 58 percent of students attend the schools to which they are zoned. About 27 percent of all HISD students leave their home school for another HISD school, and only 15 percent leave for charters or other ISDs.

Almost every comprehensive high school in Houston ISD has a special program that allows it to draw students from other areas, but data shows students disproportionately are leaving schools in minority communities and flocking to schools in whiter neighborhoods.

About 60 percent of Lamar High School students transfer into the River Oaks-area school from outside of that school’s boundary zone, for example, while more than 57 percent of students zoned to Sterling High, located near the southside community of Sunnyside, leave to attend other Houston ISD schools.

Fifteen-year-old Nia McGee, right, adjusts one of her backpacks as she gets ready to board the HISD bus that takes her to Bellaire High School Thursday, Feb. 15, 2018, in Houston. Nia, who lives in Sunnyside, takes the 10-mile bus ride to a school with more resources. less Fifteen-year-old Nia McGee, right, adjusts one of her backpacks as she gets ready to board the HISD bus that takes her to Bellaire High School Thursday, Feb. 15, 2018, in Houston. Nia, who lives in Sunnyside, ... more Photo: Godofredo A. Vasquez, Houston Chronicle Photo: Godofredo A. Vasquez, Houston Chronicle Image 1 of / 8 Caption Close HISD magnet slideshow 1 / 8 Back to Gallery

Ken Davis, principal of Yates High School in Third Ward, is familiar with the exodus from schools in predominately black and brown communities to whiter neighborhoods.

As principal of Lawson Middle School, formerly known as Dowling Middle School, he typically would see about 1,000 students zoned to the school leave each year, while roughly 20 transferred into the school. At Yates, 738 left the school for other public schools in 2015-2016; more than 110 transferred in.

Davis said the flight of students from neighborhoods of color often begins in elementary and middle school. Few who leave during those years return to their other neighborhood schools, Davis said, and their departure often is driven by negative perceptions of their communities’ schools and a lack of more rigorous magnet programs.

“Open enrollment created avenues for kids to leave but not a pathway to return,” Davis said.

It is not for a lack of schools trying.

Take Sterling, wedged between Loop 610 and Beltway 8 in southern Houston.

The school is home to one of only a handful of high school aviation science programs in the nation, complete with an airplane hangar and welding classes. It has a brand-new $67.5 million campus, yet nearly 60 percent of the students zoned to Sterling attend classes elsewhere in HISD.

Principal Justin Fuentes said part of the problem is that the school had failed to meet the state’s academic standards for three years prior to his arrival, although that has changed under his leadership.

Candid conversations with Latino parents revealed they were reluctant to send their students because Sterling had a reputation for having an overwhelmingly black student body. About 52 percent of students at Sterling in 2016-17 were black, while about 46 percent were Hispanic.

Fuentes also has heard concerns about discipline at the school, a problem he acknowledges. Last year, the school had the third highest number of fights of any HISD campus.

Those statistics may make Sterling’s future seem bleak, but Fuentes is hopeful. About 240 more students opted to attend this school year compared to last year, and he said many are zoned to the school.

EXPLAINER: How do Houston ISD's magnet schools and programs work, anyway?

The school’s freshman class has increased from about 300 in 2015 to 450 this school year. The school’s enrollment is growing, and he said early estimates show more students are opting to stay at Sterling.

Fuentes said that is no accident. He has made it a priority to recruit in nearby middle schools, add more career and technical programs and create dual-credit courses that allow students to earn college credits.

“A lot of parents are taking pride in the fact that they’re sending their kids here because they want this neighborhood to be better,” Fuentes said. “They really want the transfers to stop, because who is leaving us? It’s the kids who can, it’s the kids who are high performers.”

Those efforts have not swayed students like McGee, however, who instead takes a two-and-a-half-hour round-trip bus ride to Bellaire High. McGee said she worried about violence at the school and a perceived lack of a college-going culture.

“For the longest time, there’s been a perception that schools on the other side of town are better,” Davis said. “It’s not a matter of what we offer kids because we offer almost everything other schools have, except our magnet programs are different.”

HISD's Longest Bus Rides Find out where students travel the longest to get to school via bus.

WHAT’S LEFT BEHIND

Mark Smith, chief student support officer for Houston ISD, said once schools begin hemorrhaging students, bringing them back can be a formidable task.

“Their numbers fall, they start offering less programs to match the fact they no longer have the same number of students. They start to have more, harder, students that may require more to be educated, and the schools often need more resources to take care of the same kids,” Smith said. “It’s just a spiral they can’t get out of until we say, ‘Stop. We need to come up with a different way of doing this.’”

Every one of the 32 schools in Houston ISD’s “Achieve 180” campus turnaround program is located in minority and low-income neighborhoods. Each of those campuses has failed to meet academic standards set by the Texas Education Agency at least once in the past several years, earning low marks due to poor student performance on state-mandated standardized tests.

They also have seen most of their students leave for other schools.

In 2015-16, about 52 percent of students who were zoned to an Achieve 180 school left to go to another public school. About a third of students zoned to Achieve 180 schools left for another HISD campus, while about 18.5 percent went to charter schools.

“It creates hardships for your school in terms of how it performs. It does help when high-performing kids stay in our community, they become role models and examples for other students,” Davis said. “They push schools to raise both the academic floor and the academic ceiling. But now, it seems like we’re always looking at the floor.”

Student migrations may have contributed to school closures in the past.

Of the 24 Houston ISD schools that have closed permanently since 2001 or have been converted into private schools, 13 have closed in predominately black neighborhoods, even though black students account for only about 24 percent of HISD students. Four schools have closed in white neighborhoods and seven have closed in predominately Hispanic neighborhoods, although Robert E Lee and Lamar elementary schools were closed and their students consolidated into the relatively new Ketelsen Elementary, located blocks from the closed schools.

District officials at the time cited low enrollment as justifications for the closures, although Smith with HISD said it is impossible to pinpoint specific reasons why schools closed and that the reasons often are as qualitative as they are quantitative.

Community advocates and alumni in minority neighborhoods, however, fume that for decades their schools have been disproportionately affected by school closures, even though the majority of HISD’s students come from their communities, while those in whiter neighborhoods have had their enrollments and academics propped up by students being bused to them.

If the four comprehensive high schools in Houston ISD’s whiter neighborhoods were to lose all the students who transfer into their schools, their combined enrollment would drop by more than 40 percent. Both Lamar and Heights high schools would lose more than 50 percent of their students.

Houston ISD Board of Education President Rhonda Skillern-Jones still remembers being bused to River Oaks Elementary after being identified as gifted through testing at Kashmere Gardens Elementary. That was in the 1970s, but she said the district still disproportionately sends high-achieving students from communities of color to more affluent, and predominately white, neighborhoods.

“You systemically take away all the children who would uphold the standard of achievement in their home school to concentrate them together to create a school that’s high-flying,” Skillern-Jones said. “We’re pitting neighborhoods against each other.”

Shelby Webb came to the Chronicle as a K-12 education reporter in September 2016. She covers trends across more than 30 school districts in the greater Houston area, including the Houston Independent School District. Previously, she worked at the Sarasota-Herald Tribune as an education reporter and earned several state and national awards, including the Education Writer Association's National Award for Investigative Reporting in 2016 for covering expulsions and out-of-school suspensions in Florida. Her email address is shelby.webb@chron.com and her Twitter handle is @shelbywebb .

Multimedia by Godofredo A. Vasquez and Steve Gonzales

Interactives by John D. Harden and Shelby Webb

Design by J.R. Gonzales

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