Sekou attended IN-Tech for half of the 2013-2014 school year before moving down to North Carolina. This summer, he returned to the Marble Hill Houses to visit family and friends. 

Sekou, who identifies as black, enjoys being around people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds, saying that allows him to learn more about different cultures and experiences. He said students can do that at IN-Tech in spite of what the statistics suggest. 

Sekou was surprised to hear that New York City schools were cited as the most segregated. At his new school in North Carolina, he felt the word was more appropriate. 

“There’s a huge population of white kids,” he said. “It’s basically a white school. IN-Tech was way better.” 

Another Marble Hill resident, 17-year-old Francisco Liranzo, said students at the David A. Stein Riverdale/Kingsbridge Academy (M.S./H.S. 141) tend to associate with classmates from the same background.

Francisco, a Hispanic student who graduated in the spring, said the majority of his own friends from RKA are also Hispanic. 

“If one is, let’s say, Hispanic, they go for other Hispanic friends most of the time, and vice versa with whites or blacks,” he said. “I guess it’s because we get along the most being that we’re the same race. But sometimes that’s not the case. Maybe it’s just coincidence.”

Francisco said he would not change the social stratification in his school, or in public schools in New York City in general. 

“Everyone gets along fine,” he said. “I would leave it the way it is.” 

Trying to leap racial hurdles 

This summer, Kathy attended a summer program at Syracuse University that gave 48 students from lower economic backgrounds scholarships to take a media literacy program and a writing class. She said the students were all from minority backgrounds. Some were from the best-regarded schools in New York City; others came from public schools with reputations for being underfunded, poor-performing schools.