By Spencer Lombardo
Some Connecticut schools may be forced to reshuffle their student bodies over “racial imbalance.”
Data from Connecticut’s Department of Education highlighted 17 schools at risk of violating the state’s desegregation law in academic year 2025-2026, CT Insider reported Thursday. However, legislative hurdles have made the statute nearly unenforceable for the time being. (RELATED: ANALYSIS: The Most Woke Cities In America Are Among The Most Segregated)
Connecticut’s Department of Education reported the data during the State Board of Education (SBE) meeting on June 3. If SBE finds that racial imbalance exists in a public school, the local board must “prepare a plan to correct the imbalance and submit it to SBE for approval,” according to the state’s racial imbalance law.
“Under Connecticut law, racial imbalance exists when the proportion of students of color for any school exceeds twenty-five percentage points more than the comparable proportion for the school district,” according to the department’s report. If that imbalance is at least 15%, the school is flagged as having an “impending [racial] imbalance.”
Requiring school systems to reshuffle their student bodies to achieve “racial balance” would likely violate the Constitution, under Supreme Court decisions such as Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007), which struck down the Seattle Schools’ racial-balancing policy. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), the Supreme Court labeled “racial balancing” as “patently unconstitutional.”
But the media in Connecticut mistakenly suggest that a lack of “racial balance” qualifies as segregation, even though the 1964 Civil Rights Act explicitly states that a lack of racial balance is not “segregation.” For example, the Record-Journal wrote, “Four CT schools have been out of compliance with state desegregation law for 15 years, report says.”
The Civil Rights Act explains that a lack of racial balance is not the same as segregation, stating that “’desegregation’ shall not mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance.” (See 42 U.S.C. 2000c(b)).
Three of the five school districts in Connecticut with the highest absolute racial imbalances that year are within the Greenwich School District, according to CT Insider. Sixty percent of students at Julian Curtiss School are reportedly students of color. Eighteen percent of Old Greenwich School and Parkway School students are as well. As 39% of the school district’s population are people of color, that would make the “racial imbalance” for each school around 21% if the data is accurate.
The Greenwich School District’s absolute racial imbalance was almost 23% in academic year 2024-2025, Connecticut’s Department of Education previously reported. This signals an approximately 2% decline since last year.
The Greenwich School District has 15 schools with a combined student population of 8,589, according to U.S. News & World Report. Julian Curtiss School, Old Greenwich School, and Parkway School have student populations of 246, 406, and 244, respectively.
“Greenwich Public Schools has 11 wonderful elementary schools, which are the heartbeat of their community. They offer an outstanding array of student support, academic excellence, activities, and family events that bring joy to their child’s education,” a school district spokesperson told the DCNF. “Our high school is a genuine reflection of the diverse world in which we live.”
Democratic Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont signed SB 298 on March 3, delaying enforcement of the racial imbalance statute for further study until 2030. A Greenwich Public Schools spokesperson said they were “pleased by the pause,” CT Insider reported March 26.
