Last summer, with a grant from the United Nations, teenagers at the organization Open Road of New York interviewed neighborhood kids to find out what they thought their communities needed.
This summer they're responding to what they found, and it's not only local teens reaping the benefits: Open Road youth leaders are cleaning up parks, organizing block parties to help make the neighborhoods feel safer, and creating community maps that provide information such as the best parks to bring toddlers, which parks are friendly by day but dangerous at night, and which are good hang-outs for teens. The maps will be distributed in community centers.
The workers at Open Road are some of what experts estimate to be several thousand New York City teenagers who spend all or part of their summers working to change the world, or at least their communities. New York City has a particularly rich history of youth activism and organizing, from the Young Lords and underground high school newspapers of the 1960s to the 2002 youth organizing that helped stop the proposed juvenile jail for Brooklyn.
Many of these teens work specifically on behalf of other youth, like Tiffany Chiu, 17, who worked with the HIV Prevention Organizing Project (or H-POP). Chiu surveyed students to determine whether New York City high schools were providing condoms to students who requested them, which is required by the New York City Board of Education. These mandates, explained Chiu, "are really important, but they're not enforced. A lot of high schools aren't following the rule."
Other activist-minded teens take on projects affecting people of all ages in their communities, but tackle them from a youth angle.
Some New York City teens work on broader social or community issues that aren't youth-specific.
Like most of his family, Murad Awawdeh suffers from asthma. The pollution in Sunset Park, where he lives, was making his and his family's condition worse. Awawdeh wanted to do something about it. So seven years ago, when he was just 13, he joined UPROSE, an organization in Sunset Park that tackles youth justice issues in the community.
He and other youth organizers fought to keep a new power plant from being built on the neighborhood's waterfront. They made a short film about pollution in their neighborhood, called Industrial Takeover, which was shown at the United Nations. They alerted community residents by blanketing Sunset Park with fliers, and they organized rallies and met with elected officials.
Now 19, Awawdeh looks back at satisfaction at a fight that ended in victory for his side; the power plant was not built.
Fighting to keep his neighborhood free from more pollutants "gets me all hyped up," said Awawdeh.
This summer, Arab Women Activists in the Arts and Media (AWAAM) organized over 20 young women to develop radio pieces highlighting the issues they saw affecting Arab women in their community. The radio spots will be broadcast at schools and community centers.
AWAAM is one of eight grantees of the North Star Fund receiving funding this summer to hire young people for community organizing. Sophia Silao, program officer of North Fund, said the initiative helps these community groups acquire extra staff while also widening their outreach to youth. Teen interns provide the organizations a perspective that too often goes missing in community organizing -- the youth point of view. "When you have policies or practices and different services in low-income, people-of-color communities, the voices of young people are often left out," said Silao. "But young people are extremely aware of what goes on in their community and often they don't have a means to really propose solutions to problems that are affecting them."
Partly due to the over one hundred New York City groups working with activist-minded young people, that's slowly changing. The notion that youth should have a voice as well as a means to effect change is becoming increasingly common. In the last ten years, even New York City's Administration for Children's Services has begun several initiatives for teens to share their points of view in foster care, including a youth advisory board. And one aspect of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's plan for education reform is getting "report cards" from public school students on how their schools measure up.
Ultimately, said Silao, bringing youth to the table when discussing issues and policies having an impact on them is an investment in the city's future. It nurtures the next generation of activists and organizers. "Grassroots efforts have historically been really important in creating systemic change, so it's important to provide organizing training and leadership training for young people," she said. "They are the ones who will hopefully take up the baton and move forward and make real change in their communities."
Jennifer Morron also contributed to this article. All three write for magazines published by Youth Communication.
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The basketball courts at PS 92 in Harlem, the handball court at MS 44 on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and the red monkey bars with the spiral slide at PS 41 in Greenwich Village all have been closed to the public this summer. Operated by the Department of Education, these playgrounds are just three of the 746 schoolyards citywide that are padlocked on weekends and during the summer.
“From our point of view, it defies reason when an asset like a playground is sitting idle in a peak playtime for children like weekends and after school,” said Jeffrey Raven, a father of two teenagers and resident of the area around PS 41 in Greenwich Village. He has tried unsuccessfully for years to have the playground open during the summer. "We have a couple of parks that are a bit far away but what is missing is a place where a kid can learn how to ride a bike," Raven said
Now, City Councilmember Gale Brewer of the Upper West Side is campaigning to open schoolyards when school is out of session. She has introduced a resolution in City Council calling for hearings this fall on the feasibility of turning school playgrounds into community recreation centers. Brewer said the 746 playgrounds make up 948 acres of unused public land, an area larger than Central Park. Major barriers to opening the playgrounds are funding, liability and staffing, said Brewer.
The parks department maintains 257 playgrounds adjacent to schools that are open all summer. One way to open the 746 playgrounds that are now closed in the summer would be to have the parks department take over all the schoolyards and maintain them, Brewer said. “There aren’t any problems at the parks department-run school yards,” said Brewer. “The parks department opens and closes the school yards in the evening and it works great.”
The parks department declined to comment on Brewer's suggestion, referring calls to the Department of Education. A spokeswoman for the department, Margie Feinberg, said principals who want their schoolyards available for community use may keep them open on their own.
Tyler Smith, education specialist at Brewer's office, said it is unfair to ask principals to bear the cost of keeping schoolyards open in the summer. “The principals’ key concerns are the students and education,” Smith said. “Public recreation should not be their concern.”
Another model, Brewer said, might be a program of the Trust for Public Land, a non-profit organization. Currently there are 17 schoolyards in the city that were constructed and are operated by the Trust for Public Land through City Spaces, a program aimed at providing recreation areas for city children and communities. The Trust for Public Land works with the education department’s Office of Strategic Planning and private contributors to finance reconstruction of playgrounds for schools with extensive after school programs.
The schoolyards reconstructed through City Spaces stay open for community use after school until dark, on weekends and over the summer. For now, however, the Trust for Public Land has no immediate plans to take part in Brewer’s campaign, in part because of the enormous costs involved.
Brewer said recreation space is badly needed in low-income neighborhoods. “There is a standard in the city where 2.5 acres of open space is supposed to be available for every 1,000 residents but most of the low-income communities don’t even have that,” Brewer said. According to the Department of City Planning, 90 percent of the city’s lowest-income neighborhoods fail to meet that standard.
"For the kids, there is no other ample recreation space unless you count the streets,” said Kareen Muhammad, a child counselor who lives near PS 92 and PS 175 in Harlem, both of which keep their yards open after school but closed when school is not in session. “Sometimes kids will slip through the fence or find a way to get inside just to play basketball,” he added. “When the schoolyard is open, the kids are playing ball and use the place. Now the kids are on the street,” said Muhammad.
This topic page has been adapted from an article that originally appeared on the pages of our partner, Inside Schools, an independent guide to New York City public schools sponsored by Advocates for Children.
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The idea behind Chancellor Joel Klein's latest reorganization of schools is this: Principals -- not superintendents -- should run schools and control the lion's share of the budget. It is a simple idea, but carrying it out is going to be tricky.
The Department of Education has named 331 schools, including 10 charter schools, as empowerment schools. Starting this fall, these schools will not be part of any district or region and will not be supervised by a superintendent, but will operate autonomously. Their principals will be responsible for many functions that had previously been carried out by the districts, such as training teachers, designing special education programs and classes for English language learners, and offering sex and health education. In exchange for assuming this responsibility, the principals will get extra money in their school budgets, perhaps $150,000 a year. Principals will form "networks" of about 20 schools and hire their own "network teams" to provide services now offered by the regional offices. However, the regions will remain responsible for student placement, including middle school choice and gifted and talented programs, even as their budgets are cut.
The empowerment schools represent a wide range of schools. Some -- like Brooklyn Tech, PS 321 in Park Slope, PS 199 on the Upper West Side and PS 183 on the Upper East Side -- are well-established, well-regarded schools with seasoned teachers and administrators and high-achieving children. But others face problems of uneven discipline and low levels of attendance or serve a challenging student body. Some of the principals are inexperienced, and some of the empowerment schools haven't even opened yet. "I think a lot of schools are going to fail miserably," said one regional official who asked not to be identified. "The principals don't know what they don't know."
But Kristen Kane, Klein's chief of staff, is optimistic that the inexperienced principals will get the guidance they need from the new CEO for the empowerment schools, Eric Nadelstern, and from their colleagues. "Eric will be supporting principals and helping them solve problems," Kane said. She cited the success of the “autonomy zone”, the pilot project for the latest initiative, in which several dozen principals were given substantial autonomy. "Some of the less experienced principals have sought out the opportunity to network with more experienced principals," Kane said.
There are a lot of unanswered questions about how the new initiative will work. In the past, parents who had difficulties with their principal could call the regional office and speak to the principal's supervisor, the local instructional superintendent. Now, parents of children in the empowerment schools won't have that option -- because the regions will no longer supervise the schools. "Parents call all the time when they have a conflict with the principal over a suspension, or discipline, or safety," said a regional official who asked not to be identified. "Parents will still come to the district or region and say, 'What do you mean you are not in charge of my school?'"
A Queens mother, speaking on WNYC radio's Brian Lehrer Show July 17, said she was concerned that she would "voice a complaint and it would go nowhere" and that principals in the empowerment schools will "have the opportunity to be autocratic." Responding to the caller, Klein said, "Good principals know how to work well with parents. That will be true regardless" of the organizational structure.
At the July meeting of the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council, Nadelstern invited parents to call or e-mail him directly with their concerns. “I take calls from parents and I respond,” he said.
To pay for this initiative, the education department is cutting $80 million from the budgets of the central education department and its 10 regional offices. Many staffers in the regional offices are wary -- partly because they fear they will lose their jobs and partly because they worry that their responsibilities will remain even as their budgets are slashed. All of the staff members of the regional offices of Student Placement, Youth and Family Support Services -- who handle attendance, drug abuse prevention, homeless family services, suspensions, gifted and talented programs and middle school choice -- have been told they will lose their jobs when those offices close August 18. Many of these employees will be rehired by five new borough offices called the Office of Youth Development, designed to handle guidance services. Others may be rehired by other divisions of the education department, including a new office of student placement that will handle all admissions, from kindergarten through high school.
Department of Education officials acknowledge that many unanswered questions remain but express confidence that they will be resolved by September. “It’s July. We’ll have much more clarity before school starts,” said Liz Sciabarra, chief executive of the Office of Student Enrollment Planning and Operations.
Clara Hemphill, is project director of InsideSchools.org project director and author of “New York City's Best Public Elementary Schools: a Parents' Guide,” “Public Middle Schools: New York City's Best,” and “New York City's Best Public High Schools.” This topic page has been adapted from an article that originally appeared on the pages of our partner, Insideschools.org, an independent guide to New York City public schools sponsored by Advocates for Children.