Hoping, and Waiting, for a Bronx School’s Fresh Start to Pay Off
Debra Jones, principal of the Urban Scholars Community School, in a kindergarten classroom last month. “My whole thing is, give it time,” Ms. Jones said of her school’s progress. Ángel Franco/The New York Times
New York City has already closed the elementary school at 1180 Tinton Avenue in the South Bronx once, reopening it with new leadership and a new name, the Urban Scholars Community School.
But its students continue to be drawn from the poorest congressional district in the country, with many living in five nearby homeless shelters. Some staff members keep granola bars on hand, because many of the children do not get enough to eat at home. A third of its students are chronically absent.
And in the 2013-14 school year, only 2 percent of the school’s students passed the state English test, while 4 percent of them passed in math, placing it among the lowest-performing schools in the city.
How do you fix a school like that?
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s answer has been the $400 million School Renewal Program, which seeks to turn around the city’s most struggling schools by adding professional development for the staff and by wrapping students and their families in extensive support systems not typically found in schools.
Announced by Mr. de Blasio in November 2014, the program, which runs for three years, is supposed to transform the 94 schools involved. At Urban Scholars, nearly halfway through Renewal’s span, the school has more resources, but the challenges remain immense. It is difficult to say how much change will come.
“The problem is so huge,” Debra Jones, the principal, said of the challenges of poverty that beat away at her school. “We ask ourselves: Where do we start?”
The centerpiece of the Renewal program involves converting each school into a “community school,” which offers services to students and their families to address issues, like poverty, that originate elsewhere but are brought into the classroom each day.
It stands in stark contrast to the methods preferred by the previous mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg. During his tenure, more than 150 failing schools were shut down and replaced with hundreds of new, smaller institutions.
That is what happened to Public School 198, the school that used to occupy the Urban Scholars building. After years of academic failure, the city announced that it would begin shutting down in 2009. In its place came Urban Scholars, with Ms. Jones, a woman with a crackling sense of humor who grew up in Bronx public housing, as principal.
But while the school leaders were new and the number of students fewer, the problems that children brought to class with them were unchanged.
As a zoned school, Urban Scholars inherited families from the school it replaced. In fact, Ms. Jones said that roughly half of the parents at Urban Hoping, and Waiting, for a Bronx School’s Fresh Start to Pay Off - The New York Times: