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[PamintheWedge]

my husband attended the integrated arts & technology open house over the weekend with my daughter and was impressed enough to call me at work to tell me about it

the new principal kevin klein spoke along with 2 national expeditionary learning staff. a former GCCS 6th grade class presentation (the kids are now 10th graders) of rewatering the canals http://www.elschools.org/video.html was presented as an example of what this new school will strive for. a 7-12 school that wants kids to be the work not just do the work has me so excited as i have witnessed what it can do at the elementary level.

this school will also partner with RIT, including overnight campus visits in the summer. it will employ extensive use of technology - tests will be taken on itouch's, tracing student progress will be computerized and accessible on a daily basis. state of the art apple equipment for all students etc...

outward bound team building activities, two major expeditionary projects a year and partnerships with local arts organizations.

the lottery will be drawn early next month, i guess, from the pool of applicants who filled out the 2 page application and attended one of the sessions.

i got a little teary eyed when my husband was describing the community partnerships, the resources, the thought that has gone into making an opportunity of excellence for 75 fortunate 7th grade city students next year. i love the city...

still waiting to hear from SOTA auditions.

pam

[SKuykendall]

I have seriously lost track of what is going on where opening and closing high schools is concerned -- which is kind of shocking to me, since three of the high schools slated to be closed are located in the same building as my daughter's elementary school.

Is this one of the schools that is scheduled to open at Franklin?  Or is it opening at Edison?  Or in yet another building?

I am curious as to how the facility-sharing arrangements will work out where the new schools at Franklin and Edison are concerned.  Will the new schools have their own corridors?  Or will classrooms for the new schools simply be made available as classrooms for the closing schools are taken out of service?

It's different with elementary-school students at Franklin, of course -- but the parents have found that having our own corridors made a huge difference. 

We tried sharing a corridor one year and it was an absolute disaster, simply because when students from the high school behaved in ways that troubled the elementary-school teachers, there was very little the elementary-school teachers and principal could do to solve the problem.  The students causing the problem were the responsibility of someone else -- and, while the elementary-school teachers took a fairly firm line on things like swearing and PDA, the high-school administration didn't consider such behavior to be the sort of blanch-and-gasp transgression it was for the elementary-school teachers. 

(Can you imagine trying to get high-schoolers not to swear, speak roughly, or exhibit physical affection in the hallways?  I mean, the high-school teachers at Franklin are very good about pointing out small children in the hallway and asking the teenagers to rein it in -- but they can't exactly call parents at work and say, "Um, your son used the f-word in the hallway and we would really like you to come in for a conference asap," the way elementary school teachers can.)

It is different with high schoolers -- and, of course, it isn't as terrible for a seventh-grader to hear someone shout the f-word, but different ideas of what the school culture should be and what counts as unacceptable behavior are bound to arise even in high schools, especially when one high school is a much-touted program with enthusiastic staff determined to start out on the right note and the other high school is a much-maligned program with a possibly (and understandably) demoralized staff and student body. 

On a kind of unrelated note, I realize that the district can't simply disband schools that are currently open and serving students -- but it also seems like the next few years might also be a rather troubling experience for the students who remain enrolled in closing schools.  I can't imagine what it would be like to send a child to a program that had already been declared unfit to remain open (or what it would be like to teach in one).

Okay, so this sounds rather grim -- but, just in the way of context, my daughter absolutely loves going to school on the Franklin campus despite (and sometimes because of) the drama that comes with sharing a building.  She likes watching to see what's going on in the other programs and having students from other programs to observe and chat about -- go figure. 

Santosha

[PamintheWedge]

i laughed out loud about your curious and socially stimulated daughter. good for her

this new school is housed at 950 norton st and while i was not at the meeting, apparently the new principal spent oodles of time carefully explaining how there would be no mingling with the HS that is already there. no shared lunch, no shared classrooms, no shared hallways, no shared resource rooms. completely separate. different security doors to go in and out.

i can't imagine being a kid in one of those schools slated for closing either. no thanks. i would ask for a transfer.

i do have a link to an article about NYC and the strife that has occurred due to shared physical buildings since the mayor and company added new schools http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/education/30space.html?_r=1

[Hilary]

(For those, like me, who don't know -- 950 North St. *is* the campus of the artist school formerly known as Franklin. )

[SKuykendall]

Pam, if your child winds up at Franklin, practice looking expressionless now so that you won't cue your child to do nothing but look out the window to see what the students in the other schools are up to so that there will be something really attention-getting to talk about at home.

I am curious as to how the kids will be kept separate -- honestly, while the school is fairly good about keeping high-school students out of the elementary school corridors (the locked glass safety doors are a pretty good barrier), there is no real way to keep the elementary schoolers from passing the high schoolers in the corridors on the way to lunch or assemblies or during fire drills.  The elementary school has a separate entrance as well, but the little kids still run into high schoolers in the stairways.

You probably won't have to teach your daughter not to heckle the students from the other high schools -- thinking you can boss strange teenagers around and provide a running commentary on their behavior is probably something only an eight-year-old (possibly only my eight-year-old) would try.

As far as making my daughter feel comfortable at Franklin, I've found that taking the, "You're so lucky to go to an urban school," line with my daughter has worked fairly well -- I provide her with an age-appropriate summary of why anyone in their right mind would rather go to school in Fame rather than Heathers.

My daughter has honestly never had any trouble with the high-school students -- there are certainly some unpleasant kids there, but it has been my experience that they are vastly outnumbered by kids who look tough but are actually fairly nice young men and women.

Santosha