Schools struggle to bridge city’s long-standing east-west divide
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| In Duluth, schools struggle to bridge city’s long-standing east-west divide | In the Woodland neighborhood on Duluth’s east side, the average person lives to be more than 90 years old. Six miles away, in the west side’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, the average person lives to be only 69.
Twenty-one years of life, separated by a 12-minute drive.
That data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts into sharp focus the geographical and generational divide separating Duluth's more working class, racially diverse west side above the St. Louis River from the city’s whiter, more prosperous east end, overlooking Lake Superior.
The gaps extend from health to income to housing but are perhaps most evident in education, where graduation rates and test scores are substantially lower at the west side’s Denfeld High School than at East High School, and where recent efforts to redraw school boundaries laid bare the divisions that remain between the two sides of town.
“It’s a justice issue,” said Mary Owen, a Native American physician and professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School in Duluth who helped found a community group that advocates for equity among the city’s public schools. “This is not a level playing field … if you don’t have the resources because of where you were born.”
There have been significant efforts to close those gaps in recent years.
Owen and other advocates have persuaded school officials to allocate additional funding to western schools.
Efforts within the schools to improve outcomes have begun to bear fruit. | |
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