Alicia Hash spent her first seven years as a principal leading Cotswold Elementary in Charlotte, North Carolina. The majority white school boasted an award-winning International Baccalaureate program and was the reason many parents with young children bought homes in the neighborhood. Roughly a mile away, the demographics at Billingsville, another K-5, sat in stark contrast. Located in the Grier Heights neighborhood — an old farming community founded by a former slave — Billingsville was a high-poverty school serving an all-Black student population. The schools recently merged in a process called school pairing, improving racial and socioeconomic integration.

“We operated in silos that I never understood as a principal,” Hash said, regarding the possibility of school pairing.

Portable classrooms on Cotswold’s overcrowded campus were evidence of the school’s popularity, while Billingsville occupied a brand new building with room to spare.

In 2018, the two schools became part of a unique experiment that was unlike any student assignment plan families had ever been part of. The schools would merge, participating in school pairing, but instead of moving into one building, the early grades would occupy Billingsville, and Cotswold would serve grades 3 through 5.

Almost immediately, under the new arrangement, Billingsville went from having one white student to being 40% white, Hash said. Both schools now offer the rigorous IB program and have a more racially and socioeconomically balanced population. Across both schools, less than half of the students live in poverty, 41% students are Black, about 17% are Hispanic and 34% are white.

“Our school looks like the world. Our school looks like Charlotte,” Hash said.

The student assignment method, called a pairing, is not new. In fact, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district employed the same design in the 1970s following a U.S. Supreme Court decision that required the district to desegregate. But the model has been underutilized as an integration strategy, experts say.

Now, new research shows that such mergers could reduce racial and ethnic isolation by as much as 60% in 200 large school districts nationwide. At the same time, the method would increase parents’ commute to school by only a few minutes — not a small matter for families managing busy drop-off and pick-up schedules.

Read the full article about school pairings for integration by Linda Jacobson at The 74.