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Run-Down Schools in Low-Income Communities Face Long-Term Closures Amid COVID
Sign informs parents who picked up items from the neighborhood public school to exit the premisses through the gate, in the Mt. Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on April 14, 2020.
Bastiaan Slabbers / NurPhoto via Getty Images
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Yvette Alston-Johnson was seething when she got the news. Children in Paterson, New Jersey would not be allowed to go to school in person this fall, while many of their peers in predominantly white and affluent suburbs would return.
Alston-Johnson attended Paterson public schools, as did her five children, and she has watched the buildings fall steadily into disrepair over the years. She is now the primary caregiver for her grandson Rayahn, who is in eighth grade at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Educational Complex, where close to 90 percent of students are Black or Latino.