GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Principals allocated slightly more funding to the arts last year, according to a new report from the Department of Education. But arts spending is still much lower than it was before citywide budget cuts two years ago.

The total school-based spending on arts last year was $316 million, up from $312 million in the 2009-2010 school year but down from $326 in 2008-2009. The tally is contained in the city’s 2010-2011 Arts in Schools Report, an annual collection of facts and figures that the DOE released today.

“This year’s report shows that thanks to the hard work and resourcefulness of our schools and cultural partners, we continue to make steady progress in offering arts instruction to more students,” Chancellor Dennis Walcott said in a statement.

Other notable data points:

• Fifty-four percent of elementary schools provided instruction to all grades in four arts disciplines — theater, music, visual arts, and dance — up from 51 percent in 2010 and just 40 percent in 2009. (more…)

As after-school programs have fallen victim to budget cuts at many schools, one program to build science and math skills has found an unusual home — the New York City Housing Authority.

Once a week after school, groups of 8 through 12-year-old residents in ten public housing complexes around the city gather to learn about bridges, skyscrapers and environmentally sustainable building.

Watch an audio slideshow of students, all residents of the Bronx’s Gun Hill Houses, at work in the BRIDGES program (the punny acronym stands for “Build, Research, Invent, Design, Grow and Explore through Science”), run in a partnership between the non-profit Salvadori Center and NYCHA community centers:

The Brooklyn high school profiled in the Daily News today doesn’t get its students into competitive colleges by “maniacal dedication” alone. The Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice also has a robust college counseling program that outstrips what’s offered by most city high schools.

The school’s college placement office has two staff members who edit essays, help students find internships to build their resumes, and organize trips to colleges near and far. Most schools of SLJ’s size, with about 100 students in each grade, are lucky to have a single person dedicated solely to helping students navigate the college admissions process.

Susan Knight, SLJ’s director of college placement, told me about the school’s college program after a panel discussion this spring about how to boost achievement at city high schools. During our conversation, a college counselor from another Brooklyn high school approached Knight to ask her how he could replicate SLJ’s success on his own. It would be a challenge, Knight said: She hired additional an additional staff member only after persuading foundations to cover the salary. (more…)

UPDATE: Here’s a video of Saturday’s street-painting event:

Art classes might be getting squeezed in some city schools, but they are still happening in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn — at least on Saturdays. Fort Greene kids are set to paint the street in front of their school tomorrow as part of a city initiative to beautify local roads.

The art teacher from one of the schools, Community Roots Charter School, has been working with a local artist and her second graders to develop a plan for drawing a street mural that looks like a neighborhood map. The event, taking place in front of the building shared by PS 67 and Community Roots, is being sponsored by Livable Streets Education, which like GothamSchools is part of The Open Planning Project. (more…)

The number of New York City schoolchildren enrolled in high-quality after-school programs has risen from 48,000 in 2001, when Mayor Bloomberg was elected, to 140,000, according to a nonprofit dedicated to expanding the programs.

At a snow-dampened event on Monday, The After-School Corporation celebrated its 10th anniversary by honoring philanthropist George Soros, who originally funded the group, and thanking Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein for their help bringing after-school programs to 600 city schools. During a 6-minute video that depicted city leaders as superheroes, the group noted that under Bloomberg, New York City has become “the largest municipally funded after-school system in the country.” (more…)

A Boston-based program that pairs adult mentors with middle school students who want to learn how to design video games or launch a business is now bringing its brand of mentoring to New York City kids.

Citizen Schools, a decade-old organization that facilitates apprenticeships for students in almost 20 cities nationwide, set up shop at four middle schools this year, two each in Brooklyn and East Harlem. At each school, the organization is offering professional instruction, an after-school program, and classroom support, according to Nitzan Pelman, Citizen Schools’ New York City executive director.

The centerpiece of Citizen Schools’ programming is the apprenticeship, in which adult volunteers spend 12 weeks teaching students about a particular subject before the students present their work to a panel of experts on that subject. (more…)

Our colleagues at Livable Streets Education (like us, an initiative of The Open Planning Project), have been “encouraging students to explore and question the environments around their school and in their neighborhoods, and to voice the changes they want to see on their streets.” Here, they present some advice to drivers, pedestrians, and bicyclists from 1st graders at Manhattan’s PS 87.