High school students in the Race, Class, and Education workshop tackled the difficult issues of economic inequality and racial and economic segregation. Currently, Long Island is ranked as the seventh most racially segregated area in the United States. The combination of racial and economic inequality leads to great disparities in the quality of public education and prevent many Long Islanders from reaching their full economic and social potential. Diana Coleman, Co-Chair of the Board of Directors of the Long Island Progressive Coalition (LIPC) and of the Economic Opportunity Commission (EOC) of the Nassau County, and Dr. Nathalia Rogers, Director of the American Communities Institute at Dowling College (ACI) and an Associate Professor of Sociology at Dowling College served as experts for this workshop. Students proposed solutions to the issue of inequality in education on three different levels: institutional level, school level, and personal/individual level.

 The institutional solutions included: merging smaller school districts with student population of less than 1000 students; and making sure that all schools within each school district have universal (high) achievement standards across the board, standardized curriculum, and small class sizes (20 to 25 students). On the school level, students proposed to model programs in every high needs school district after an original and highly innovative program “No Friend Left Behind” developed and implemented by the Student Organization of Unified Leaders (S.O.U.L.) of the Walter G. O’Connell Copiague High School. S.O.U.L. students find the resources within the school to inspire their peers to have higher academic achievement. In the program over two dozen school clubs are organized around students’ interests such as hip-hop music, law and immigration, health and medical issues, and many others.

 Fellow club members not only share their interests for the club’s subject but also help each other to achieve a higher GPA. A student can only be a club member if he or she maintains a higher GPA. Among other school-level recommendations, students suggested that teachers in every school should be required to stay an extra half-an-hour after classes end to help students who are need (this model already exists in a number of schools on Long Island). On a personal/individual level students suggested starting an education to prevent racism from a very young age; counteracting racial stereotypes in the mass media though inviting a diverse group of role model adults to speak in high schools or at youth summits; and working with school teachers to reduce their own racial stereotypes to help them support academic achievement of students of all races to an equal extent.

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