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The converted gym on the bottom floor at P.S. 3 served as a evacuation shelter for hundreds of students on Sept. 11, 2001.

It was less than a week into her job as principal and Lisa Siegman was already confronted with her first major crisis.

As a first-year principal on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Siegman was just a few hours into her third day on the job when two hijacked commercial planes struck the World Trade Center less than two miles away. Siegman’s school, P.S. 3 in the West Village, was immediately converted from a place of learning into a refugee shelter.

“It just turned into survival mode,” recalled Siegman.

Within hours, hundreds of students who had evacuated from schools near ground zero were pouring into P.S. 3′s nearly century-old building on Hudson Street. Some of those schools would not reopen for months, causing their students to temporarily become P.S. 3′s.

Siegman, who is still principal at P.S. 3, one of the top-performing schools in the city, said she remembers few details from that day other than how quickly her responsibilities as a school leader had changed and how urgently her skills were needed.

Parent phone calls needed to be made, but most phone lines were down. Information had to be disseminated to staff and parents, but initial announcements from the Department of Education was unclear and conflicting.

“It was this huge logistical problem,” Siegman said. “Suddenly I had to worry about this whole new set of challenges.”

As the city prepares to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on Sunday, new attention is being given to the largely unheralded success of educators across the five boroughs that day in coordinating evacuations and dismissals for more than one million students. (more…)

Since Lehman High School added scanning last year, students at every large high school building in the borough must go through metal detectors before they can get to class.

That’s not the case at Hyde Leadership Charter School, a five-year old Hunts Point secondary school that emphasizes character education. I got a press release earlier this week about the school’s move into its own brand-new building this year.

“Hyde-Bronx administrators, teachers and parents made the decision not to have students enter through metal detectors, the way most other public schools do,” the release said. “Although Hyde-Bronx is located in the significantly disadvantaged Hunts Point neighborhood, the school believes that students need to feel respected and responsible.”

Today in the Community section, Hyde teacher Mark Fusco reflects on the differences he sees between his school and other charter schools, and about his efforts to teach his junior English students about social justice.

“I’m thankful that Hyde stands apart from most charters,” Fusco writes. “The theme of my school is social justice, a label rarely worn with pride in these times when schools are not measured by the content of their character but by the strength of their test scores.”

This column is about those of us who abhor AYP, avoid IMPACT, won’t SLANT or SPORT, don’t “Do Now,” and wriggle when you hear “rigor,” “relentless pursuit,” “high-performing,” “low-performing,” “work hard, be nice,” and “mastery.”

My name is Mark Fusco. I love teaching. The buzzwords of “no excuses,” data-driven school reform don’t resonate with someone like me, whose inspiration to enter the classroom came from watching my mother, a lifelong teacher, instruct a class of students with disabilities during the summer before I started kindergarten. I learned by her example that acronyms and test scores were not what stayed with the children, but rather their transformative education came from my mother’s profound love and her commitment to helping students discover their individual talents and intelligences.

I am distressed because it appears that my mother’s brand of education is becoming increasingly devalued in our current educational and political climate. I work at a charter school where I am happy, but I am concerned by what I see in the prevalent trends of charter schools in New York City and nationally. First, I see an almost monomanical focus on high-stakes testing. Second the CEOs of the fastest growing charter management networks, such as Harlem Success Academy, are predominantly white, upper-class men and women who I suspect do not fully understand the communities and kids they serve. Many of these leaders seem to resist any collaboration with the neighborhoods their schools are in and the families who depend on them.

I have been working in education in New York for several years. I volunteered with 826 NYC. I worked for Harlem Children’s Zone’s after school program. I left for a year to get my masters in education at Harvard. I am now embarking on my second year as an 11th-grade English teacher at Hyde Leadership Charter School in the Hunts Point neighborhood of the South Bronx. I’m thankful that Hyde stands apart from most charters. (more…)

• The numbers of homeless students in city schools quadrupled in two years, from 2008 to 2010. (Post)
• The state released plans and proposals for boosting test security. (GothamSchools, Times, Post, WSJ)
• The UFT’s Michael Mulgrew and Council Speaker Christine Quinn: No layoffs allowed. (GothamSchools)
• City schools opened their doors yesterday to start the year. (GothamSchools, Times, NY1, Daily News)
• After a 3-year-old pre-K student boarded the wrong bus, the driver still got him to the right school. (Post)
• A second-grader at the Spruce Street School wore a tuxedo for his first day in the new building. (Post)
• Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s praise for Detroit’s schools comes despite little improvement. (WSJ)

• A parent at P.S./I.S. 187 lays out the sad reality of budget cuts at the Washington Heights school. (EdVox)
• A Mets fan and teacher gives his classroom a theme, turning it into a “field of dreams.” (Mr. Foteah)
• President Obama is asking for $60 billion for schools, but he probably won’t get it. (Politics K-12)
• What Republican presidential candidates said about education during last night’s debate. (Hechinger)
• Rotherham reviews “Class Warfare,” calling it important but ahistorical and zealous. (School of Thought)
• An argument (that has been made before) that teaching to the test isn’t such a bad thing. (Freakonomics)
• An online survey asks parents to assess class sizes and budget cuts at their schools. (NYC P.S. Parents)
• The UFT uses new data to compare district schools to charter schools and finds inequalities. (Edwize)
• A teacher who retired last year is teaching a college course to students at her old school. (Pissed Off)

The first recommendations of the state task force to boost test security are out, and they suggest that big changes could be coming to the way tests are administered and graded.

Next week, the Board of Regents will vote on a measure to start an immediate, independent review of how the state handles allegations of cheating.

No action is set yet on the rest of the recommendations. But they provide a blueprint of what the state might do to prevent cheating scandals like those that have gripped Atlanta, Philadelphia, and other cities.

To improve the current system, the state could prohibit teachers from proctoring their own students’ exams and even exams in the subject they teach; bar teachers from grading their own students’ exams, as many currently do; and keep completed exams on hand for longer than a year so they can be checked if cheating is alleged, the recommendations say. The Regents could turn those recommendations into official policy as soon as next month.

But a more substantive revision of the testing system would be even more secure, the working group concluded. The task force wants permission to sketch out — and cost out — a centralized, statewide scanning system that includes erasure analysis and other measures to check for irregularities in test results.

City officials say they support the changes — as long as the city doesn’t have to foot the bill.

“We applaud the state for proposing to centralize and strengthen security on its exams,” Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky said in a statement. “Their proposals make a lot of sense, provided the costs are not passed on to districts like New York City, where we now spend more than $20 million a year to score state exams.” (more…)

Chancellor Walcott speaks to a parent on the first day of school

Between school visits today, reporters grilled Chancellor Dennis Walcott about the biggest issues the Department of Education faces today.

Most of his answers tread familiar territory: When asked about the pool of teachers without permanent positions, which has grown, he suggested the same policy solution that former chancellor Joel Klein called for on his way out the door.

But in a few cases Walcott broke new ground. Asked about the city’s testing of schools for toxic chemicals, which he vowed to accelerate after the city precipitously closed a contaminated Bronx school this summer, the chancellor said all schools have come back clean. But testing is still ongoing at the majority of leased sites, he said.

Read on for the highlights. (more…)

Every year, the city’s schools chancellor takes a five-borough tour on the first day of school. Today is Dennis Walcott’s first time on the circuit, but it’s our third, and we’ll be chronicling his journey and the first day of school for the city’s 1.1 million students in 1,600 schools. Rachel, Geoff, and Jessica will be sending dispatches from around the city all day.

Want to add your own first-day-of-school stories or pictures? Email us.

Dismissal at Brooklyn's School for International Studies

5:32 p.m. It’s been a long day, and just like some teachers, we’re ready for a nap. (But don’t worry, we’ll post Remainders before we crash.) I’ll conclude with a note from the only school visit I managed today, a jaunt down Brooklyn’s Court Street to the low-slung building that houses two secondary schools.

One of them, the School for International Studies, made the news last week when the Post reported it was looking for a public relations professional to help improve its image and boost enrollment. Having more students would give the school more money and allow it to offer more to its students. But a student I met today cited the school’s small size as its greatest asset.

“I like that it’s small,” said the student, a 10th-grader who was scarfing down a lunch with friends while standing on the school’s front patio. “I want to keep it just the way it is.”

5:01 p.m. It was the beginning of the end for Christopher Columbus High School today, where students returned to class knowing that they would be among the last to ever attend the school.

Columbus is one of 22 schools the city started to close this year. It will phase out one grade at a time and close its doors for the last time when current sophomores graduate in 2014.

Two students set to graduate in Columbus's final class.

“Everybody is very upset. It’s depressing,” said a longtime special education teacher at the school, who said her department lost four teachers because the school does not have a ninth grade this year. “But we’re going to work just as hard, if not harder, to show that were a good school.”

That was the tone teachers were striking over the summer, when they told GothamSchools that they would revamp the curriculum despite knowing that the school’s days might well be numbered.

Two members of the sophomore class, Christopher Rivera and Lisa Budhwa, told Geoff today that they agreed the school should be closed. Rivera said one of his teachers told students they should feel special to be among Columbus’s final students.

“There’s just so many kids who don’t act the way they should,” Rivera said. “They’re always jumping around the hallway like they’re crazy.”

Kayla Allen, a senior, disagreed, arguing that the school should stay open. But she seconded Rivera’s complaints about student behavior.

“It’s not the school that’s doing bad,” Allen said. “It’s the students in the school not doing stuff.”

4:19 p.m. Earlier today, Geoff filed an in-depth report about City Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s sharp words about teacher layoffs this morning at P.S./I.S. 187.

Other elected officials also turned out for the first day of school. (more…)

City Councilman Robert Jackson, Council Speaker Christine Quinn, and UFT President Michael Mulgrew addressing students at P.S./I.S. 187.

With a new round of budget projections already on the horizon, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn sent a clear message to City Hall today, warning Mayor Bloomberg that teacher layoffs would not be on the table to close gaps at the Department of Education.

“I cant imagine why you would go back to that idea again,” Quinn told reporters outside P.S./I.S. 187 in Washington Heights, where she spent more than an hour greeting students on their first day of school. “It didn’t work.”

It was just a couple of months into the last school year that Bloomberg announced his intention to lay off thousands of teachers in order to balance the city’s budget. But layoffs were ultimately averted after the city struck a deal with the UFT and City Council.

Quinn, who is planning a 2013 mayoral run, said she hasn’t discussed the prospect of teacher layoffs with the mayor yet this year. But she signaled that she would reprise last year’s fight if the mayor again levels a layoff threat.

“I think, and I certainly hope, that they saw how clear and strong we in the council felt about the idea of layoffs last year,” she said.

Quinn was joined by Councilman Robert Jackson, chair of the education committee, and United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew at the school. (more…)

• Families crowded registration centers yesterday as they frantically tried to find school seats. (Daily News)
• Another new poll focuses on Chancellor Walcott’s approval rating and finds it middling. (NY1)
• In an interview, Walcott again emphasized that he wants civility and community buy-in. (Times)
• The principal of Boys and Girls High School hopes this is the year that it finally improves. (Daily News)
• Parents at two Brooklyn schools are suing to stop co-locations that have already started. (Daily News)
• City teachers all got training on new Common Core curriculum standards. (GothamSchools, NY1)
• Many also got training on the teacher evaluation model, Danielson, that the city favors. (GothamSchools)
• The city’s school numbering system started out systematic but soon became almost random. (Times)
• Advocates want the city to hasten testing schools for toxins. (GothamSchools, Daily News, NY1, WNYC)
• A top DOE official said, as he has before, that the state should pay for test monitoring. (Daily News)
• An economist and testing critic says safeguards aren’t enough to stop cheating on tests. (Daily News)
• The city officially got federal funds to help it improve struggling schools. (GothamSchools, Daily News)
• The Daily News calls Comptroller John Liu’s recent ATR audit, which criticized the city, “disingenuous.”
• Private donors pulled out of Philadelphia’s schools chief’s buyout, leaving the city on the hook. (Inquirer)
• Atlanta’s former schools chief, Beverly Hall, says there was no culture of cheating under her. (Times)