Sarai said she felt sickened by the statistic — yet unsurprised. A 16-year-old sophomore, she is one of just 29 black students out of about 3,300 teenagers at Stuyvesant.
“I go to this school every day, I walk through the hallways of this school, and I don’t think I see a black person usually through my day,” said Sarai, who lives in Brooklyn. “It wasn’t shock that I felt, it was the same wave of disappointment I feel every time I look at the demographics of this school.”
New York is being roiled by a fight over the future of its selective schools, but at Stuyvesant, the admission statistics were especially piercing. For students, it is hard enough being a teenager, balancing grades and homework with social pressures and a barrage of Instagram Stories.
But imagine being one of the few black and Hispanic students at one of the country’s most selective public schools.
The nine black and Hispanic students who gathered for an interview after school Wednesday said the sobering statistics had energized them to be even more vocal in the discussion regarding the city’s elite schools, and to make Stuyvesant a more welcoming place for future students like them.
The students — members of the school’s Black Students League and Aspira, the Hispanic student organization — recalled painful memories of having heard racist comments behind their backs at school. They reflected on their shared sense of alienation. They said they worried that adults would allow inequities in the system to persist.
“It’s frustrating to see that nobody wants to do anything, until it’s like, ‘Oh no, nobody got it in,'” said Katherine Sanchez, 17, whose parents are from the Dominican Republic. “But it’s like, ‘well you didn’t try to make anyone come in, you didn’t do anything about it.'”
Katherine and some of the others noted how strange it was to leave their mostly black and Hispanic neighborhoods to make lengthy commutes to Tribeca, where the school takes up most of a city block. Katherine, the oldest of four siblings, said she was the first person in two decades to go to Stuyvesant from her middle school in the Bronx.
William Lohier, 17, whose father is black and whose mother is Korean-American, said the numbers had made him feel both angry and committed to improving the school culture.
“I have so much trouble believing that of all of the top students in New York City who are able to change the world, and are able to perform the best in this really rigorous environment, that only seven of them are black,” said William, who spoke quietly and seriously throughout the meeting while wearing a Black Students League T-shirt. Last year, William was the city’s youth poet laureate.
“It’s just wrong.”
After that comment, the teenagers — including current students and recent graduates — let out a collective sigh. Then they smiled and nodded in agreement.
Still, Sarai acknowledged that other students’ comments had occasionally made her question her place at the school.
“I’ve been told that the only reason I got into Stuyvesant is because I’m black, even though the test doesn’t even factor that in,” said Sarai, whose father is black and grew up in New York City and whose mother is from Spain. “Not only is that discouraging and alienating, but it makes you feel like maybe you don’t deserve your spot, even though I know that I work just as hard as every other sophomore in my class.”
The students said they hoped that the state’s politicians would listen to their opinions and experiences and then make a determination about how to diversify the school: by expanding gifted and talented classes, which many of them had benefited from, to low-income neighborhoods and by tackling the entrenched segregation they had endured throughout their younger years. They had already collaborated with the Stuyvesant administration to bring in more racial sensitivity training for teachers and seminars for incoming freshmen.
And the teenagers hoped they could expand the conversation beyond Stuyvesant, which is just one of the city’s roughly 600 high schools.
Last year, Mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled a controversial proposal to eliminate the admissions exam — the sole means of entry into the city’s eight specialized high schools — and replace it with a system that offers seats to the top performers at every city middle school. The plan has little if any chance of passing in Albany because it has faced opposition from the schools’ alumni and Asian-American groups.
Asians make up roughly 73 percent of Stuyvesant’s 3,300 students, while white students are about 20 percent of the school. Hispanic students make up another 3 percent, with black students just under 1 percent. The city school system is nearly 70 percent black and Hispanic with white and Asian students making up roughly another 15 percent each.
Some who defend the entrance exam say Asian-American students at the specialized schools simply worked harder than the black and Hispanic students who did not get in. They say they believed that the numbers, while bleak, reflected a fair system.
But the black and Hispanic teenagers interviewed said they considered themselves proof that there is no disparity of effort or talent — just an imbalance of opportunity.
Venus Nnadi, 18, a Stuyvesant graduate who is a freshman at Harvard, said she remembered when a fifth-grade teacher pulled her aside at her Catholic middle school in Queens Village and encouraged her to consider an elite public school.
Nnadi, the daughter of Nigerian immigrants, had never heard of Stuyvesant, but she bought a test preparation book and started taking practice exams. She thinks often of her classmates who didn’t have the same guidance.
“I had a lot of friends in my middle school who were just as smart as me, and who I know could be thriving at Stuyvesant if they had known it existed,” said Nnadi, who was a standout on Stuyvesant’s track team.
It was much the same for Hanna Gebremichael, the daughter of Eritrean immigrants, who found out the test existed three months before taking it — by Googling phrases like “best New York City high schools.”
She crammed practice exams into her schedule and took a test preparation course at the last minute.
“It ended up working out, but a lot of the time it doesn’t, and I can see why,” said Hanna, a 17-year-old senior who grew up in Harlem and on the Upper West Side.
Eugene Thomas, who is now a 19-year-old freshman at Yale, said that when he found out about specialized high schools from his seventh grade classmates, he saved up money from his job as a pharmacy delivery boy to pay for test preparation.
Thomas, who is black and Puerto Rican and grew up in a housing project in Manhattan, remembered that his tutor gave him a steep discount, in part because he lived with a single mother who is disabled.
Yet even after acing the exam, the students’ moments of triumph were tempered by fears about being one of the few black or Hispanic students at Stuyvesant.
“I remember my mom telling me, ‘You’re going to have to put on your armor every day,'” William said.
Once they got to Stuyvesant, the students said they sometimes felt misunderstood by their white and Asian-American classmates.
When Nnadi found out last April that she had been accepted into all eight of the Ivy League colleges, her first reaction was to keep the news quiet. She said she feared that her peers would make snide comments.
Nnadi’s classmates had previously told her that she did not have to worry about her grades because, as a black girl, she was basically guaranteed entry into the college of her choice.
“To have all my hard work, and all the work I’ve done throughout the years invalidated simply because I’m black, that hurt a lot,” she said.
Thomas was grateful to have Asian-American friends rush to his defense after some students gossiped that he got into Yale only because he is black and Hispanic. (There are 100 Hispanic students at Stuyvesant.)
Ultimately, all the students agreed that they had made the right choice in going to Stuyvesant.
Yajaira Rodriguez, 17, a Mexican-American senior who lives in Queens, got to take a camping trip that bolstered her passion for environmental science.
Bryan Monge Serrano, a 16-year-old Salvadoran-American junior who lives in Queens, said he never would have fallen in love with computer science if it wasn’t for the high-level classes at Stuyvesant.
As the sun began to set, the teenagers zipped up their coats and got ready to trek to their respective corners of the city to start their homework. They said they were grateful to have spent another afternoon together.
Falina Ongus, 15, a sophomore who was born in Kenya, said, “We all help each other through.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.