Education
In Monroe County and the Finger Lakes, thousands of students could graduate high school without ever seeing a black teacher in their school hallways. A year-long WXXI News investigation found that five districts in Monroe County don’t employ a single black teacher in kindergarten through 12 th grade, according to the numbers from the 2015-16 school year. Four districts have only one. The countywide lack of diversity on teaching staffs is significantly more severe than the national average. According to the National Center for Education Statistics , 82 percent of American public school teachers are white. In Monroe County, we found that 92 percent of teachers are white. Outside the city of Rochester, 98 percent of teachers are white. In every district, the percentage of white teachers is significantly higher than the percentage of white students. “We all, collectively, have failed on this issue, and we continue to fail just by doing nothing,” said Adam Urbanski, president of the