I grew up in a highly segregated area, so my elementary school cohort was roughly 80 white kids 5 Asian kids and one Latina kid. There was also a single black kid, but he got kicked out in first grade when it was discovered he was using his grandparent's address to go to a better school.
The junior high, however, drew from a larger geographic area so it was far more diverse. Junior high is always a bit of a culture shock, but I can't help but feel it was more-so for us. A white kid got suspended for bringing in a hunting knife because he was afraid one of the black kids was going to beat him up -- kind of a mini racism-in-action lesson for all of us, though we didn't know it at the time.
Now my daughter just finished seventh grade. Her elementary school cohort had one Spanish-speaking kid, in a district that is 59% Hispanic and 18% English language learners, and had a bit of a similar culture shock. I checked if I could have done better in retrospect, and found that, while I could have done slightly better, the public schools were all either over 75% Hispanic or over 80% non-Hispanic, with the one exception being a school that required a lottery to get into.
The only real diverse schools I found were the parochial schools, which are a strange combination of your traditional Hispanic Catholics, and "white flight" of kids at schools that were nearly entirely Hispanic.
The junior high, however, drew from a larger geographic area so it was far more diverse. Junior high is always a bit of a culture shock, but I can't help but feel it was more-so for us. A white kid got suspended for bringing in a hunting knife because he was afraid one of the black kids was going to beat him up -- kind of a mini racism-in-action lesson for all of us, though we didn't know it at the time.
Now my daughter just finished seventh grade. Her elementary school cohort had one Spanish-speaking kid, in a district that is 59% Hispanic and 18% English language learners, and had a bit of a similar culture shock. I checked if I could have done better in retrospect, and found that, while I could have done slightly better, the public schools were all either over 75% Hispanic or over 80% non-Hispanic, with the one exception being a school that required a lottery to get into.
The only real diverse schools I found were the parochial schools, which are a strange combination of your traditional Hispanic Catholics, and "white flight" of kids at schools that were nearly entirely Hispanic.