When Melissa De Almeida’s parents immigrated to Newark in the 1990s from Brazil, navigating the public school system for their two daughters was among their steepest battles.

De Almeida’s older sister struggled to learn English in a system where few teachers spoke her native Portuguese. By the time Melissa enrolled a few years later, she encountered teachers who were able to communicate with her family, but it was uneven.

In Newark and other cities in New Jersey, teaching staff and school leadership do not always reflect diverse student bodies. Demographic data shows Black and Latino students make up about 90% of Newark’s total student population, while teachers from those backgrounds make up just over half of the teaching staff. 

Roughly 20% of Newark schools have a majority of white teachers. Other cities in New Jersey have even lower proportions of teachers from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds.

As part of the Segregated collaboration among newsrooms covering New Jersey, Chalkbeat Newark compared the race and ethnicity of teachers and staff with that of students. While studies show that a diverse teaching staff, especially one representative of a school community, can help students in a number of ways, the teacher ranks in the state’s largest city and in elsewhere in the state, are predominantly non-Hispanic white. Read the full report from Chalkbeat Newark.

Find links to all the stories in the series.

Cover image: Students with their teacher in a Newark classroom. Alex Zimmerman/Chalkbeat