I had the chance to meet up with two friends from my Poynter fellowship last summer this past weekend. They were in town for the 2011 Computer-Assisted Reporting (CAR) conference in Raleigh, N.C. Unfortunately I couldn’t attend, but I was able to gain some second-hand knowledge from my friend Katelyn Polantz, an education reporter for the Roanoke Times.

As an education reporter, she was obviously drawn to the session looking into education databases. One of the databases mentioned, the Common Core of Data from the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, has a wealth of information on public school districts and their respective K-12 schools. I decided to take a jog down memory lane and pull data from the fine public school that gave me my diploma—Pine-Richland High School.

Now, we always joked that we lived in a white picket fence-type “bubble”—and the demographic data certainly supports that notion. Out of 1,442 total high school students in grades 9-12, there is/are:

• 1 Native American/Alaskan (0.07%)
• 7 Blacks (0.5%)
• 16 Hispanics (1%)
• 31 Asians (2%)
• 1,387 Whites (96%)

Additionally, there are only 48 free-lunch eligible kids (family of four income below $28,665) and 19 reduced-lunch eligible kids (below $40,793), for a grand total of 5 percent. So not only are there no ethnic kids, there are no poor ones either.

My high school is not an anomaly in the area. The three school districts it shares borders with in Allegheny County—North Allegheny, Hampton and Deer Lakes—have similar breakdowns. North Allegheny has 2,668 total students (split between an intermediate high school and senior high school), 91 percent of whom are white and 2 percent on lunch assistance. Hampton is a bit smaller, with 1,053 students, but with a greater percentage of whites (97 percent) and 5 percent of students on lunch assistance. Finally, Deer Lakes is significantly smaller at 632 total students (97 percent white) and has a much larger percentage of students receiving lunch assistance (19 percent) than the other three districts.

This is just a drop in the bucket as far as the type of data I could collect. The database also has tools to create tables to organize different data that can be exported into Microsoft Excel. And as Katelyn pointed out, it would be interesting to take this mini investigation one step further and look at each of the district’s test scores and compare them to other nearby districts that aren’t as Caucasian dominant.