I heard Bob Cox on WVOX this morning where he highlighted one the reasons he developed the New Rochelle Talk of the Sound. While I may not agree with much of the comments on the blog, I do understand and agree with his generalization that many parents in our school district are stifle, ignored, and simply discouraged from getting involved or much less advocating for their children in some schools. While I do agree that we have many good teachers and caring administrators, there are many occasions when something is wrong and if you complain, there is Fort Apache attitude of How Dare You Complain. In being suggestive or critical of some school misgiving, parents are punished, blacklisted, and in some cases as Mr. Cox, physically prevented from entering our school grounds. Note: Mr. Cox has a mission against the school district and it’s epic! Yet, his saga began by simply advocating for his child, when he was right, and the school district began a costly legal campaign to derail, discourage and silence him. Well, he won and the school district and Taxpayer lost. All he wanted was a simple correction and a well deserved apology.
As a parent advocate for two children, I will, like many parents, get involve in advocating for my children AND their friends. As a former soccer coach and active member in my community, I direct parents to school administrators when they have an issue. Sometimes parents who have had negative experiences in school will come to me to bring up an issue and as a former school board members I did many times. Many of the issues I brought had to do with equity issues or simply racism. Often many members on the Board, not all, would not believe that such things existed in New Rochelle. They refused to believe it, yet often in the end, it turned out to be true. Let me give you some examples of issues that I brought up, which in some cases resulted in change (albeit slow change):
• A couple of years ago, there existed two different set of grading policies for Isaac Young Middles School and Albert Leonard Middle School. Turns out that students at Isaac had to work harder to get an A than students at Albert Leonard. The initial reaction by some members of the Board and the administration was that it was impossible. After a lengthy investigation, I was proven correct and a change was made internally, yet no proof was sent to ALL of the parents. They claimed that they did, but as an Isaac parent, I never received one and neither did many of the parents. The question remains, how many students did this negatively impact? Could it be that this is a reason why so few Isaac students get or got in to Honors and AP classes at the High school? Was an apology ever made – district-wide?
• NRHS has many wonderful Honors and Advance Placement classes. Many of the students who get into them do so based on grades (see above) and recommendations by teachers. Over the last several years, I have been privileged to know many of the students in almost all of the classes (my son has taken almost 1/2 dozen AP classes). If you were to walk into anyone of these classes, any Honors or AP class, you could see that 80 to 90% of the kids were from Albert Leonard or some other private school. In some classes you had one, or maybe two kids from Isaac. To go even further the number of Latino or African-American children in anyone of these classes (not counting Spanish AP or Honors) is even more reprehensible. When challenging the administration with this reality, they produce numbers such as “there was a 50% increase from last year”. Like going from 1 to 2 is satisfactory.
• The high school graduation rate is another issue that I continuously bring up. To the embarrassment of the district, our Latino and African-American students 4-year graduation rate is at around 60%. When you consider that Latino and African-American students comprise over 60% of the NRHS population, roughly 2000 out of 3400. This is worrisome. You think? While the school refuses to acknowledge any progress here, they will read a laundry list of programs, the same ones they’ve had for years now as fixtures by which they believe it is addressing this issue. My contention is that it is not working. Similarly situated schools (with same or higher numbers of Latino students) are doing better – see Port Chester High School. Why don’t we speak with them and see their formula for success. Try something different? Think outside the box. You have in NRHS presumably successful small learning communities, yet when you look at some of them, they are overwhelmingly Latino and constructed with long-time ESL students. On this issue, it bothers me that some of these students have been in ESL classes for 3 or 5 years or longer? Is this the fault of the student or the incompetence of staff that cannot provide positive outcomes?
• Finally, there are many good teachers, hard-working and creative people who work in our district. The fact is that these teachers and staff do their job and succeed because they welcome parents and care deeply about their role in teaching our children. To them my profound gratitude and respect. Then, there are teachers and administrators who are simply in the classroom and allow for disorder to flourish. They cannot manage the classroom. There are teachers, who reach tenure, and simply alter their teaching. It becomes mundane and uninspiring. These teachers are few, but nothing is done. They continue to work without supervision or corrective action – many are not evaluated on a year by year basis. Walk into a social studies classroom in middle school where no textbook is ever read and when they arrive in HS, kids are at a disadvantage. Walk into a language classroom in middle school where a horribly created textbook is used that even teachers encourage their students to leave in their lockers.
As members of this community, we have to applaud the good work that is being done, and we do, but we must also critique and suggest change where necessary. We should not be confronted by our schools administrators as pariahs or people that don’t know. We do know. We want to help. But don’t scold us or send us away when we try to recommend change. New Rochelle schools suffer from equity issues – both in resources and how discipline is handed out; from racism; from drug sellers; from teachers that smoke on its property (saw several at the HS just yesterday). I ask the administration to listen and respond to questions when asked ( at the board meetings specially). It is often claimed that it is tradition to not answer questions at Board meetings; well, slavery use to be tradition also.
Martin Sanchez
