Local schools still deeply segregated 70 years after Brown v. Board

“I grew up in segregated Dayton,” said former Dayton mayor Rhine McLin. “And today, I think that Dayton has some serious racial issues. Even though, as hard as the city talks about being immigrant friendly and all of this, their actions aren’t being demonstrated.”

McLin, a longtime Dayton Public Schools teacher before she became a political figure, still works as a substitute teacher in DPS and still sees heavily segregated schools. Schools on the west side are still mostly Black, while schools on the east side are mostly white.

But the the discrepancy is most visible if you compare districts to each other. Dayton Public Schools spent decades under a federal court-ordered desegregation effort ending in 2002 that involved an unpopular busing program and fueled white flight to the suburbs.

“In effect, the Dayton region never desegregated its schools,” says a recent essay from Alex Lovit, senior program officer and historian at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, marking the 70th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling.

“Today, 78% of Dayton public school students identify as minority, and total enrollment is less than a quarter of what it was at the district’s pre-desegregation peak. The eight largest suburbs in the region have majority-white enrollment. According to Ohio School Report Cards, each of them has higher average teacher salaries, higher test scores, and a higher graduation rate. Prior to Brown, Dayton’s schools were segregated and unequal; they remain so today.”

Local school districts

Today, Black and Hispanic kids are more likely to lack resources that their white peers have, such as easy access to parks and grocery stores and living with families who make more than minimum wage. The racial divide also impacts white students because it does not academically challenge them in the same way.

“There’s actually cognitive benefits for white students when they’re in more diverse types of classrooms,” said Leslie Picca, a sociology professor at the University of Dayton. “It really prepares students to live in an increasingly global economy.”

According to the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, across Ohio, 66% of Ohio schoolchildren are white, 17% are Black, 7.5% are Hispanic, about 6% are multiracial and about three percent are Asian. About one-tenth of a percent are Native American or Native Alaskan.

Most of the 26 local school districts reviewed by the Dayton Daily News do not reflect that racial diversity. Northmont, Huber Heights and West Carrollton most closely reflect that diversity, but none match exactly with those statewide statistics.

In the 2022-2023 school year, 63% of Dayton Public Schools students were Black, 21% were white, 10% were Hispanic, 5% were multiracial and less than 1% were Asian or Native American/Native Alaskan.

Oakwood City Schools, which borders Dayton to the south, has a Black student population of 1%. It’s one of six local school districts where fewer than 4% of students are Black.

How did we get here?

In the 1920s, Black families in the U.S. began moving north in what was called the Great Migration, escaping the Jim Crow south. Those families moved to multiple cities, including Dayton, which boasted manufacturing jobs at Frigidaire and National Cash Register.

But while the North didn’t have the same Jim Crow laws, there were still rules about where Black families could or could not go. Black families settled in West Dayton, which is still a heavily Black part of the city today.

In the 1940s, as World War II ended and millions of veterans returned from war, the U.S. government began offering 30-year home loans to white veterans. Black veterans were not offered the same loans until the 1960s.

A practice known as “redlining” also divided who was able to build wealth and who was not. Parts of cities that were heavily Black were listed on bank maps as “undesirable” areas, making it harder to get home loans there.

Desegregation orders

In 1976, Dayton schools were ordered by a federal judge to desegregate. The order was that each school had to closely resemble the racial makeup of the city. Dayton schools were 47.3.% white, according to Dayton Daily News archives.

White students were bused to schools in Black parts of town, while Black students were bused to white schools.

A Dayton Daily News article from 2002 outlining the history of segregation in the city noted the NAACP, which brought the suit against Dayton schools, presented evidence for a history of segregation in the city.

Between 1938 and 1948, Black high school teams were excluded from the city’s athletic conference. “Optional” attendance zones allowed white students to avoid attending school with Black students.

Until 1954, Black residents of Shawen Acres Children’s Home on North Main Street were bused to West Dayton schools while white residents attended all-white schools nearby. Similarly, white students living at the Veterans Affairs Center in West Dayton were bused to white schools elsewhere in the city.

Dayton city commissioner and Dayton Children’s Hospital chaplain Darryl Fairchild was nine years old at the time and attended Belmont Elementary. He was bused to Residence Park Elementary as part of the desegregation order.

Fairchild said the busing was personally good.

“I got to learn how to operate across class and race and culture,” Fairchild said of his experience. “I’m grateful for my Black classmates and teachers and coaches who invested in me and taught me how to be a really good person. It gave me the skills to be a really good chaplain.”

But the desegregation plan faced criticism. Most shockingly, a professor from Ohio State University helping to design the desegregation plan was shot dead in his office in downtown Dayton in 1975.

And it led to unintended consequences. Migration to the suburbs began before busing and continued for multiple reasons, but it accelerated amid desegregation efforts.

The city’s population plummeted, and enrollment in Dayton Public Schools dropped nearly in half from more than 40,000 to less than 21,000.

When the desegregation order was lifted in 2002 — after a negotiated settlement with the NAACP — white enrollment in Dayton Public Schools had dropped to less than 27%. As noted above, it’s even lower today.

Fairchild says he sees the legacy of busing still in fragmented neighborhoods and schools. Many kids are attending schools that don’t correspond with their neighborhood.

“I’m continually working to get that knit community back together and trying to do that around the schools is one path,” Fairchild said.

In 2002, McLin, then mayor of Dayton, said at the time the ending of the desegregation order in the city meant kids would be able to attend neighborhood schools again. But that outcome has not happened, and McLin said now she believes the city is even more segregated than it was then.

Legacy of segregation

Today, Dayton Public schools is a heavily Black, heavily poor district, which impacts the kinds of services the district must provide to their students to get them ready to learn.

Unlike most kids in nearby districts, many kids in a DPS elementary school arrive on buses early to eat the provided breakfast, which the district qualifies to give to all kids because of federal guidelines on poverty.

Some Dayton elementary schools, like Ruskin and Louise Troy, start at 7 a.m. both because DPS must bus kids to charter and private schools under state law and because of mandatory after-school programming.

McLin and Dayton Public Schools board member Chrisondra Goodwine noted the impact of segregation in West Dayton, compared to the east side and most suburbs. There are still fewer basic services, like pharmacies and grocery stores, on Dayton’s west side. McLin walks by a homeless encampment in her neighborhood near a charter school. There are no outdoor swimming pools in Dayton, and only two pools in the entire city, both open for limited hours.

Goodwine noted at this point, many people who can afford to leave West Dayton do so. That trend means kids who are in poverty are only around other kids in the same circumstances. The lack of diverse experiences limits kids’ dreams, she said.

“If you don’t have middle class families leaving their children in these areas, then you are significantly missing out on the backbone of this society, and the experiences that grow us,” Goodwine said.

How can things change?

Goodwine said she wants to see more younger lawmakers take charge. She said it is hard for older people to understand the needs of young people when they no longer have kids.

“My grandparents are great people,” she said. “My grandparents have no idea what the world is like for kids.”

Goodwine also noted the lack of transportation and opportunities for teenagers and kids, which limits their experiences.

Dayton Public Schools superintendent David Lawrence, who has taught in Northmont and the Dayton Regional STEM school, a state-sponsored school that accepts kids from across the region, said he believes all kids need to be given access to high-quality education.

But he said people also need to understand that in a district like Dayton Public, where students have been disadvantaged for so long, those students will have to be given more opportunities to get to where their peers are. Some Dayton Public families can’t afford a washer and don’t have time to go to a laundromat, so their kids go to school with dirty clothes. Some can’t afford to feed their families and keep on the lights, so some pick one or the other.

“It’s this idea that there’s an even playing field and people like to say, if we just run faster, do more, than you catch up,” Lawrence said. “I think we can catch up. But I think you have to acknowledge that we have to run faster and do more.”

Chad Sloss, a sociology professor at Wittenberg University, said the history of segregated housing still plays into perceptions of school performance, which impact property values near “higher performing” schools.

“That’s the thing that people really, really overlook is what makes good schools versus what makes bad schools,” he said. “You can have equally bad white schools but it’s not going to be perceived as such just on the basis of color.”

Sloss said laws meant to help stop practices like only selling homes to white people did not do enough to integrate communities.

Instead, he argues for restructuring the economic system, not relying on property taxes to fund schools, and moving away from zero-sum thinking — meaning just because one person gets more help doesn’t take away from someone else.

Experiences and exposure will help change people’s minds, he said.

“The whole purpose of keeping people segregated is so that they won’t build solidarity. They won’t see the similarities. They’ll continue focusing on the differences,” Sloss said. “And with those differences, you’re going to keep competing.”