I entered the New Rochelle public school system in ninth grade, attending New Rochelle High School. Prior to this I had gone to a small Catholic school, though I lived directly next to Trinity elementary school. My parents sent me to Catholic school because they knew of the reputation of Trinity and Isaac Young middle school. This reputation was that children were failed by teachers and faculty based on lack of funding. This cannot be refuted, within the New Rochelle community there's a clear divide in the way we discuss Isaac vs. Albert Leonard middle schools. Even I knew as an incoming freshman who had never been to either middle school that Albert Leonard was where you went if you wanted to be in honors and AP classes. This is a product of de facto segregation. Upon entering New Rochelle High School, a school that never failed to mention its "diversity", I realized it was not the inclusive school I thought it would be. One of my teachers point blank said to a classroom full of racially and ethnically diverse students that white privilege was not real and he had to work just as hard as anybody else. That's an act of racism, to dismiss the lived experience of the black and brown students in his classroom due to his own white fragility. New Rochelle needs to do better before it claims to be diverse.

​

Victoria-Lynn Moscoso