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The entrance of Brighton Beach's William E. Grady Career and Technical Education High School.

Is the school being closed, or is it staying open?

Parents repeated variations of that question often over the course of a two-hour-long meeting Department of Education officials held at William E. Grady Career and Technical Education High School Monday evening to detail the city’s plan to overhaul the school.

The answer, they were told, was more complicated than a matter of semantics.

“This school is not being closed,” Aimee Horowitz, the school’s superintendent, told families, teachers, and the School Leadership Team in three meetings at the school over the course of the day.

But she also said a new school with a different name would be opening in the building in the fall, and just half of Grady’s current teachers would remain. Those are the conditions of the school improvement model known as “turnaround,” she explained.

Mayor Bloomberg announced earlier this month that the city would use turnaround at 33 struggling schools so that they could continue receiving federal funds even if the city and teachers union do not agree on new teacher evaluations. Since 2010, Grady had been undergoing a different federally mandated overhaul process, “transformation,” which relies on changing leadership, bringing in extra support services, and experimenting with longer school days and new teacher training.

The details Horowitz outlined were puzzling for several of the 40 parents and students who crowded into Grady’s cafeteria to learn about the turnaround plan.

“First you say in your speech that the school was going to do transformation. And then as you go on you started saying things like, this is going to be a new school. So where are we, which one should we believe?” said Ade Ajayi, whose son is a junior. “A lot of things are going to change. Teachers are going to change. We don’t even know if the name is going to be the same.” (more…)

Christopher Columbus High School students wait to receive their diplomas at graduation in the Lehman College auditorium.Tamjid Chowdhury, this year’s valedictorian of Christopher Columbus High School, said in his graduation speech that the fight to save his school from closing had ironically provided some of his favorite memories.

Tamjid Chowdhury, this year’s valedictorian of Christopher Columbus High School, said in his graduation speech that the fight to save his school from closing had ironically provided some of his favorite memories.

“It was one time I was awed by the sense of unity in the school,” he said of the rallies.

For teachers and staff at the Bronx school, another year under the threat of closure has ended with stories of coming together to improve.

The unity extended beyond protests at public meetings. Without anyone asking them to, a group of teachers at the school spent the year huddling together to redesign the school’s curriculum.

“We knew if anything good was going to come out of this year, we would have to generate it, and we would have to execute it,” said Christine Rowland, an English teacher who also works for the UFT.

City officials tried to close Columbus this year and last year, and they want Columbus phased out by 2014 to open a new school in the building. Teachers have tried to save the school multiple times by rallying behind efforts to convert Columbus into a charter school, and Columbus remains at the center of the lawsuit filed by the teachers union and the NAACP to stop school closures.

“It’s a really big blow to our psyche,” said Larry Minetti, an art teacher who has taught at Columbus for 16 years. (more…)

Geraldine Maione, principal of William E. Grady CTE High School, speaks to a teacher getting ready for summer school.

“Everything about this school has improved. Everything.”

Geraldine Maione, principal of William E. Grady Career and Technical Education High School in Brighton Beach, does not hesitate when asked about the trajectory of her school.

Maione just finished her first year at Grady, where she was greeted with a staff weary of leadership changes, a curriculum that has see-sawed between emphasizing traditional academics and the school’s signature “shops,” and a D grade on its 2009-10 progress report.

She was also given $1.4 million of additional “transformation” money through the federal government’s program to improve low-achieving schools.

At the end of her first year, staff members say they’ve felt the impact of Maione’s leadership and the additional funds—though it is unclear if the school is yet making the academic gains it needs to avoid facing closure in the future.

The transformation money helped pay for an array of cosmetic changes to the building and school trips to colleges throughout New York state, Pennsylvania, and Washington, DC.

The entrance area was repainted from black and white to maroon and yellow, the school colors. The front doors are now framed by planters, filled with flowers, that double as benches. Murals featuring civil rights leaders and faces of current students fill once-blank hallway walls. (more…)

UFT President Michael Mulgrew addresses graduates of Grady High School. Male graduates wore red caps and gowns, and female graduates wore white. Students with blue stoles graduated with Regents diplomas.

A sea of red dotted with white caps made up the graduating class at William E. Grady Career and Technical High School on Monday.

The color contrast on display during Grady’s graduation exercises reflected the school’s stark gender imbalance: 80 percent of students are male. They were the ones wearing red caps and gowns, while female graduates wore white.

Grady’s vocational programs — which include automotive technology, construction trades, and heating and air conditioning repair — tend to enroll mostly male students. A culinary program attracts both men and women. (A cookbook distributed at graduation, titled “We ♥ Julia: The Recipes of the Whisk & Ladle Bistro,” showcased senior culinary arts students’ top recipes, including Cuban black bean soup, Swedish meatballs, and spanakopita.)

But despite the odds, both of Grady’s two top graduates were women. Valedictorian Jannatul Noor is heading to Philadelphia University, and salutatorian Catalina Lucero, who said in her speech that she graduated with an 88 average, will attend the Fashion Institute of Technology. (more…)

At the beginning of this year, Brian Rosenbloom, the principal of Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School didn’t know how efforts to turn the school around would pan out.

As part of The Big Fix — the year-long series we’re doing in partnership with WNYC — WNYC’s education reporter Beth Fertig has checked in periodically at Chelsea as its teachers and staff try to move more students toward graduation.

Now, Rosenbloom can cite results, Fertig reports:

Earlier this month, Rosenbloom received the school’s Regents scores: more than 90 percent of the juniors passed their exams in English and U.S. history. And there were similar scores for the sophomores who took the science exam.

“It’s just beyond my wildest dreams,” he said. “To see how well the kids are doing, and the teachers – the pride they’re taking and the pride the kids are taking. I mean, I had two kids yesterday jump in the arms of the teacher when they found out they got 88 and 82 on the exam.”

Rosenbloom and his teachers say investment in learning new instructional strategies made the difference, Fertig reports. But they are split on whether students’ performance should factor into teachers’ evaluations.

Listen to Fertig’s complete radio story on Chelsea High School here. And stay tuned for updates soon from Christopher Columbus High School and William E. Grady Career and Technical High School, the other two schools whose changes The Big Fix project has tracked.

Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch visited a struggling Bronx high school today that is hoping to convert into a charter school in order to prevent the city from closing it.

A teacher at Christopher Columbus High School said that Tisch toured the school today, stopping into teachers’ classrooms and talking to principals at several of the schools that share the building. The teacher said that Tisch was there to discuss the school’s charter conversion aspirations.

Though city school officials have said that they have no intention of allowing the school to convert into a charter school, teachers took Tisch’s visit as a sign of hope that state officials haven’t ruled the plan out.

Tisch has personally campaigned for more charter high schools, calling on charter school networks to take a risk on older, more difficult students.

“It’s really time for charter schools to say to me, ‘I don’t want to just grow my own, I don’t want to operate in this zone where I am the darling,’” Tisch said at Hunter College in 2009. “I want them to dig in and say, ‘what can we do to help?’”

City Department of Education officials said today that Columbus should not be allowed to convert into a charter school — keeping its staff and students the same — because of its years of poor performance. (more…)

Jamaica High School students, teachers and parents cheer a speaker at the school

For the past two weeks, education officials have spent nearly every weeknight holding public hearings at each of the 25 district schools the city wants to close next year. Seventeen of the schools are in this for the second go-around, after a union lawsuit foiled the department’s attempt to close them last year.

As a result, this year’s hearings are both formatted differently — part of an attempt to better explain the closure decisions and avoid another lawsuit — and less emotional, despite communities’ still-simmering anger and frustration.

GothamSchools reporters recently attended three of these hearings.

Jamaica High School

The group of students, teachers and parents that gathered in Jamaica High School’s auditorium was smaller than the large, boisterous crowd that packed last year’s hearing.

But, as several students pointed out, the school is also smaller this year. After the courts blocked the city from closing Jamaica and 18 other high schools last year, the size of the incoming freshman class shrunk dramatically. (more…)

Renaissance students take 90 minutes of English twice a week long after their peers have finished the school day.

At 4 p.m., long after most city high school students have gone home, a group of Bronx students trudge into two warm, sleepy classrooms and begin their school day.

For most of them, graduation is a long-shot. Some are 17 years old and have no more than six credits completed; they’ll need 44 to get a diploma. Others are new mothers or have to hold day jobs that make going to regular day-time classes impossible.

For its students on the brink of dropping out, Christopher Columbus High School has an unusual program: an after-hours school for its most at-risk students.

In many New York City high schools, when a student seems irrevocably off course — he’s failed so many classes that there’s no way he’ll graduate in four years — there’s a standard response.

If he’s over 17.5 years old, he might enroll in one of the city’s Young Adult Borough Centers, known as YABC programs, which offer classes at night for students who are a few credits shy of graduation. Alternatively, a counselor might recommend that he switch to a transfer school, where younger students who are falling behind are pushed toward a diploma. (more…)

Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School Principal Brian Rosenbloom was recognized by Gov. Andrew Cuomo during today's state of the state speech.

When Governor Andrew Cuomo wanted to make the case during his State of the State address today that it’s possible to transform education, he pointed to a familiar face as proof.

That face belonged to Brian Rosenbloom, whom followers of the WNYC/GothamSchools project The Big Fix might recognize as the principal of Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School.

Cuomo praised Rosenbloom for dramatically boosting Chelsea High students’ attendance and the rate at which students pass their Regents exams during his two years as principal of the school.

“That performance is what we want to incentivize, that performance is what we want to model,” Cuomo said.

In part because of the progress that Chelsea has shown under Rosenbloom, city officials spared the school from closure and instead opted to spend nearly $1 million in federal grant money to let the school experiment with extended day programs, new “master” teachers, and outside community support.

Cuomo overstated the gains the school has made, however. In his speech, Cuomo said that the school’s Regents pass rates have dramatically risen from 31 percent to 89 percent.

That’s not quite true, Rosenbloom confirmed to WNYC’s Beth Fertig after the speech. The numbers that Cuomo cited are the rates that sophomores passed the Global History Regents between 2008 and 2010 — still an impressive jump.

The overall Regents pass rates at the school are lower, though the progress is still substantial. According to the most recent data available from the state, 73 percent of all the Chelsea students who took the Global History exam passed in the 2008-09 school year, up from 48 percent the year before. The school posted an 80 percent pass rate on the Comprehensive English exam in 2008-09, up from 66 percent the year before.

Rosenbloom told Fertig that one of his teachers watched the speech with his class at the school; the students went “ballistic” when they saw him, he said.

“I was very humbled by the experience, and I must say that I think a lot of the credit should also go to my staff and the students who worked hard to see changes in their school,” he said.

Fertig profiled Rosenbloom and his efforts at Chelsea for The Big Fix back in October; you can listen to the piece here.

Since the school year began, GothamSchools and WNYC reporters have been telling stories from inside three struggling high schools as they try to improve. To help readers put these changes in context, the clever minds behind the extensive Big Apple Ed database have created profiles for each of the schools.

The profiles for the three schools — Chelsea CTE High School, Christopher Columbus High School, and William E. Grady CTE High School — display data on the schools’ graduation rates, how much money the federal government has given them to improve, and a breakdown of their student demographics.

They also include background information on how the schools have changed over time and what they’re doing now to serve their students better. Throughout the year, we’ll be updating the data regularly as new information becomes available. We’ll also add new stories and reader polls.

You can follow the schools by checking out the “Big Fix” widget (at right) on our sidebar, which has links to all three profiles.

Further down on the sidebar, you can enter your school’s name to see a comprehensive profile designed by Big Apple Ed. By adding the school to your “backpack” you can compare it to other schools, including the three “Big Fix” high schools we’re following this year.