Building Community in a Cramped SpaceFebruary 10, 2006 By Kathleen McGrory
At lunchtime, 15-year-old Vivian Quintero and more than 200 classmates pack into a basement with high ceilings and deafening acoustics. Conversations about who is dating whom, the rapper 50 Cent and the New York Yankees echo across the room. But hardly any of the students at Quintero’s South Bronx school are eating lunch.
"We don't have a kitchen at our school, so they have to bring us food from somewhere else," Vivian explains. "But it's disgusting - too disgusting to eat. So most kids buy their food outside of school, or they just don't eat at all."
A kitchen is not all that is missing at Banana Kelly High School. Students also lack access to a gymnasium, science laboratory, computer laboratory, library and auditorium.
Banana Kelly is one of the city’s new small schools, created partly to address the city’s high dropout rate. And despite its shortcomings, Banana Kelly seems to be meeting that goal. More than 85 percent of the students are from low-income families. But last year, less than 10 percent of the students dropped out. And nearly 65 percent of the graduating class enrolled in college.
What accounts for the school’s success?
Studies indicate that many students who drop out of high school blame problems within the schools, such as unfair discipline or poor relationship with teachers. In contrast, administrators and teachers at Banana Kelly appear to have created a good atmosphere.
"This is a great school," Quintero said. "We really get to know the teachers. It is fun, and we're all really close." She added that the teachers try to make the students “feel like a family. You don’t see that at other schools.”
“The classes are small so the teachers make sure that you really understand things, said Jennifer Robles, 16, who wants to be a professional dancer. “And I know almost everybody here. It's comfortable.”
Peter Rodrigues, an English teacher, agrees. “The students develop really close relationships with the faculty and administration. And at bigger schools, you can’t ever change the schedule or do your own projects. Here, everything is so flexible.”
City education officials have created more than 200 small high schools since the early 1990s. Banana Kelly opened in 1997 is one of the older small schools. Twenty-seven small school opened this September and there are plans for even more next year and beyond.
While small schools are hardly a panacea, city Department of Education
officials have noted that the graduation rate at some of the city’s large comprehensive high schools is less than 40 percent. (Overall some put it as high as almost 50 percent.) On the other hand, officials told City Council in 2004, the graduation rates for small schools in those same neighborhoods neared 60 percent. Many of the small schools are too young to have had their first graduating class yet.
Whatever the success these schools have achieved, they could do more to keep students in school, score higher on tests and go on to college at if they had better facilities.
Cindy Maguire, a research assistant at the New York University Center for Education and Social Policy, has spent the past two and a half years studying small schools in New York City. "Many of these schools can't fulfill their missions if they are living in a single hallway without the resources they need," she said.
But Jamie Smarr, special assistant to the deputy chancellor of education, said that, although facilities and resources may not be ideal, they are adequate. "The budget for school buildings is not unlimited," said Smarr. "We have limited resources, and they have to be spread over all five boroughs."
When Banana Kelly first opened, it was housed in a Police Athletic League building near its current location. Teachers complained that the space was inadequate, and in 2004, Banana Kelly moved in with the New School for Arts and Sciences, another small high school.
But despite the move, Banana Kelly falls short of the 2005 Department of Education requirements for a new small-high school.
Banana Kelly principal Joshua Laub declined to comment on the school's shortages. However, experts say that inadequate facilities can harm student performance.
Not eating a good lunch, for example, can cause hunger and even health problems that distract students from their studies, said Tara Ostrowe, a dietician at the Adolescent Health Center at Mt. Sinai Medical Center. "A lot of students don't eat breakfast either, so you've got teenagers who are going the entire day without eating," Ostrowe said.
Margarita Brice, Banana Kelly's parent coordinator, said that parents frequently complain about lunchtime at Banana Kelly, but for a different reason: Students who leave campus to buy lunch often don't return for afternoon classes.
"The parents also complain that they have to be giving the kids $5 a day for lunch so they eat," said Brice. "That's $25 a week. They don't have the money."
A small fitness center with weights and ping-pong tables substitutes for a standard gymnasium. But Quintero said she feels the space squeeze most in biology. The state standardized Regents test includes questions about lab safety, instrumentation and measurement – a challenge for students in the school like Banana Kelly that does not have a lab. “We don't get to dissect anything, and we don't get microscopes or anything like that," Quintero said.
Further complicating the crunch are tensions between Banana Kelly and the New School for the Arts and Sciences. Like Banana Kelly, the New School lacks an auditorium and computer lab. But New School students have two floors of the building instead of one, and they have a science lab.
Last school year, when Banana Kelly moved into the building, there were reportedly some conflicts – mostly verbal -- between students. "Last year, the kids from the New School felt like our students were on their turf," said Rodrigues, the English teacher. "This year, that seems to be settling down."
Students aren't the only ones clashing in the building. Rodrigues said that administrators often "go head-to-head" over the use of shared facilities. In the basement lunchroom, for example, principals must shuffle two schools worth of students in and out without conflicts between the students.
Back in their buildings, teachers and administrators said they try to work around the situation. Guidance counselor Malinda Diaz-Proeve has organized field trips to local museums, hospitals and colleges. "We want students to have the opportunity to get out of this tiny building," she said.
In addition, teachers and administrators have sought outside assistance. New York State Assemblymember Ruben Diaz recently got $50,000 in state money for Banana Kelly to help purchase mobile science laboratories and other equipment. But Paul DelDuca, Diaz's chief of staff, believes that this is a short-term fix for a long-term problem.
"Instead of taking old buildings and dividing them into four small schools, we need to build new, state-of-the-art schools," he said.
When the last bell rings at 3:30 p.m., Quintero maneuvers her way down a stairwell packed with students and exits the school. Outside, the building bears the name of a now defunct elementary school once housed there. "What I'd really like is to see the name Banana Kelly written in big letters on the outside of a building that actually belongs to my school," Quintero said. "Every day, I have to see some other school's name out there. But I'm really proud of my school."

Marketing Health In The South BronxNovember 18, 2005 By Joshua Brustein
Dozens of elementary school students stop off at Olamo Corporation Food Center on their way to and from PS 28 on Arthur Avenue in the South Bronx each day. Omar Castillo, the bodega's owner, makes them bacon in the mornings, and sells them bags of chips and bottles of soda in the afternoons.
This isn’t just kids sneaking junk food; this is what
passes for grocery shopping here. The area around Olamo has less than half
the grocery space per resident than in Manhattan, according to a study by urban
affairs magazine City
Limits (in .pdf format). To fill the gap, residents in
the South Bronx rely on the abundance of bodegas, which tend to specialize
in unhealthy products.
This has contributed to the local problem of obesity. About 27 percent of South Bronx residents are obese, as opposed to 16 percent of residents citywide, contributing to the area’s disproportionately high rates of serious diseases like diabetes. Concerned about the declining health of the neighborhood, a number of local groups have been trying to change the habits of those who buy food in the neighborhood – and of those who sell it.
One afternoon Castillo talked about what was threatening his customers’ health while several young shoppers perused the soft drinks in the store's tight space. "What's healthy is not what's popular," he said in Spanish.
Still, Castillo is one of several storeowners working with local group
Bronx Health REACH to show customers how to eat healthy from local bodegas.
As a promotion, Olamo sells healthy products to volunteers from the group,
who then stand outside and pass them out for free. On this particular afternoon,
two volunteers pass out pretzels and apples they bought inside while giving
health tips to those walking by.
The volunteers quizzed a boy who stopped to inspect what they were offering. When they asked him to give examples of healthy snacks, he quickly recited a list of fruits. But when they asked him what he ate after school, he said chips and soda. They gave him some pretzels, and he went inside to buy a Pepsi to go with them.
Eating healthy isn’t necessarily a choice here, though. Bodegas are the primary place to buy food, and less than a quarter of local stores carry fresh vegetables, according to a survey done by medical students working for Bronx Health Reach. Even fewer carry whole wheat bread, low fat dairy products, or low sodium soup.
Bodega owners are hesitant to stock produce and other healthy, but perishable, items because there is a low profit margin and questionable demand, said Kelly Thompson of City Harvest.
For two years Thompson’s group has been trying to offer such items through a twice-monthly “mobile market” at the Melrose Homes, a nearby housing project. It runs the market with the New York City Housing Authority. Residents of Melrose Homes and several other public housing projects can register with the market and receive 12.5 pounds of fresh produce for each member of their household – free. The market also offers cooking demonstrations, and tips on nutrition and food storage.
The market has turned into a “fair-like atmosphere, a community day,” said Thompson, who is planning the market’s third annual Thanksgiving celebration the day before the holiday. She hopes such events will not only inspire people to eat better, but will also create the market for produce that local bodegas now feel is lacking.
“We’re giving the food away, so we’re not creating a market, but we’re raising the awareness of healthy food,” Thompson said. “We feel like we’re in a good place to plant the seed, create a demand.”
Hilary Rosenstein of Montefiore Medical Center – one of the two volunteers standing outside of Castillo’s store – said that the Bronx Health Hearts Initiative is also working from the other end of the problem, convincing bodegas to carry products like fresh produce and low-fat milk. Until both suppliers and consumers change, she says, residents will continue to complain that they can’t buy healthy food while storeowners will remain convinced that no one is interested.
Rosenstein interrupted her explanation and turned to a mother and daughter who had walked up to the table. They discussed nutrition for several minutes, with the mother seemingly eager to learn– and somewhat knowledgeable already. As Rosenstein handed the girl a snack, she noticed a shopping bag in her hand, and asked what was in it. Shyly, the girl showed her what she was carrying home for dinner: Broccoli.

Testing Students For Success in the South BronxNovember 11, 2005 By Gus Garcia-Roberts
When billionaire financier Carl Icahn decided to start a charter school in the South Bronx, he said that it would focus on great works of arts and literature, and on the basics of the American constitutional system. But what an observer will see the students focusing on day in and day out is standardized tests.
The Icahn School, founded in 2001, serves a population where 94 percent of the children are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced lunch, as opposed to 54 percent citywide. Historically, it has been vastly underserved by the public school system – and just about everything else.
If success is measured by standardized test scores, the four year old Icahn School has already far surpassed the public schools in the area. Only 30 percent of the fourth graders in the surrounding school district passed state reading tests in 2004, while 70 percent of the Icahn School’s fourth graders passed the same test. Remarkably, not a single one of the 216 students at the Icahn School failed that year’s standardized math test.
“This place is a godsend for parents,“ says Richard Santiago, the Icahn School’s director of operations. “Otherwise, if you can’t afford private school tuition, then you have to send your kid to whatever public school is in your neighborhood, and when you live in a area like this, that’s not much of an option.”
Testing begins from a student’s first day at the school, when he or she takes a “pre-test”, to assess each child’s ability and determine whether he or she needs specially targeted assistance. Young students are coached on tips for taking standardized tests.
Part of this is about the school’s survival – “we need good scores to remain open,” said Santiago – but part of it is a choice made by the Icahn School’s administration. The school’s priority is to prepare students to excel on the test that will allow them to go to elite, specialized high schools.
To achieve these results, the Icahn School demands much from its students: the school year is twenty days longer than the Department of Education’s, and every day lasts as long as eight to ten hours. The school’s administration takes pride in its ability to do all this with less public money per student than regular public schools. Santiago attributes this success to the school’s independence from the Department of Education bureaucracy, saying it is simply more efficient than its public counterparts.
The lack of faith in the government-run education is a basic tenet of this school’s philosophy. “I think we need to get education out of the hands of government, away from all the bureaucracy,” said Carl Icahn in 2001. “If society is going to be successful, we’ve got to have free enterprise in everything.”
But Icahn has given the school more than his free enterprise ideology. He financed the construction of a $3 million building to house the school – a cost that can be the biggest hurtle to starting a charter school. The school also gets private funds for some of the programs that set the Icahn School apart. This “targeted money” pays for special consultants such as the school’s unique director of assessment, who is responsible for designing and finding tests and preparations. It also pays for 36 students to attend summer camp in upstate New York each year.
Whether the school’s increased efficiency and access to private funds will help its students reach Bronx Science or Stuyvesant has yet to be seen. Its first fifth grade graduating class won’t be ready for high school until 2010.

Building Baseball StadiumsApril 29, 2005 The Yankees want to build a new baseball stadium to replace their current home. This chart compares the project to similar stadiums built recently in other American cities. (Read More...)

Dumping Ground No Longer?October 15, 2004 By Mohi Kumar
The mayor's new plan for each borough to handle its share of the
nearly 50,000 tons of waste generated in the city each day pleases
members of grass-roots environmental groups based in the South
Bronx, who claim that the old system of trucking garbage into
poorer neighborhoods unjustly created health problems and lowered
the quality of life for residents in those communities.
"The way the mayor looked at how to share the burden of garbage is
an enormous step forward," said Majora Carter, the founder and
executive director of Sustainable South Bronx, a nonprofit organization dedicated to environmental justice.
The Port Morris and Hunts
Point neighborhoods house 15 residential and commercial waste transfer stations
currently in operation under the city's truck-based waste transport
system. In this system, municipal garbage is hauled into
semi-permanent facilities in the South Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens
before being shipped by truck outside the state.
The stations in the South Bronx handle 25 percent of the entire
city's waste stream; by contrast, as of now, Manhattan does not contain any
facilities to manage its garbage.
The concentration of private waste transfer facilities in poor
neighborhoods of the South Bronx is a problem shared by residents
of Greenpoint-Williamsburg, and Southeast Queens, said Gavin
Kearney, a spokesperson for New York Lawyers for Public Interest, a
non-profit civil rights firm that provides technical assistance to
groups such as Sustainable South Bronx.
“This happened to a lot of low-income communities of color,” he
said. “They were more likely to be zoned for manufacturing, and
lacked the political clout and regulatory oversight to stop it.”
Kearney added that other industries of potential environmental
harm, such as power plants and sewage facilities, also moved into
these areas for the same reasons.
However, the mayor's proposal to open two marine waste transfer
stations in Manhattan, one for commercial waste on West 59th Street
and another for residential waste on East 91st Street, is expected
to reduce the amount of waste and associated truck traffic in the
South Bronx. Some of Manhattan's waste will then be shipped from these
stations by barge to out-of-state-landfills.
The mayor’s plan seems to be heavily influenced by recommendations from the
Organization of Waterfront Neighborhoods (OWN), a citywide
grassroots coalition formed seven years ago to advocate against the
concentration of waste transfer stations in poor communities.
Sustainable South Bronx is a member of OWN.
However, Eddie Bautista, the director of community planning for the
New York Lawyers for the Public Interest and the facilitator for
OWN said, “OWN conditionally supports the plan as long as there is
a concurrent commitment to shutting down private land-based
transfer stations. The mayor devotes 59th Street to commercial
waste, but how do we make the private truckers go there to dump?”
"The devil's now in the details," added Kearney. Many waste
transfer stations in the South Bronx handle commercial garbage, an
aspect of municipal waste not directly managed by the city. "We
are pushing for the city to adopt a stronger role in influencing
commercial waste stations," Kearney said.
The mayor would like to "lessen
the impact of truck routes serving transfer stations," according to the summary of his proposed plan, and reduce
"noise, odor and dust conditions at private waste transfer
stations."
For Hunts Point residents, the mayor's attention is long overdue. "It's their garbage, their mess, they
should take care of it," said Lillian Garcia, a 37-year-old mother
of two who has lived in the South Bronx for 12 years. "The minute
I came to Hunts Point, my son developed chronic asthma. Why do they
dump garbage here in the first place? We have kids here. We want
our place clean."
Asthma levels in Port Morris and Hunts Point are three times the city average, according to the city's department of health.
Environmental groups partially attribute this to the high levels of
truck traffic required to transport the garbage in and out of the
South Bronx.
However, residents of Manhattan's Upper East Side, where the mayor
proposes to reopen the East 91st Street marine transfer station,
worry that health problems in the South Bronx will simply be
shifted to their communities. "How does it make sense to replicate
health problems here, in a neighborhood with children and elderly?"
asked Tony Aard, the president of the Gracie Point Community
Council, an organization opposed to the city's plan. "How is it
that the health of a child in one neighborhood is of any more or
less value than the health of a child in another neighborhood?" [See The Garbage Returns To The Upper East Side in the Community Gazette for that neighborhood]
For Carter, this argument misses the point. The
'Not-in-My-Backyard' phenomenon has its place, but "our backyard is
already full," said Carter. "A child in the Bronx is as important
as one in the Upper East Side. We need to share the burdens as
well as the benefits." She added that because of the East 91st
Street transfer station's prominent location, it is likely to be
monitored carefully, mitigating its effect on the population.
For the Bronx, the new plan involves contracting the private
transfer facility owned by Waste Management of NTC located on East
132nd Street near Locust Avenue in Port Morris to consolidate the
Bronx's garbage before sending it by train to landfills in other
states. Port Morris' Harlem River Yard transfer station, located
on East 132nd Street and St. Anne's Avenue is also being considered
for this task.
The Hunt's Point marine transfer station, located on Food Center
Drive near the Terminal Market, will remain closed.
For a citywide overview, go to The Mayor's New Garbage Plan

The South Bronx: Getting to the RiverMarch 10, 2004 By Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke
Even many local residents who look at the abandoned
concrete plant along the Bronx River in the South
Bronx have trouble seeing a park.
Spray-painted concrete blocks lie along a road that
leads to the former factory. Tires and garbage are
strewn along a steep drop with no clear path to the
river. Dilapidated docks jut into the water while the
noise from the elevated subway drowns out any
conversation.
But while it may not be a park yet, it is certainly a
park-in-progress -- and a key part of an effort,
spearheaded largely by local residents, to revitalize
the Bronx River.
The South Bronx: Going to the River.
The effort began in 1974 when residents formed the
Bronx River Restoration Project, Inc. to improve the
condition of the Bronx River. The group removed
debris, including refrigerators, from the banks.
By 2001, the coalition of organizations working on the
cleanup had evolved into the
Bronx River Alliance, a
partnership of over 75 government agencies, local
organizations, schools and environmental groups all
dedicated to creating a greener South Bronx.
The alliance’s central mission is to create a greenway (in pdf format)
that stretches along the Bronx River for 23 miles,
from the Kensico Dam, the river's source in
Westchester, all the way to the East River by the year
2008.
This is no small task. The Bronx has a
disproportionate share of the metropolitan area’s
truck traffic and waste facilities. Many of its parks,
particularly the smaller ones, are dilapidated and
forlorn; a number received failing grades from New
Yorkers for Parks in their survey
of city parks last year. And the South Bronx, site of
the cement plant, has the worst waterfront access of
any waterfront neighborhood in New York City.
The Bronx suffers from high levels of asthma and other
respiratory illnesses that many in the community blame
on the pollution and the lack of parks. And some
attribute the situation to "environmental racism" or
at least the community's lack of political heft.
"If you look at the areas around the river in
Westchester, it really is a totally different
environment," said Annette Williams, program
coordinator for Sustainable South Bronx, one of the organizations that
form the Bronx River Alliance.
The clean-up of the Bronx River is one way that the
organizations seek to improve the Bronx. Many are also
campaigning to close the Sheridan Expressway,
a 1.25-mile stretch of elevated highway that community
residents say is little used and that blocks access to
their waterfront. Tearing down the highway would open
up 28 acres that could be used for waterfront parks,
affordable housing, and other community needs, they
say.
Whatever the fate of the Sheridan Expressway, progress
has been made along the river, with old tires and
other litter now removed, and plants and marine life
being harvested from the area and planted elsewhere
along the river.
Local schoolchildren use the river as an outdoor
classroom to research marine life and to learn boating
skills. Last spring, Sustainable South Bronx launched
the Bronx River
Restoration Development Project, an ecological
apprentice program. Six "river heroes" were chosen
from among 52 applicants to plant trees, shrubs and
other greenery along the river and to remove litter.
The heroes were then eligible for permanent jobs as
stewards of the Bronx River.
This summer, Sustainable South Bronx will sponsor
RiverStage, a series of concerts and events designed
to raise community and city awareness of the Concrete
Plant Park-in-Progress and the revitalization efforts
as a whole. RiverStage will bring musicians and
dancers to the South Bronx and provide a setting for
local vendors. The group believes the river and the
industrial backdrop of the plant could provide a
setting for similar events in the years to come.
Although community groups have provided the impetus
for the overhaul of the Bronx River, the effort has
received a significant amount of government and
private funding. Together, the federal state and local
governments have committed about $70 million to the
clean-up project. Some of that money comes from the
state's Environmental Protection Fund. Various private
organizations have also contributed.
Two hundred years ago, the Bronx River was considered
so pure that politicians wanted to use it as drinking
water for the growing city. Within 100 years, though,
the river had become an open sewer that carried away
the city's waste. While the water will probably never
again be clean enough to drink, residents hope that
the river can once again be an asset.
............................
Related Story:
New York is building new parks and restoring old ones -- at a time of budget cutbacks and staff reductions. Anne Schwartz reports on how this has been possible.

Reclaiming Industrial SitesApril 29, 2003 Baretto Point, a 13-acre brownfield on the East River that was once home to an asphalt factory and a gravel manufacturer, has been earmarked for redevelopment as a waterfront park and pier. Environmental concerns may delay progress -- the site is close to the Hunts Point Water Pollution Control Plant.

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