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NYC Disability Education Archive NYC Disability Education Archive
NYC Disability Education Archive

History of the “600” Schools

In the early twentieth century, the New York City Board of Education turned its attention to truancy and “maladjustment” among public school students. Truant schools and, later, probationary schools such as P.S. 61 in Brooklyn and P.S. 37 in Manhattan were created for boys considered too difficult for regular classrooms. In 1929, a special committee appointed by Superintendent William J. O’Shea investigated “retardation, truancy and problems of personality and conduct,” and from 1936 to 1938 the Board’s Joint Committee on Maladjustment and Delinquency studied the problem again.

These early programs primarily served immigrant children, particularly Italian Americans. After World War II, as the city’s Black and Puerto Rican populations grew, a second narrative of truancy and maladjustment developed, and educators increasingly characterized “troubled” Black and Puerto Rican children as delinquent and unmanageable.

In 1946, the Board of Education announced a new, centralized program for “emotionally maladjusted” youth, with plans for a network of twelve schools. Known as the “600” schools for their number designations, the program was placed under the Board’s Division of Child Welfare and led by Lillian Rashkis, who promised a therapeutic, non-punitive education that would return students to regular classrooms and, eventually, the workforce. Nine schools had opened by the start of the 1948 school year, along with classes in shelters and institutions for youth referred by the courts.

As the city’s demographics changed and the fight for school integration grew, the mission of the “600” schools changed as well. By the 1950s, they had shifted from sites of rehabilitation to sites of exclusion and isolation. Against the backdrop of the struggle to desegregate New York City’s schools, from the boycotts of 1964 and 1965 to the fight for community control and the 1968 teachers’ strike, the “600” schools served as a tool for removing and isolating Black and Puerto Rican students.

The transition to District 75 began in the 1970s, after the 1969 decentralization of the city’s school system. The former “600” schools were first grouped under an Office of District 75, which was eventually funded as a district in its own right: New York City’s separate district for students with disabilities, and the only one of its kind in the country. Like the “600” schools before it, District 75 disproportionately serves Black and Latino students, many of them classified as “emotionally disturbed” and removed from their community schools.

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