From The Village Green
A working history of South Orange-Maplewood school integration, access and equity efforts
As the South Orange-Maplewood School District — or SOMSD — enters the third year of its Intentional Integration Initiative — a generational effort to balance the district’s elementary and middle schools and ultimately improve outcomes for Black students — a draft final report by an outside consultant again demonstrates that the intended results of the effort can’t come soon enough: SOMSD continues to fail its Black students at alarming rates and in multiple ways.
About this project
Study after study has found that New Jersey — despite its diverse population — has one of the most segregated public school systems in the country. More than a dozen newsrooms covering New Jersey have come together to explain how it came to this, what might be done about it and how segregation affects the student experience.
The series, Segregated, includes reporting from NJ Spotlight News, Gothamist/WNYC and others.
As part of the collaborative journalism project Segregated, involving news organizations across New Jersey examining segregation in the state’s schools, The Village Green is providing a working history of SOMSD efforts in the last 30 years to integrate or balance the schools racially and socioeconomically, close the achievement gap and pilot or attempt other educational improvements.
This story aims to offer a basic timeline, beginning in the late 1990s with the designation of the Seth Boyden school as an “opt-in” demonstration school for multi-intelligence learning.
Read the full report from The Village Green.
Find links to all the stories in the series.
Cover image: Dr. Ronald Taylor, superintendent of South Orange-Maplewood schools, at the Integration Symposium in January 2020. Credit: Bruno Navarro for The Village Green
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