How school funding can help repair the legacy of segregation
Excerpt:
The walls at the high school Leanne Nunes attended in the Bronx were painted a color she likes to call “penitentiary beige.”
The cafeteria, located in the basement, had no windows. About half of her classrooms didn’t have windows, either. “It felt kind of jail-like,” Nunes, now a first-year student at Howard University, told Vox. “It felt like the building itself was trying to keep you in.”
And the lack of resources went beyond the physical space. Laptops for students were often old or broken. Students struggled to get access to the classes they wanted. For example, the school could only afford to offer art or music in a single year, not both. “You’d have to pick,” Nunes said, “and by ‘you’d have to pick,’ I mean the school made the decision for you.”