A Sharpe Walk to School is a print-and-play racing board game inspired by the popular board game Candyland. The game is designed to teach students about modern-day segregated schools. The goal of this game is for players to ask why segregated schools still exist, to explore the consequences segregated schools have on the American educational system, and what they, the players, can do to address the problem.
Segregated schools, despite what you’ve learned in history books, remain a problem in American public schools more than sixty-five years after the passage of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The title of this game itself is inspired by Bolling v. Sharpe, a court case that ended segregation in Washington, DC public schools about a year before Brown v. Board of Education. Today, segregated schools are segregated by zip codes, whereby low-income students, who are disproportionately people of color, are zoned into different schools from their affluent, disproportionately white, peers. This creates segregated schools as we know them today which work to keep low-income students in poverty by limiting their access to resources that are the standard for their more affluent peers. This limits students’ access to classroom resources and deprives them of a diversity of people, experiences, and perspectives, stifling their potential personally, professionally, and academically.
My board game addresses these issues by building students’ awareness of their communities—what they have and what they lack—and how access to these outside resources impacts their experience inside the classroom. This awareness empowers students with the vocabulary they need to redefine their experiences in the classroom and encourages them to advocate for themselves and their communities.
