P.S. 217, one of the schools affected by overcrowding (Chika Okaneme/The Brooklyn Ink)

It’s a timeless American scene that warms the heart, but what it hides is something else.   P.S. 139, and many other schools throughout Brooklyn, are growing increasingly over-crowded—and the problem is likely to only get worse for the foreseeable future.

According to the New York City Department of Education’s 2010-2011 capacity report, about a third of NYC elementary school buildings are over capacity. Nearly a hundred of these schools are in Brooklyn. Out of the 5,003 new seats the department provided to schools this year, Brooklyn— the most populated borough—received only 343 of them. Yet, the borough continues to grow as a popular destination for young American and immigrant families looking for affordable housing and charming neighborhoods.

But as Mildred Decker, a young single mother with a child in P.S. 139, worries:  “If the school’s overcrowded, how is a kid supposed…to get the right amount of help?”

Her concern can be seen in spades in Community Board 14, which represents the Flatbush, Midwood, and eastern Kensington neighborhoods.  Three schools in CB14’s part of school district 22— P.S. 217, 139 and 315— are over-capacity, according to the department of education’s report. In October, the board completed its fiscal year 2013 capital and expense budget and recommended that a new elementary school be built.

“Overcrowding has been a persistent problem…for many, many years…and this has been a recommendation for consecutive budgets” stated Shawn Campbell, the community board’s district manager. “The biggest challenge in meeting this or any other capital need is the constraints on the budget in the City of New York in these difficult financial times.”

“It’s been a problem in Brooklyn and citywide” said Christopher Spinelli, president of Community Education Council District 22, the “budget is degrading year by year.” Recently, the state reduced its contribution to city education by $1.4 billion. There have been thousands of teacher layoffs and a series of school budget cuts.

Schools are having trouble finding room for incoming students. “Principals are having to do more with less. They’re not able to open up additional classes, so… they have to continue to fill a class until it’s at capacity” Spinelli said. “In some cases they wind up going over capacity since you really can’t turn a child away.”

Residents are growing increasingly restless. “We’re getting more complaints now than ever before,” Spinelli said, “because principals are not able to open up more classes and hire more teachers. So we’re definitely seeing more issues with overcrowding.”

Spinelli went to an overcrowded school as a child, and his children are now in the same situation.  “My children have always been in classes that are at the maximum capacity and I don’t think that is an ideal learning situation” he said. “You always want a smaller class size.”

Repeated research shows that class size has a major impact on learning, student-teacher relationships, teaching quality, and overall academic success. In the 1980s, the landmark Tennessee Project STAR study, for example, showed that a class size between 13-17 students, for grades K through 3, resulted in higher test scores. According to the U.S. Department of Education, these results were especially significant for minority children and those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.

Subsequent research also supports the Tennessee findings.  In a study published this year by Switzerland’s University of Teacher Education St. Gallen and the University of London, reducing class sizes by even one student can improve learning. The study also suggested that a class of 17 students or less is ideal.

The city department of education has a set of target class sizes for different elementary school levels— 18 students for Pre-K, 20 for grades K-3, and 28 for grades 4-8. All of these numbers are lower than the city’s previous class size standards, but they are higher than what many researchers think is the best class size for optimal learning.

Deckard’s five-year old daughter is currently enrolled in one of P.S. 139’s kindergarten classes. “I was aware of [the overcrowding] that’s why I didn’t want her to go to that school” she said, but she felt as though she had no choice. She was told to send her daughter to a zone school. Before registering her child, she tried to contact the school board to see if there was any way for her child to enroll someplace else, but she was either shooed away or left without a response. “I just feel like it’s kind of messed up” she said.

Her child’s kindergarten class has about 21 students. Deckard says she was in a kindergarten class about that same size when she was little, but there was one major difference. “I remember when I was in kindergarten I had two teachers” she said.  If the school cannot reduce the class size, she wishes there was at least another teacher in the classroom so that her child could receive more attention and better instruction.

Beth Orchulli, a stay-at-home mother of two, never went to an overcrowded school— but because of P.S. 217 her children now do. Although her son’s pre-k class is a descent size, her second grade son is in a class with about 25 other students.

When her family moved into the neighborhood two years ago, she already presumed that her sons would go to an overcrowded school. “It’s unavoidable unless you can afford private school,” she said.

Nevertheless, she wants change. “I think the children suffer,” she said. “There should be a bigger commitment to building more schools.”

Leonie Haimson, founder and Executive Director of Class Size Matters, is determined to stop overcrowding in New York City public schools. For the past 15 years she has used her organization as a means to inform the public about large class sizes and to push government into using state funding more effectively. “The Department of Education is legally mandated to [reduce] class sizes in all grades and they have not done so,” she said. “Instead they have allowed class sizes to increase.”

Children at the school playground in P.S. 217 (Chika Okaneme/The Brooklyn Ink)

The Contract for Excellence has been providing state funding to the city department of education since 2007. Under contract, the money can only be used for certain purposes, which includes reducing class sizes. However Haimson believes officials are not doing enough.

Since 2002, Mayor Bloomberg has had control of the New York City education system, not the Board of Education. “The city has been neglectful and remiss for many years, and it has gotten much worse under the Bloomberg administration” she said. Mayoral control will stay in effect until 2015.

“Early grades [are] the largest in 11 years” Haimson said, “so [the administration is] violating the law and [is] in essence violating our children’s constitution rights to adequate education.”

Although people are troubled by the current overcrowding situation, the city’s education department does not provide them with much hope. Frank Thomas, a spokesperson from the city department of education, said that overcrowding in CB 14’s part of school district 22 is not severe enough to cause much concern. “We only have so [many] resources to do work with,” he said.

And so after receiving proposals from across the city, the department believes that other parts of New York are in greater need for new schools at the moment. It may be some time before the residents in the CB 14 area see that desired new school.

Bah Black, 15, a young rapper from Bushwick (Hannah Olivennes / The Brooklyn Ink)

A mini-documentary about hip-hop in Brooklyn’s projects.

Brooklyn has been a birthplace for hip-hop since the very beginning. More importantly, its housing developments are some of the most well-known incubators of hip-hop talent in the world. Artists like Jay-Z, Notorious B.I.G., and Mos Def, all found their voice through their childhood in Brooklyn’s projects. We followed children, teenagers and adults and asked them how hip-hop influenced their lives, and how their lives influenced their hip-hop.

A collaboration between Hannah Olivennes from The Brooklyn Ink and Nic Stone of NYC in Focus.

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MORE ON HIP-HOP:

- Where Brooklyn At? Hip-hop’s travelling geographical center. 

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Blidi Stemn and Zenobia Frypher in discussion. Chikaodili Okaneme/ The Brooklyn Ink

In Crown Heights’ M.S. 394, it was time for math in Jean Graham’s  5^th grade class.  On her green chalkboard, she wrote in white chalk: “Today we will continue to practice using data to plot a line graph. We will also interpret data from, and look at how, line graphs can be applied to real world situations.”

Line graphs can often seem too abstract for fifth graders to understand, or even care about.  But if the students can connect a math principle to real life, new concepts such as a line graph might be easier to learn.

Her attempt to make such connections is new, too. Rather than teaching the entire lesson herself, while the children simply watched, Graham had the students form small groups to discuss the math problem and data amongst themselves. They then presented their results to the rest of the class.

The students proved to be very resourceful. One group’s line graph even charted decreasing stock prices to illustrate a market crash. In the end, the students gave themselves a round of applause. Some cheered when the teacher said they would continue their math lesson the next day.

Math education is suffering in American schools as the country has fallen behind most other industrial countries. But this turn of fortune in its popularity, at least in M.S. 394, is the handiwork of Blidi Stemn, a passionate, soft-spoken mathematics education professor at Hofstra University.  Through New York State’s Teacher/Leader Quality Partnerships program, Stemn has been working with teachers at M.S. 394 since October to improve their math skills and teaching techniques.

“What is really good about this,” Stemn said with a Liberian accent, is that “it is [about] in-class professional development…done [regularly], not once a year [or] twice a year. Every week we come together and talk about mathematics.”

For the past six years, Stemn has been going to schools in Long Island and Brooklyn, particularly to those whose students are doing poorly in math. He assesses the teachers’ math education skills and offers them his expertise. “He’s excellent at what he does and has a very solid math mind” said Dr. Anthony Robinson, Assistant Dean and Executive Director of Hofstra’s Center for Educational Access and Success. He “brings a very unique approach to math.”

Before working at M.S. 394, Stemn worked with two Hempstead, Long Island schools for about four years. In one school, only 53% of its fourth graders were passing math at the state level. But after working with one teacher, Stemn said that by the next year 93% of that teacher’s students were passing with far higher math test scores.

“What did you do?!” Stemn remembers the school principal asking in amazement. “It was just helping [the teacher] to understand the mathematics himself,” Stemn replied, “because if you do not know the content, you can’t teach it well.”

Along with one-on-one mentoring of teachers, Stemn helped M.S. 394 create “a community” in which he had teachers join in “a culture of discussion” about how they teach.  Teachers go to each other’s classes and later provide constructive feedback on technique and performance.  Stemn also engages the teachers in group sessions to discuss the fundamentals behind the mathematics they teach.

“The conversation is ongoing about [what they] need to do,” he said. “They find it very valuable…because they haven’t had the opportunity to do that.”

Dr. Blidi Stemn, a professor at Hofstra University. Chikaodili Okaneme/ The Brooklyn Ink

Stemn’s group of ten M.S. 394 teachers is the largest that he has worked with at one school. The teachers vary in their level of teaching experience and math proficiency, but he is seeing progress even in the first few months. Students “need to touch, see, feel and make sense of mathematics” he said, “and I’m seeing that happen.”

Zenobia Frypher, who has over 20 years of teaching experience, noted that Stemn’s influence is shifting the teachers’ views on learning. “Sometimes [teachers] tend to go on and on…rather than delve into the work and have [students] solve the problems,” she said. But teachers are gradually changing their old ways to help enrich the quality of their students’ learning experiences.

“The students enjoy it, but the teachers were a bit timid at first” she said. “As teachers we tend not to like too many different people or strangers coming in the classroom…but I think now people are taking it [as] something positive.”

Stemn hopes to work with M.S. 394 for the next few years. This spring, he also plans to start preparing his research for future publication.

Protestors hold signs at Coney Island march on Wednesday afternoon (Esteban Illades / The Brooklyn Ink)

The coalition was made up of approximately 70 people who braved the wind and cold.

Under the banner of “Budget Cuts Hurt Our Schools”, Mike Schirtzer, the organizer and a History teacher at Leon M. Goldstein High School, said that the march was “a pro-student rally.” Schirtzer said that his school has had to eliminate many after-school programs, advanced placement classes, and just the number of classes in general. “Students have holes in their schedules in the middle of the day, and they don’t get four-years worth of math and science” he said.

Students were the most vocal. Changing the lyrics to an old Twisted Sister song, they sang,  “You can’t cut our budget anymore!”.

One of the singers turned bright red when another student recorded her with her phone.

Jessica Kallo, a 16-year old who attends Goldstein High School, complained in particular about the budget for science and math classes. “Our high school focuses on math and science. It’s absurd that that’s what they’re cutting!” she said.

She was worried that this might damage her application to college.

“We want to raise awareness,” said Kit Wainer, a social studies teacher. “There is a [state] legislature meeting in spring [about the education budget], and Mayor Bloomberg has already announced more budget cuts.”

Mike Schirtzer, a Brooklyn history teacher and protest organizer at Wednesday' s march (Esteban Illades / The Brooklyn Ink)

The march was peaceful and protesters were upbeat. The march started at the corner opposite of Nathan’s restaurant, near the boardwalk, and ended in front of Abraham Lincoln High School, where a small rally was held.

Upon arrival, a small stepladder was brought out and representatives from different groups took turns speaking. Almost all of the protestors wore bright orange stickers on their shirts. “Some cuts don’t heal,” read the stickers. A few students from Lincoln High joined the event.

Howard Schoor, Brooklyn Representative for the United Federation of Teachers, said that the budget for local public schools has been cut 13 percent over the last three years and that about 7,000 teachers in New York City have been laid off. “They say ‘cutback’, we say ‘fight back’,” he shouted through a megaphone. He said that this struggle was part of a larger one, and made a passing reference to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Members of the Transport Workers Union (Chapters 100 and 101) were also present. The representatives from the 101 pledged the support of their 1,500 members to the coalition. Tim Schermerhorn, from Local 100 and a protest veteran, called it “the beginning of a long struggle.”

Kit Wainer, a social studies teacher and the rally's co-organizer (Esteban Illades / The Brooklyn Ink)

The last speaker was Farin Kautz, 23, a student at CUNY’s Kingsborough Community College. Kingsborough teachers and students have been participating in ongoing protests against tuition increases.

“It’s ironic… While you’re getting your budget cut, we’re getting tuition hikes,” Kautz told the crowd.

Speakers in favor of the establishment of Brooklyn’s third Success Academy school argued that it will serve high-needs kids in the neighborhood. Critics complained that it will overcrowd a building that already houses two secondary schools and a special education program. The debate became tense at times, and one man was ejected by police for using inappropriate language.

Read more at GothamSchools.

A heder in Hasidic Williamsburg (Photo: Brian Eha / The Brooklyn Ink)

Imagine you’re a Hasidic Jewish boy of perhaps five years old.

By this time, like other Hasidic boys, you’ve already been attending heder, primary school, for two years. Six days a week you rise early. Maybe you take the bus, if you live in the Hasidic community of Borough Park, or maybe you walk, if you live in Williamsburg and your heder is nearby.

There are no girls in your school. Mandatory sex segregation begins in the classroom. This segregation lay behind the unofficial signs that were posted along Bedford Avenue last month reading: “Precious Jewish daughter: Please move to the side when a man approaches.” Many New Yorkers were appalled.

But they don’t understand that Hasidic education, especially for males, is a world apart from the one most other Americans receive. Hasidic schools like yours focus on instruction in religion and Hasidic codes of conduct. By New York State and federal law, the schools are required to teach certain secular subjects, but those who have gone through the system say it’s questionable whether even this minimum standard is being met.

After morning prayer (tefilah), the rebbe leads you and your classmates through the weekly portion of Torah. In heder, the Torah—the first five books of Jewish scripture—is divided into 52 portions, one per week, and these portions are repeated throughout your school years, always in the same order, the only difference being that the rebbe teaches each passage with increasing sophistication as you grow older.

Instruction is in Yiddish, and you, like other Hasidic children, will grow up speaking Yiddish as your first language. Torah passages are read aloud—first in Hebrew, then in Yiddish.

“Mish oyf,” the rebbe might say to his young charges, “Kapitel dalet, Pusek zayin” (“Open to chapter four, verse seven.”)

Each boy sits at his own desk, and the desks are arranged in the U-shape of the fifth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The rebbe paces the inner arc of this horseshoe holding a cane that he uses like a conductor’s baton, chanting in a sing-song voice to aid the students’ memory.

You and your classmates repeat everything back to him, first in Hebrew, then in Yiddish. If a boy isn’t joining in, the rebbe might rap him smartly with the cane and ask, “Farvus zugsti nisht mit?” (“Why aren’t you saying along?”)

At five years old, you’re already in the third grade of the Hasidic system, but there’s still a long way to go. At 13, you become a man in the eyes of your community and enter yeshiva, secondary school. The religious instruction becomes so intense that many students choose to live in dormitories on campus, even if their families live nearby, in order to maximize their study time. And yet, in a school day that is far longer than the average New York public school student’s, only two hours are set aside for instruction in math, English and other secular subjects.

Few Hasidic men emerge from this education ready to embrace, or even to take part in, a modern society. And those who want to transition into a modern way of life after leaving the faith often find it extraordinarily difficult—not only because they aren’t equipped for most jobs, but also because, by this time, they already have a wife and children. Faced with these challenges, some ex-Hasids turn to entrepreneurialism, others to a precarious double life.

One who has found a way to profit from his old faith, and now makes a business of pulling back the curtain on the world he grew up in, is Jacob Gluck, who runs HasidicWilliamburgTour.com. Gluck was raised Hasidic in Borough Park and went to school in Williamsburg. Now an ex-Hasid, he takes paying customers on a walking tour of Hasidic Williamsburg, pointing out landmarks and explaining the history and customs of the European Jews who settled in Brooklyn after the Second World War. Today’s Hasids are descended from these immigrants who survived the Holocaust.

Ex-Hasid Jacob Gluck offers tours of Hasidic Williamsburg to paying customers (Photo: Brian Eha / The Brooklyn Ink)

“I consider myself a historian,” Gluck says. “I’m not just interested in the way things are, but in the way things came to be.”

A handsome, lively man of 32 with a shaved head and intelligent dark eyes, Gluck is deeply knowledgeable about the Old World shtetl culture that modern Hasidim seek to preserve and extend.

Since renouncing his faith at age 20, Gluck has lived in Flatbush, away from the judging eyes of the Hasidic community.

Yakov Yosef doesn’t have that luxury. A married father of six, Yosef must remain, for the time being, in Williamsburg, and keep his anti-Hasidic sentiments quiet.

“I’m somewhat outcasted, but since I have six children, I have to keep up appearances,” he says. “My wife and I live like roommates.”

Where Gluck has his tours, Yosef’s outlet is writing. He blogs for Unpious, a website for what he calls “Hasidim on the fringe.”

Yosef is a pen name. The penalty for speaking openly and critically with an outsider is severe. If it became known that he had spoken to me, his children would be expelled from school and his wife would be humiliated. Yosef himself would be shunned, and become unable to take part in his children’s lives.

For now he leads a double life, participating in his sons’ mitzvahs and observing the High Holidays while harboring deeply felt heretical thoughts.

On Friday nights, under cover of darkness, he retrieves his car from an underground garage and heads out, casually dressed, and without his kippah, to meet secular friends. That he must do this in secret is a sign of just how antithetical Hasidism is to the modern world.

Yosef still remembers the first movie he watched, at the age of 16 in the backroom of a mom-and-pop video store: Steven Seagal’s Out for Justice. Movies of any kind, like most other forms of entertainment, are forbidden by Hasidic law.

When he was 34, Yosef says, a female friend took him to the mall to buy “outsider clothes” for the first time. At the food court, he ate his first non-kosher meal in public.

Gradually, through exposure to a world outside the narrow confines in which he had always felt awkard, he began first to accept, and then to savor, many elements of modern life.

Hasidim view outsiders as, at best, anathema to their way of life, and, at worst, outright antagonistic to it. But unlike the Amish and many other separatist communities, Hasidic Brooklynites choose to live in the heart of one of the largest cities in the world. Tension and even conflict with city officials and other citizens seems inevitable.

City workers soon took down the Yiddish signs that had been bolted to trees along Bedford Avenue.

Both Gluck and Yosef are critical of Hasidic education for males, the goal of which is to produce Talmudic scholars. Science and history, English-language reading and writing, training in modern technology, even the less savory parts of Scripture—all receive short shrift in heder and yeshiva.

“You bring people into the world and don’t give them the tools of living,” says Yosef.

In their own ways, Gluck and Yosef are proof of life after Hasidism. Forever marked by their education and upbringing, they are nevertheless making a place for themselves in a wider world.

“Once you leave the bubble of the community, you learn the world is not your enemy; the world is not immoral,” Gluck says. “It’s just a beautiful world out there!”

Henry Schoolfield teaches 7th and 8th grade social studies at Salve Regina. (Photo by Olivia B. Waxman / The Brooklyn Ink)

At the beginning of September, Salve Regina Catholic Academy (nursery-8) opened its doors, a brand new Catholic school in East New York that formed from the merger of three struggling schools—St. Rita’s and St. Michael’s in East New York and St. Sylvester’s in City Line. Boasting more than 730 students, it is now the largest Catholic school in the Diocese of Brooklyn (which also includes Queens).

To Alvida Cordoba, 62, the librarian for the 4th to 8th grades, the consolidation of the schools becomes more real as she consolidates the three schools’ book collections, unpacking boxes of books and putting them on new bookshelves.  Her children attended St. Michael’s, whose building on Jerome Street now houses Salve Regina, and she’s been working in the building for 23 years in various volunteer and part-time jobs.

She misses her children’s alma mater. Gingerly, she picks up one volume and flips to the back.  “I have to stamp the books with the new school name, and it’s not St. Michael’s anymore,” she says wistfully.  “I pull out the old cards in the back of each book, and it’s like saying ‘goodbye.’”

Just as Cordoba meticulously integrates the schools’ books, administrators at Salve Regina are working to integrate the three different communities to form an entirely new community and identity.  It’s not an easy task.

St. Rita’s, St. Michael’s, and St. Sylvester’s had to merge because they faced declining enrollments, according to William Geasor, the principal of Salve Regina, who was also the principal of St. Rita’s for 34 years.  He says that four years ago St. Rita’s had about 600 students, St. Michael’s had 450, and St. Sylvester’s had 280.   Last year, St. Rita’s student population dropped to about 450, St. Michael’s to 280, and St. Sylvester’s to 190.  As enrollments fell, tuition increased, making it more difficult for families to afford to send their kids to the schools.

In order to ease the financial burden on current families and encourage enrollment, the administration decided to set Salve Regina’s price tag at $3,600, the same amount as the tuition at St. Rita’s and the lowest rate of the three schools.  Ninety-five percent of children at Salve Regina come from St. Rita’s and St. Michael’s, which were only four blocks apart, while only 30 students come from St. Sylvester’s, which was 15 blocks away.  St. Michael’s also became the logical place for the new school because it had two buildings, both an elementary school and a high school (which closed in 1976), that could fit all of the new students now and in the years to come.

“There were eight schools in this neighborhood six years ago, and by last year, we were down to three,” Geasor says. “Some of the children in the building now have already been in three different schools before this year, so we’re trying to provide stability.”

Since 2005, 28 schools have closed in Brooklyn, according to Stefanie Gutierrez, the press secretary of the Diocese of Brooklyn. Yet this phenomenon is not unique to Brooklyn Catholic schools. Since 2000, elementary school enrollment has dropped nationwide by around 35% in the nation’s 12 urban dioceses, and 1,755 schools merged or closed, according to the National Catholic Educational Association.

Salve Regina Catholic Academy in East New York is now the largest school in the Diocese of Brooklyn. (Photo by Olivia B. Waxman / The Brooklyn Ink)

Declining Catholic school enrollment is the result of the changing demographics of the church, which has created a kind of “perfect storm,” according to Joseph O’Keefe, S.J., a professor at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education who specializes in urban elementary schools.  More traditionally Catholic families—Irish, Italian, Polish communities—have been moving out of cities and into the suburbs.  There has also been an “exodus” of white, affluent Catholics, and an increase in the number of Catholic immigrants and Hispanics, a population that “does not have the wherewithal to afford Catholic school.”  Catholic schools are also more expensive to operate now that they are almost entirely run by lay (non-religious) people, who have to be paid more than nuns who take a vow of poverty.

Since 2008, in light of these demographic changes, the Diocese of Brooklyn has been consolidating the smaller parish elementary schools into larger, regional academies so that schools can meet their overhead costs. The idea is that it is more economical to manage bigger schools than a patchwork of small schools. So far there are nine academies in Brooklyn (17 in the entire Diocese), and the Diocese hopes all parish elementary schools will turn into private Catholic academies by 2017.

“The biggest challenge is building trust and building community among the people,” says Tom Chadzutko, the Superintendent of Schools.

O’Keefe, who has consulted on Catholic school mergers in Boston, emphasizes that simply merging struggling schools is not enough.

“If you take three failing schools and put them together, you get one failing school,” he says. “You want to bring the best of the traditions and culture of the schools that have merged, but you really want to create something new.”

Some innovations can be as simple as school spirit.  Right off the bat, Salve Regina instituted a new uniform as a visual reminder to students that they go to a different school now.  At first glance, one cannot tell who went to St. Rita’s or who went to St. Michael’s in the bustling sea of blue and gray plaid skirts, navy blue pants, and pale blue polo shirts with Salve Regina emblazoned in gold stitching.  “We didn’t want them to bring their self-identity from three different schools and have three different schools present in the building,” Geasor said.

The administration has also integrated nearly all of the classes and after-school activities from the three schools—from St. Rita’s Spanish language program to St. Michael’s robotics club—and added new baseball and basketball teams. Roxanna Elder, 39, Salve Regina’s assistant principal and former assistant principal at St. Rita’s, said the faculty spent the entire summer getting ready for the new year without extra pay; some didn’t even take vacations.

Pooling resources has allowed the school to provide more federally funded special education classes for students struggling in reading and has also given the school the opportunity to purchase new technology like SMART Boards for almost every classroom.  Thanks to donations from Petro Oil, the school will also have a new state-of-the-art science lab, but for now the room is just a graveyard of cardboard boxes filled with textbooks and equipment from the three schools’ science programs.

Some students and teachers are still getting used to how big Salve Regina is.  There are so many new students that the school had to add extra 5th grade and 3rd grade classes last month.

“I’ve gotten lost in Salve Regina a couple of times,” St. Rita’s alum Jsmine Adams, 12, admits bashfully, with a giggle.

Eugenia Colon, 48, a parent of a Salve Regina student, thinks the school feels a little more “crowded” now, but she sees the merger as a necessary evil. “There’s more kids, but the school stays open,” she says.

As the school has grown, so has the faculty’s workload.  Teachers used to have 15 to 20 students in each class, but this year they have about 30 students per class.  “When I taught at St. Michael’s, I saw 60 students a day,” says Henry Schoolfield, 49, who teaches 7th and 8th grade social studies. “Now I see 180 students a day.  The second you hit the front door, it’s like getting on a rollercoaster.”

All of the teachers who worked at the three schools had to apply for jobs at Salve Regina.  According to Elder, the academy’s new board of directors determined how many teachers should be hired. The superintendent’s office interviewed candidates and made recommendations to Geasor, who made the final decisions.  Out of the 42 teachers who taught at the three schools, Salve Regina hired 28 of them.  Of the rest, half of them didn’t make the cut and the other half just didn’t apply for jobs at the new school.  Two out of the three principals are at Salve Regina, including Sister Peggy Merritt, the former principal of St. Michael’s, who stayed on to be the new director of development.  Overall, most of the remaining teachers knew each other going into the new school year from participating in workshops and grading state tests together.

While the administration at Salve Regina has been trying to integrate as many elements of the three schools as possible, some things have had to give—like recess.  Students from St. Michael’s, for instance, used to get half an hour for lunch and half an hour for recess at their old school. Geasor says that recess does not fit into the schedule because the school day is six-and-a-half hours long, and the state requires students to be in class for six hours a day.  He is willing to extend the school day to seven-hours, but he wants to let parents decide.  In the meantime, he encourages teachers to give students 15-20 minute breaks at the end of classes or take them to the gymnasium to blow off some steam.

However, 8th grader Julian Wilson, 13, still feels like he doesn’t have enough time to socialize outside of the classroom.

“I don’t get to see my friends anymore,” he says, “and I can’t go to after-school activities because I have to get home to watch my little brother, so I only have 15 minutes at the beginning of the day to talk to people.”

Other conspicuous signs of the transition are the boxes tucked away in the corners of classrooms, and the extra desks, chairs, and monitors sitting in the hallways.  The dimly lit corridor connecting the gymnasium to the cafeteria is like a ghostly shrine, with photographs of students, teachers, and families from St. Michael’s taped to the white, peeling walls.

“People become very attached to schools, especially Catholic schools because they aren’t just where you go to school, but a lot of your religious formation happens there,” O’Keefe says. “They’re also multi-generational. People have gone to those schools before.  You have to allow people to grieve.”

Schoolfield allows students to vent in his social studies class.  “I’ve let them talk about their feelings whenever the issue of their old schools comes up,” he says. “Most of the kids cried.  All three communities were devastated, and because I’m a teacher, I see the devastation.  A school closing is like asking you to leave your home.”

In the meantime, physical education teacher Casey Seawright, 31, who taught at St. Rita’s for seven years, says the key to making the students feel at home in the new school is getting their names right. And that’s no small feat for someone who teaches all 730-plus students.

“But the minute you know a child’s name, they feel like they’re a part of something, whether they’re from St. Rita’s, St. Michael’s or St. Sylvester’s,” he says.  He looks over his shoulder at the herd of restless 8th graders waiting to start gym class.  “I mean, by Christmas, I should know all of their names. Hopefully.”

The Palestinian bid for U.N. membership was put off by the Security Council, announced today the council president, Portugal’s U.N. ambassador Jose Filipe Moraes Cabral. The Palestinian authority will now have to decide whether to press for a vote it is widely suspected to loose.

 

Children at Beginning With Children Charter School (Gloria Dawson / The Brooklyn Ink)

The quest for statehood began on September 23 after Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian authority, appeared before the General Assembly.

Palestinian hopes were high last month, as Israel agreed to exchange more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for Staff Sgt. Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held for five years. On October 31, Unesco added Palestine to its members, a move that has cost the organization $60 million of its yearly American funding. However, with the United States expected to veto a Palestinian full U.N. membership, and other countries such as France and Britain saying they would abstain from voting, Palestine’s chances for statehood continue to appear slim.

Whatever happens, it is a historic moment in the Middle East. We wondered how the younger generation thinks about it. After decades of fighting, the Middle Eastern conflict is part of contemporary history and has been added to many school curriculums around the world. But in a multi-cultural and multi-faith borough, like Brooklyn, conversation about it is likely to reflect widely varying and passionate points of view. Rather than ask the teachers, we wanted the children’s thoughts.

We decided to ask sixth graders at schools from different faiths to take part in a candid conversation about the conflict. Unfortunately, due to security reasons, we weren’t given access to any 6^th grade class of the 4 Islamic schools we contacted in Brooklyn. We spoke to a Jewish day school, a Christian school, a secular school, and to Muslim students from Brooklyn College. What do they know? How do they know it? And how do they relate to it? Here are four audio slide shows that address some of our questions.

Slide shows produced by Omar Bilal Akhtar, Gloria Dawson, Tracy Jarrett, Emily Judem, Andrew Katz, Ravi Kumar, Xin Hui Lim, Joey Maestas and Hannah Olivennes.

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Students excel at P.S. 172. Esteban illades/The Brooklyn Ink

The doors of P.S. 172 open at 3:05 p.m. The children rush out to meet their parents after a seven-hour school day. Their backpacks are full of books for tomorrow’s homework assignments.  These enthusiastic students are from  the Beacon School of Excellence, one of the top five elementary schools in New York City.

In September, P.S. 172 was the only school in Brooklyn to receive the annual “Blue Ribbon”  award bestowed by the U.S. Department of Education to high performing schools across the country. The New York City Department of Education’s Progress Report for 2011 has given them an “A” grade during the past three years.

This high-achieving school is even more extraordinary because it is located in Sunset Park, a neighborhood in which roughly half the residents are of Hispanic origin and poverty rates are high.

Moreover, the Department of Education reports that Hispanic children have the largest elementary school dropout rate in the city, with 17.6 percent.

In contrast, the other public elementary school in the neighborhood, P.S. 169, suffers from the same problems but is not doing nearly as well as P.S. 172. While P.S. 172 scored a 9 out of 10 in performance on schoolbook.org, P.S. 169 received a 4.

Beacon School belies those grim statistics. The school’s success is the result of a long term effort that has revolutionized its teaching. According to a 1998 DOE profile, the school got rid of its topdown structure and allowed its teachers to design and adapt the curriculum for individual classes.

In addition the school works closely with parents, immediately informing them when their children are failing to meet their goals. “A school support team including a psychologist, a guidance counselor, a social worker, and an educational evaluator interprets the child’s needs to the family,” the DOE states.

Susan Johnson, a grandmother of twin girls, aged 5, argues that P.S. 172 is very  different from other schools she sent her children to. “They are taught to read and enjoy it from early on,” she says. She is particularly fond of the discipline the school instills on its pupils. “They know what they’re supposed to do, and they are taught to follow the rules,” she says. And, the teachers in the school are “very caring.”

About 82 percent of the students enrolled in P.S. 172 are Hispanic. 87 percent qualify for the federal lunch program, which is a figure used to measure poverty rates in the country.

According to insideschools.org, a website that provides information about public schools in New York City, P.S. 172 is not a traditional school because students are the ones who lead class discussions, not teachers.

Parents are involved. The school hosts assemblies on Saturdays and encourages parents to continue their own education, by promoting GED programs, among other things.

There’s a fair amount of work from the students involved as well. Johnson says that her grandchildren leave school with homework everyday.

Students spend about seven hours in school. The day ends at 3:05 p.m., but children who need extra help stay an hour later.

“It’s also very safe,” Johnson adds. “The children are always supervised and there is no reason to worry.”

The school’s environment is reflected in its test scores. The Department of Education reported in  August that the school’s scores in English and Math from grades 3 to 5 are above the state average in all categories.

People move to the neighborhood just for the school. Cat, whose daughter has just started kindergarden this year, says she and her family moved specifically to Sunset Park because of its reputation. “We bought a house four years ago. The house isn’t much. But the school is great,” she says.

Louis Reyes, who has three daughters, has sent them all here. His youngest one says she loves going to school, which is something few kids say in general. “It’s awesome!” he says giddily, embodying his daughter’s enthusiasm.

All three agree that their children are more than prepared for the challenges of middle school upon leaving the Beacon school.

After the children meet their parents at the main entrance, they scamper off in different directions. As a father and his child  cross the street, he asks her in Spanish: “¿Aprendiste las letras?” (“Did you learn the letters?”, meaning the alphabet). The child, excited, replies in English: “Yes, Dad!”