P.S. 1 Principal Questioned Plan to Send Tribeca Kids to Her School
As parent opposition was mounting over a proposed zoning plan to send some Tribeca kindergartners to P.S. 1 in Chinatown next year, the principal of the school said that she, too, had been wary of the Department of Education proposal. (That plan was rejected Wednesday night, Nov. 16, by the Community Education Council.)
Amy Hom, who has led P.S. 1 for seven years and grew up just half a block away, said there are reasons, both practical and cultural, to doubt the success of the proposal. Under that plan, the school’s catchment area would extend from its location at Henry and Catherine Streets to the east side of West Broadway in Tribeca.
“It’s great that [the DOE] has these grand ideas and I’m not a principal who is not open to change or challenges,” Hom told the Trib in an interview on Tuesday, the day before the CEC rejected the proposal. “However, if you trust me as the principal of a school then you trust that I have lots of questions to ask and I need answers before these things happen. Someone’s going to put all these kids in here and say, ‘Have fun, Amy. Good luck.’”
Hom questioned, for example, the DOE’s appraisal of the available number of classrooms for additional students. In announcing the proposal Nov. 8 to a meeting of the Community Education Council, Elizabeth Rose, the DOE official in charge of planning for Manhattan, said there’s an excess of “10 full-size classrooms” beyond what is needed for the number of students in the building, providing enough space for one extra class per grade.
Those extra rooms, Hom said, include two science rooms, an art room, an assistant principal’s office, a computer lab, three “specialty” rooms (a resource room, reading recovery room and speech room) and a family room where parents gather. Only one room is currently not in use, she said. However, with the addition of new students, she and the DOE agree, the school would officially qualify for “cluster rooms” of art, science and music and the teachers to go with them.
Many newly arrived children from China enter the school after the Chinese New Year, the principal said, so that the current student population does not reflect what it will be later in the year.
Hom said she sympathizes with Tribeca parents’ concerns about a potential cultural divide at her school. Seventy-five percent of her students come from Chinese-speaking families (nearly all the rest are African-American and Hispanic) and 40 percent are newly arrived immigrants. Increasingly, because of the economy, she said, parents work out of state and many children are under the care of non-English speaking grandparents.
“So if you’re talking about a language barrier that was bad before, it’s worse now,” Hom said. “Grandparents come with other traditions so it’s not quite so easy to deal with grandparents as parents.”
The president of the PTA, for example, is the grandmother of a 4th grader and she does not speak English. Hom described PTA meetings as “the longest in the world” because English is translated into Cantonese, then Mandarin and sometimes into Spanish. But not always. Wednesday morning, the guest speaker, Chris Chan from the organization Family Harmony, talked to the PTA about reducing tensions between parents and children. Judging from the audience response, he was very entertaining, but would have been indecipherable to non-Mandarin-speaking parents.
Hom said she also understands parents concerns about traveling from Tribeca to her school. She said a number of Tribeca children have been part of the school’s pre-k program and getting to the school, she said, seemed to be difficult for families, who often arrived late.
“Our attendance rate was much lower in those couple of years when we had those kids from Tribeca,” she said. “It’s a hardship. You’re half a mile away and you’re trucking kids across town here.”
In addition, she said children from Tribeca came to school “with so much more. Their experiences are very different and how they’re being raised is very different and that’s something I can’t control.”
She fears, too, that the disparity in language and other skills could leave many high-scoring Tribeca children feeling unchallenged.
“We do a great job with the at-risk kids, we do a great job with the [English language learner] kids. But we don’t challenge that top group enough.” According to insideschools.org, about half of the children are proficient in reading, and three-fourths are proficient in math.
Hom said the Department of Education is considering the creation of a dual language program for next year’s crop of kindergartners. It would create classes equally divided between native Chinese speaking and native English speaking children and taught half the day in Chinese. (Choosing between Mandarin or Cantonese could be a struggle in itself, Hom noted. ) The principal said she has had good experiences with the program in the past when it was supplemented with after-school and other programs. But she said she does not anticipate that she will receive funding for the extra programs.
“In the past it was popular,” Hom said. “But in the past it came with half-a-million dollars.”
DOE spokesman Frank Thomas confirmed Wednesday afternoon that a dual language program was under consideration and “definitely a possibility” if the zoning were approved. But he said it is too soon to know the nature of the program or its funding.
Hom said that rezoning and all that goes with it would require that the DOE clearly translate its intentions to the parents in her school. One of Hom's fears, which she said she shared with Rose, the DOE official, is that parents would “think the people from Tribeca are trying to push into the community in any way.”
“If this zoning happens,” the principal added, “it has to be a nice merge.”
A RESPONSE:
New Yorkers who care about diversity cannot help but object to the notion that an increased racial and ethnic mix at P.S. 1 is cause for "concerns" New York Appleseed, one of a network of 17 public interest justice centers in the U.S. and Mexico, believes that all schools, including P.S. 1, should strive for maximum diversity, an approach that offers real solutions to the problems currently facing our public schools. New York Appleseed is currently conducting a comprehensive analysis of the benefits of racial and economic diversity in our public schools. Clear evidence demonstrates that diversity boosts academic performance—improving test scores, critical thinking and graduation rates—and provides societal benefits—improving cross-racial understanding and reducing racial prejudice. Diversity also improves preparation for all students in our diverse workforce. Children who attend schools more closely representing the tremendous diversity of our city will be better positioned to thrive and lead not only in the global economy, but in our own country. The benefit is there for all children – regardless of race or ethnicity.
David Tipson, director of New York Appleseed
By Carl Glassman