Lunch at 9:21, and Students Are the Sardines
Ohanian Comment: Surely this answer to the crisis will make students feel better. Teachers too. It sounds like Chicago all over again: Create some show schools and to hell with the rest of them.
"They are growing pains, and we need to do it better," said Michele Cahill, Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein's senior counselor for education policy. "This is a transition year."
John F. Kennedy High School, a sprawling eight-story building in the Bronx, has 4,590 students this year, 1,200 more than last. Lunch starts at 9:21 a.m., and all three of the cavernous cafeterias are packed until it ends more than five hours later.
"When the bell rings in this school, there is not an inch on any floor where you can walk," said the principal, Anthony Rotunno. "It's a mass of humanity moving from one place to another."
At a time when city education officials are moving aggressively to create small high schools, most of New York's 30 or so biggest high schools are at or over their limits.
In these schools, classes are being held in libraries, conference rooms and even a principal's office. Hundreds, union officials say, exceed the limit of 34 students. To cope, schools are stretching their days from dawn until after dusk, a remedy that keeps some afternoon students from going out for certain sports or holding their usual after-school jobs. And when the bells ring between classes, the competition for space in hallways and stairwells raises the level of tension.
City officials say most of the problem has to do with a 7,000-student surge in the incoming ninth-grade population and a longstanding need for more high school space.
But principals say the abundance of freshmen has been compounded by the phasing out of several large failing high schools and the creation of new small ones, some of which have taken root inside the very same crowded schools.
A small additional factor is the impact of a new federal law that allows students to transfer from schools deemed failing.
Department of Education officials say that while that may be the case, the large schools' headaches are in part a result of efforts to improve the system over all.
"They are growing pains, and we need to do it better," said Michele Cahill, Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein's senior counselor for education policy. "This is a transition year."
Ms. Cahill said a new office set up last month to handle enrollment and student placement issues would work to improve things in the future. "We obviously think this is important, and we want to address it," she said.
Nonetheless, critics say the surge in ninth graders was predictable and should have been addressed. They say this year is going to be among the most painful in recent memory for high schools citywide that have more than 3,000 students — small cities to begin with.
"This is a principal example of when you don't learn from people who have an understanding of the facts on the ground," said Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, the teachers' union. "The big high schools really got shortchanged in this process."
For principals, it is a time of frustration and improvisation. For students, in many cases, disappointment.
At DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, which has 4,600 students, 700 more than last year, the principal has given up her office for the first three periods of the day so that Latin and special education classes can be held there.
At Fort Hamilton High School in Brooklyn, which has four overlapping sessions for the first time in recent memory, the principal herself is out in the street trying to move along the 1,000 students released at 4:15 p.m., half an hour after the police officer assigned to the school has gone home.
At Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx, which has 3,700 students, about 300 more than last year and 500 more than the year before, officials scrapped plans for overlapping sessions and took the drastic step of splitting the school into two separate shifts.
When the shifts at Columbus change, around lunchtime, the scene on Astor Avenue is a disorienting mix of older students hopping into cars with throbbing music or gleefully plotting their afternoons, and baby-faced ones trudging through the crowds to line up at the metal detectors.
Most upperclassmen go to school from 7:05 a.m. until 12:21 p.m., while most freshmen attend from 12:30 p.m. until 5:46 p.m.
"One train is leaving, and the other train is coming," the principal, Lisa Maffei-Fuentes, said one recent afternoon as she watched the freshmen place their schoolbags on an X-ray machine and trickle inside. "That's just the feeling."
Jacqueline Benel, 14, a freshman, said she had always pictured herself playing a sport in high school and had chosen Columbus because she heard it had a decent volleyball team. But when she saw her schedule, she realized volleyball would have to wait.
By the time she gets out of class, practice will be ending, or over. In the winter it will be dark, which worries her mother.
Steven Ramsaroop, 15, another freshman, tried to get an after-school job at Dr. Jay's, a clothing store on East Fordham Road.
"They said, `Sorry, but if you got out a little earlier,' " Steven said.
Gerald Garfin, the school's former principal and now a consultant there, said the decision to split the school day had been painful.
"You don't want to have two different schools," he said. "Everything that makes a school a whole body is destroyed."
But with the new Columbus students and a total of 500 other students enrolled in three small schools located in the building, there was little choice.
So Ms. Maffei-Fuentes and her staff members have made do. Tutoring is available on Saturdays for freshmen who are in school during after-school tutoring hours. Junior varsity teams practice in the morning. Instead of one monthly faculty meeting and another monthly meeting for educators in each department, there are two of each, because teachers also come and go in shifts. Security cameras have been installed at the doors as a precaution for students dismissed after dark.
School overcrowding is not new in New York. In the 1960's and 70's, enrollment mushroomed.
But that was before schools had metal detectors, and when the sort of violence that made them necessary was less of an issue. In any event, it is hardly a time educators wanted to return to.
For some large schools, the space relinquished to the new, smaller schools in their buildings has become the final straw.
Kennedy was built to accommodate 3,644 students. This year, the 4,590 Kennedy students share space with some 300 students from two small schools in the building.
Mr. Rotunno said he supports creating small schools, but "the question I have is, Where do you put them?"
"I think the powers that be are trying to make sure that the small schools are successful," he said. "It's not that they're neglecting the large schools, but they're depending on the principals of large schools to be very creative and to work harder than we've ever had to work before. We're asked at times to do more with less — budgetarily, facilities, rooms, personnel. I go home at nighttime and I am just exhausted."
Union officials who report overcrowded classes say the city is obligated to whittle them down, but this could take until next semester.
At all big schools, the total student population is only part of the story. At James Madison High School, in Brooklyn, there are 4,422 students this year, up from 4,307 last year. But the freshman class is 1,500 strong, up from 1,100.
The large crop of freshmen causes additional strains, because underperforming ninth graders must, under the chancellor's school reform plan, be taught longer sessions of reading and math, generally with fewer students per class.
Unlike some of his colleagues, Madison's principal, Joseph A. Gogliormella, said he does not believe that the size of the school's population in itself is an obstacle.
"The biggest problem is space," he said. "I believe that students can achieve the highest standards in a program that is solid, regardless of size."
Space is not a new problem at Madison, which has been growing for a while. Several years ago, the auditorium balcony was enclosed to create five oddly shaped rooms. At first, they were used mostly for meetings, and for administrators to store their files. Now, they are classrooms.
One is used by Brenda Fluet's conflict resolution class, which trains students to be peer mediators. And more crowding means more conflicts to mediate.
"The space is killing us," Ms. Fluet said during a brief break between classes. "Anytime you have larger numbers, the more you have conflicts. The more you have in the halls, the more you have people bumping into one another."
To ease overcrowding, there are quadruple sessions, meaning four overlapping school days. They run from 7:30 a.m. until 4:36 p.m.
Even so, at least one period a day this year, two classes at once are held in the library. One recent morning, a history class sat on one side of the library discussing the causes of the American Revolution. A few bookshelves away, an English class discussed examples of foreshadowing in "The Scarlet Letter."
Shana Arroyo, 16, says she is often late for her fourth-period class because the stairwell is so crowded.
"It's like rush hour on the highway," she said, as she stood outside her massive brick school. Then she turned on her heels and, with two friends, headed to McDonald's. The cafeteria, they explained, was unappetizingly crammed.
— Elissa Gootman
Lunch at 9:21, and Students Are the Sardines
New York Times
2003-10-14
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/14/nyregion/14CROW.html?tntemail1
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