Ahead of the seventieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown versus Board of Education, a new report is calling on state officials to take steps to eliminate divisive school districts by expanding open enrollment for public school students. While it identifies Connecticut as the only state to decriminalize address sharing, author Halli Faulkner says Connecticut can do more to reduce segregation in its school districts.
The report from yes. every kid., an education advocacy group focused on putting families at the forefront of the education system, focuses on three policies it is looking for states to adopt: prohibiting discrimination based on residential address, decriminalizing address sharing, and creating mandatory open enrollment.
According to the report, while Connecticut is not the only state that does not criminalize address sharing, it is the only state that has removed address sharing from its criminal code.
Address sharing involves enrolling a child in a school using an address at which the child does not reside. In 2013, Tonya McDowell was arrested for using her son’s babysitter’s address to enroll him in elementary school in the Norwalk School District. She was homeless at the time. McDowell was charged with first-degree larceny and served time in prison.
Following the case, Connecticut passed a bipartisan bill, signed into law by then-governor Dannel Malloy, that exempted school accommodations from the state’s larceny statutes.
According to Faulkner, decriminalizing address sharing “honors that public education is a public good.” Faulkner added that doing so also softens divisive school boundary lines, organized around factors like race and socioeconomic status, that have been in place for over a hundred years in many states.
And Connecticut, according to Faulkner, still has divisive school district boundaries.
Faulkner pointed to a survey by EdBuild, an education advocacy group focused on funding for public schools, that ranked the 50 most segregated school district borders across the country. The boundary between the Hartford School District and the South Windsor School District is ranked as the fortieth most segregated border in the country. While Hartford has a 35 percent poverty rate, South Windsor’s poverty rate is 4 percent. And while South Windsor is 37 percent nonwhite, Hartford is 89 percent.
The issue of segregation in Connecticut’s schools, and particularly in Hartford, has resulted in a ruling from the Connecticut Supreme Court, and proposed federal legislation from Sen. Chris Murphy, D-CT.
According to data collected by the Connecticut State Department of Education, five schools had a racial imbalance between minority students enrolled in the school district and the minority population of students of the same grade age in the school district of greater than 25 percent during the 2022-2023 school year, including schools in the Greenwich, Fairfield, West Hartford, and Hamden school districts. Another 20 schools had a racial imbalance between 15 and 25 percent.
Connecticut has an open enrollment system, called Open Choice, that allows students from inner-city districts to attend adjacent rural schools and vice-versa. Enrollment is offered on a space-available basis and a lottery is used when there are more applications for seats than there are seats available. But not all school districts participate. According to Open Choice’s website, the program operates in Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven and their surrounding school districts.
According to Faulkner, some school districts remain completely closed no matter how many open seats are available.
Faulkner noted that the seventieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education Ruling, which famously ruled racial segregation in schools unconstitutional, overturning part of a prior ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation could exist as long as the facilities were equal, occurs on May 17. And in the spirit of the ruling, Faulkner says the state should continue to open public schools to all students.
“One easy way to do this is to require or ensure that all school districts participate in open enrollment.” Faulkner said.
Faulkner also said the state should prohibit address discrimination, which allows a school district to refuse to accept a student solely on the basis of their residential address.
According to Faulkner, Idaho became the first state to prohibit address discrimination in 2023, adding discrimination based on address to other forms of prohibited discrimination, including race, sex, socioeconomic status, and disability. She added she believes the policy “has the power to end or help to soften unfair and unequitable school district boundaries.” To date, Idaho remains the only state that has done this.
Faulkner, who has been working in education policy for over a decade, says what excites her about the organization’s no more lines policy—a reference to their mission to eliminate students to be able to attend schools regardless of district lines—is that it focuses on softening district boundaries, which is a policy with bipartisan support.
According to polling yes. every kid. Conducted in 2023, 84 percent of respondents either strongly or somewhat supported students having access to any public school. That level of support held steady across partisan lines, as well as across racial and socioeconomic demographics according to Faulkner.
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