GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Overcrowding in Manhattan schools seems to be more acute than usual this year. But in the rest of the city, Manhattan’s overcrowding story isn’t news: For years, many schools in the outer boroughs haven’t been able to accommodate all of the children who live near them for years.

So writes Jeff Coplon in next week’s New York Magazine: 

The DOE perennially “caps” the enrollments of dozens of schools in the Bronx and Queens and Brooklyn, busing hundreds of kindergartners out of places like Elmhurst or Norwood. In the northwest corner of the Bronx, the poorest urban county in the nation, District 10 leads the city in capped schools-seven by the count of the DOE, nine by that of Marvin Shelton, the president of the district’s Community Education Council. (The crush can only worsen this fall, given the closure of kindergartens at city-run day-care centers: more than 3,000 of the city’s least-advantaged 5-year-olds, thrown into the DOE’s Mixmaster.) The children are bused miles east to west in rush-hour traffic and arrive home so exhausted they take two-hour naps. More than a dozen other schools dodge formal caps by shunting students to annexes blocks away or hauling makeshift “mini-schools” or double-wides onto their properties.

Coplon’s report jives with data made available online last week by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, which show that Manhattan is far from having the most crowded schools.

After a long wait, a commission of parents led by outspoken critics of the Department of Education is unveiling its own proposal for how to change mayoral control. In testimony delivered to the Bronx Assembly hearing on mayoral control this morning, parents painted an ideal picture in which parent voices would gain power while the mayor would lose it.

Their proposal is topped off by a radical answer to the question of how to change the Panel for Educational Policy — the effective citywide school board — that would both strengthen the powers of the board and reshape who sits on it. The board would include just three mayoral appointees compared to six parent representatives, plus a City Council appointee, an appointee of the public advocate,and four expert members selected jointly by the board.

The commission is also proposing a stronger role for the CEC elected parent councils in each district. A key complaint about Mayor Bloomberg’s leadership has been that parents are not included in decision-making about the schools. Some have criticized the DOE for not consulting those councils when choosing to open and close schools, as is required by law.

Lisa Donlan, a commission member from Manhattan and the president of a CEC, testified that the state should create an “ombudsperson” role who would have the legal authority to advocate for parents when they aren’t comfortable advocating for themselves. This role addresses the DOE’s Office of Family Engagement and Advocacy, which Freeman called “a way of distracting [parents], but not a way of helping them.” (more…)

The rising tide of transparency seems to have infected a South Bronx schoolteacher. Since last August, the teacher has been skewering Department of Education policies on his blog, South Bronx School. He reserves the harshest words for his school administrators, whom he nicknamed “Numb Nuts” and “John Deacon,” and whom he recently accused of committing corporal punishment, in a complaint he says he sent to the Special Commissioner of Investigations.

Yesterday, for reasons that aren’t explained on his blog, the teacher revealed the name of his school, PS 154 in the Bronx, and his administrators’ real names. He did not disclose his own name. Many teachers have damning things to say about their schools, and while some criticisms are justified, others are not. We called 154′s principal today for comment and are waiting to hear back.

Not everyone has embraced the spirit of openness yet. The first comment, left just minutes after the post went up: “Whoo Hoo!!!!” Its author: Anonymous.

Last week’s “Big City” column in the New York Times tells the story of a 12-year-old aspiring food critic who adorably took himself out to dinner one night, alone, and then later wrote up a Zagat’s-style review in a private leather-bound journal. (“As I left,” the Upper West Side boy wrote, “I knew that soon enough this would be one of the most ‘hip’ places in the city.”)

The story reminds me of another aspiring food critic of about the same age: Franklin, a Bronx pre-teen who last year became the official food writer at his middle school, CIS 339. His column, called “Franklin on Food,” ran as part of the school’s online newspaper, the 339 Hardline. He reviewed the cafeteria food, which ran the gamut, from the baguette pizza (loved) to the pollo (not a fan) to the coleslaw:

Shout out to the garbage for eating all the coleslaw.

Franklin never offered ratings. (“Thank you for cooking today, dining staff. If I was going to rate you, you would have gotten a 9 out of 10. But I’m not a rater,” he wrote one day.) But he did occasionally poll his fellow students. (“I know that I have no power, so I’m just writing this to make a point and let the people’s voice be heard. 144 people didn’t like the lunch and only 6 people liked it.”)

Franklin graduated CIS 339 last year and is now in high school. But the school saved his columns, which you can read here.

(Postscript: Why are these kids writing blogs? Reminders here and here.)

The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) and local youth organizations regularly condemn metal detectors and policing of schools, saying they make students feel like criminals. So I was surprised when I was in the Bronx last week and heard students saying something different.

I was at a workshop at a conference on youth violence prevention, and participants were asked to cross the room if they agreed with statements by the facilitator, move to the middle if they weren’t sure or partly agreed, and stay on the other side if they disagreed.

Nearly all the students crossed the room, indicating they agreed, in response to two questions related to NYCLU’s campaign: Should the city have a curfew for teenagers, and should the city schools have metal detectors?

Although students in the workshop crossed the room in favor of them, other students I spoke to later expressed concerns about whether metal detectors really keep schools safe. Their views are after the jump. (more…)

I’m a few years behind in reading Random Family, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s book chronicling a decade that she spent following a family from the Tremont neighborhood in the South Bronx. Timely or not, I can’t help but post about it.

The first thing that broke my heart was the pervasiveness of sexual abuse. By about 15 pages in, every single woman and girl in the book up to that point had been sexually abused by a family member, family friend, or acquaintance. One girl was only two years old when she was molested. The psychological toll of abuse is enormous, and when a problem is as widespread as this book suggests that it is, where do you even begin in helping people heal? The legacy of abuse runs through families, as daughters blame their mothers for not protecting them, even as they are often unable to protect their own daughters.

(more…)

Recess in a huge public school is so loud you can hear it six stories up. Children play basketball, kickball, double-dutch, and games of their own invention. Some cluster near the walls, laughing and gossiping. Others chase each other with abandon, zigging and zagging through the middle of more structured games. In some city schools, the “yard” is little more than a fenced-in, paved play area, perhaps with the pavement painted with lines delineating basketball courts, a running track, and four-square. So it is undeniably a good thing that Out2Play, a New York City nonprofit organization, is building playgrounds in the most underserved schools across the city. And the idea of the kids designing the playground for their own school sounds like a great way of involving kids in authentic, interdisciplinary projects where they can see, touch, and even climb on the final product. Here’s a video of opening day at the PS 55 playground in the Bronx.

What’s a little harder to see from the article and the video is how small the new playground at PS 55, a campus serving nearly 700 elementary and almost 300 middle school students, really is: a small jungle gym and a child-sized climbing wall tucked into one corner of the enormous schoolyard. The kids do love the new playground: any sunny day this spring, you’d have seen a dozen middle school girls and boys lining up for the slide, giggling and pushing each other into a heap at the bottom. Yet only a tiny fraction of the students can use the equipment at any one time. I hope that Out2Play and other initiatives are successful in building more playgrounds like this one, and expanding them so that even more students can make use of them.