NEW YORK -- Spending a day at an affluent, mostly white high school in Brooklyn led Bronx Academy of Letters student Shania Russell to grapple with some complex feelings.

The high school junior, who is black, attends a school where most students are black or Latino. Her day in Brooklyn was part of an exchange program designed to help students connect with teens from other backgrounds.

"The point is that we already attend a really good school, and so do the other kids," she told classmates, reading from a sheet of paper on which she'd written about her experience at the school in another borough.

"But we also attend very different schools, and we attend them separately," Shania continued. "And unfortunately, that means there are resources that just aren't fairly allocated between us, and there are opportunities that are not fairly distributed between us. And there's something fundamentally wrong with that."

Shania is involved with IntegrateNYC4Me , a Bronx Academy of Letters elective course that teaches students about the impact of school segregation and helps them advocate for more integrated, equitable ones.

Sarah Camiscoli, an English as a second language teacher at the Bronx school, co-founded IntegrateNYC4Me in the 2014-15 academic year after hearing that some students were concerned about resource allocation across schools.