(16 May 2024)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Topeka, Kansas – 28 March 2024
1. Superintendent speaking to class
2. Close up of students in class.
3. SOUNDBITE (English) MaKenzie Johnstone, Williams Science & Fine Arts Magnet student:
“We usually do talk about it. Just with the like after having like a lesson or two about it, we usually talk about it at recess, and then we kind of push it off and then like, we get back to it once we start more class time because we’re like, oh, well, we can have more time for recess to like, hang out with each other. But yes, we do have different conversations about the Brown v. Board and lessons that we had just had.”
4. Various of teacher speaking to students
5. SOUNDBITE (English) Malaya Webster, Williams Science & Fine Arts Magnet student:
“When it was like back in the days when the schools were segregated and white people and black people couldn’t be next to each other. But like time now, black people and white people could be in the same type of school and next to each other.”
6. Various of superintendent speaking to class
7. SOUNDBITE (English) MaKenzie Johnstone, Williams Science & Fine Arts Magnet student:
“It doesn’t really matter what kind of color you are or where you’re from. We’re all loved equally. Nobody’s loved less, nobody’s loved more. We’re all loved equally. Doesn’t matter what race you are, doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter in your behavior either. You are always loved either way.”
8. Exterior of Monroe High School
9. Exterior of Kansas Capitol
10. Exterior of Williams Science & Fine Arts Magnet School:
11. SOUNDBITE (English) Jamari Lyons, Williams Science & Fine Arts Magnet student:
“Like it’s okay to be black and it’s okay to be white and you can still be friends and neighbors.”
12. Students sitting on classroom floor
13. SOUNDBITE (English) Tiffany Anderson, Topeka Public Schools superintendent:
“Just being here in this magnet school environment, you get to see an array of diversity. But if you drive 20 minutes down the road, which is where she (Linda Brown) was, you might not see any diversity in the student population or the staff population.”
14. Superintendent greets students in hallway
STORYLINE:
The lesson on diversity started slowly in the first-grade classroom in Topeka, whose schools were at the center of a case that struck down segregated education.
The students in the sunny, book-filled room were comparing what makes them the same and what makes them different. It’s part of their introduction to Brown v. Board of Education, a ruling commemorated just down the street at a national historic site in a former all-Black school. Linda Brown, whose father was the namesake of the historic case, was a student there because she was denied entry to an all-white school closer to her home.
Within a few questions, the first-graders at Williams Science & Fine Arts Magnet school were comparing skin tones.
Seventy years after the landmark Supreme Court ruling, segregation persists, not as a matter of law but as a reflection of underlying disparities including in in housing. In greater Topeka, as in school systems across America, students of color are concentrated in districts that disproportionately serve low-income families. That racial isolation has lasting consequences as students who attend high-poverty schools have lower graduation rates and less earning potential as they move into adulthood.
RACIAL DISPARITIES DEEPEN BETWEEN DISTRICTS
“White people,” Malaya, explained, “couldn’t be next to Black people, which is pretty bad, because we all should be treated the same.”
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