GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

A slide from a Department of Education presentation about the damage wrought by Hurricane Sandy shows that P.S. 114′s devastated auditorium has since been repaired. The presentation, which contains before-and-after photographs from 16 school buildings, is being delivered at a City Council hearing today about city agencies’ responses to the storm. Emma is at the hearing and will report on it later this afternoon. (more…)

According to the Department of Education, 200 of New York City’s 1,400 public school buildings are currently “not operational” because of damage wrought by Hurricane Sandy. We visited a few of them today.

“Catastrophic. Pure devastation,” said Joe Modica, a custodian at Gravesend’s William Grady Career and Technical High School. The school’s boiler room and media center, both located in the school’s basement were flooded with about seven feet of water yesterday.

Modica and about a dozen others — custodians, plumbers and electricians — were working in shifts to pump water from the school today.

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Chancellor Walcott and football player Denard Robinson (center) speak with Javier Sarmiento, an eighth grader at I.S. 195 Roberto Clemente. Sarmiento will be attending Central Park East High School in the fall.

In its latest effort to get young, male students thinking about the path to college, the city enlisted glow-sticks and a Big Ten football player. (more…)

Parents at the city’s 10th annual English language learners conference literally lept out of their chairs at the chance to meet and take a photo with Chancellor Dennis Walcott this morning.

During his brief speech about how the parents could help their children in school, dozens of parents crowded around the stage, cameras and smart-phones in hand. More later greeted him off-stage, where he shook hands and posed for photos. (more…)

Children from the Bay Ridge Child Center drop off petition letters to Mayor Bloomberg.

Educators and children gathered to deliver more than 5,000 letters and petitions to Mayor Bloomberg to save their child care programs, which will be affected by the proposed city budget cuts. The cuts are shaping up to be a main point of dispute in budget negotiations between the mayor and City Council. Those negotiations are underway now and must be completed in time to finalize a budget by June 30.

When I spoke to Valerie Reidy, principal of the Bronx High School of Science, earlier this week, she said criticism about how she manages teachers and the student newspaper distracts the public from her students’ accomplishments.

“They work so hard, they study so hard. I hate to get caught up in administration-kid rivalry,” she said, adding that she doesn’t hold criticism by students against them. “The kids who push back — that’s what they’re supposed to be doing. I fully understand.”

A teacher at the school followed up on Thursday, sending a picture of 221 Bronx Science students taking Advanced Placement World History exams in a school gymnasium. The test took place on the penultimate day of a two-week spree of AP exams. (more…)

Present and former teachers from schools around the city that were targeted for closure rallied at Foley Square Thursday afternoon.

Teachers union president Michael Mulgrew told teachers to dress for a funeral today.

Teachers who worked at schools that the city has closed or is trying to close gathered at “Mayor Bloomberg’s Cemetery” — actually Foley Square, in Lower Manhattan — to mourn the Bloomberg administration’s school closure policies.

Joined by about 60 union members, the teachers displayed pictures of tombstones etched with the names of schools the city has targeted for closure, including Bread and Roses High School, Legacy High School for Integrated Studies, Manhattan Theater Lab School. (more…)

Student protesters unfurled a banner listing names of the schools that could close this year.

Students from at least five city high schools walked out of classes this afternoon in opposition to the city’s school closure proposals. (more…)

We usually have to patrol dismissal time to meet large groups of students, so we’re always excited when teachers bring their classes to us. Today’s visitors: a group of high schoolers and their teacher from the Henry Street School for International Studies, a small high school on the Lower East Side.

If their teacher (in a blue shirt) looks familiar to readers, it’s because he’s Collin Lawrence, the author of a series in the Community section about four years working in a troubled Brooklyn high school. He landed at Henry Street after spending last year teaching English in China.

Henry Street doesn’t have an active newspaper club and students in the group said they aspire to become pharmacists, basketball players, forensic scientists, and photographers — not reporters. But we did our best to win them over to journalism, walking them through the fast pace and ever-changing challenges of a typical day at GothamSchools. We also talked about how strong reading, writing, and math skills can be useful in any profession.

Just a reminder: If you’ve got a journalism class or after-school club and want to come visit, let us know.

Families from the nonprofit New York Communities for Change stand behind teachers union president Michael Mulgrew at a press conference to criticize how the DOE has responded to the threat of toxins in schools Wednesday morning.

Weeks after the city announced that students at a Bronx elementary school had been exposed to toxins for years, parents and lawyers from New York Lawyers for the Public Interest are renewing their call for city officials to protect students against another toxin found in schools: PCBs, which are present in older light fixtures. (more…)