Crayons to Chaos: a uniform what?

A warmup to my second education story, which will now be an unholy marriage of reporting done in August, phone follow-ups through September, and then a PUSH that started with my visit last Friday to an actual meeting of the Z Crew - or some facsimile thereof, since there were a lot of new members, some of whom were only 6th graders -- and ended, for now, with a quite dramatic flourish, in a quite evocative visit yesterday to I.S. 126, which I saw last when it was quite empty. Then, I was able to sort of ambush the principal into giving me a very quick comment for the Father Brady story, butI didn't linger - no one else was there, and I was afraid the security guards would give me the heave-ho.

Today was different. Today I knew where the school was, approached it in the pouring rain with a name in mind - a counselor I wanted to see. I told the guards "I'm here to see Miss Smith," which was true (nevernomind that she didn't at that point know I existed).

"And you're from?"

"Columbia University," I said, leaving out the J-School part; they nodded and gave me a yellow visitors' sticker, and sent me upstairs. I rejoiced silently; whether I found Ms. White or not, I would keep my promise to the student I've been calling Jessie to meet her at 10:37, would walk the halls and see the kids (and see how many wore what's loosely known as a uniform there). I had already won.

And since I was feeling serene, serendipity commenced.

I walked into the door that said "Math Academy," one of the small schools inside the Albert Shanker School -- which was founded in 1925, and still has an exterior that hearkens back to a British boarding school. ( (Knowing that Indian families first moved to Astoria in 1904, I'm suddenly imagining a novel with scenes in this school from the Jazz Age. But I digress.)

"Can I help you?"

"I'm looking for Miss Smith, the counselor."

And there she was, looking nearly young enough to be one of the students - my unintentional gatekeeper at Shanker.

The school's interior still has that urban half-prison look, despite cheery posters and bright colors in places, the class assignments on the bulletin boards bespeak its current ethnic blend: Sheikh. Guzman. Edwards. Majic. Harrison.

The particular bulletin board that holds those names is part-filled with a social studies assignment on the Constitution, one that quotes the 1793 document on one side and adds large-size concepts on the other, like RACIAL DISCRIMINATION. The bottom third is empty, from the force of students hurtling down the halls. "That board was once all my students' work," social studies teacher Vernor Asregadoo told me mournfully. "But they took them all down."

By "they" he meant not his students, but the boys who hurtle down the hallway at top speed the minute the bell rings, half-wrestling and playslapping their buddies as they go. The class change kind of a rock and roll moment at 126, only half-checked by the security guards on each floor, who seem more concerned with getting them into the classrooms than their behavior.

And god knows almost none of the high-spirited kids bothered to wear a blue shirt along with their slouchy loose jeans and hooded sweatshirts.

The blue shirt being the minimal requirement for the Shanker dress code - the focal point, in a way, of my piece.

Because when Father Brady gathered a handful of students, largely from Astoria Homes, to develop "young leaders," out of their long list of complaints about 126 came one central beef: the "mandatory" uniform, ignored by most, grounds for criticism by teachers and administrators. And as I said in the earlier Father Brady piece, the Z Crew organized and eventually confronted the principal about it last June, achieving a partial victory that fell far short of their ultimate goal - to get rid of the requirement entirely - but made some steps toward consistency.

Rose Carmelo is a mirror image of Bree Sanders: slim, paler skin and unusual, luminescent eyes, hair straight as that of a swimsuit model. She dismissed Scott's claim of powerlessness, when I talked to her on Monday: "I think there should be actual punishments" for not wearing the uniform, she said. ""I know they can't expel us, but there's detention, there are things they can do."

Rose was a self-admitted bad girl before she joined the Z Crew. "I was hanging out too much outside," she said. She lives on 8th Street, right at the edge of Astoria Homes. "I know it wasn't good for me."

It was Rose who told me about Julie Smith (not her real name, which she asked not be used), the counselor I asked for at the front door of Shanker. A slender woman who looks barely out of high school herself though she's 40 years old, Smith is a certified substance abuse counselor. Not that that's all she does here: she does all kinds of counseling. "They tell me everything," she said with a shy smile.

Smith also runs group sessions where kids can share strategies and emotions on a range of issues.
"Problems at home, problems with relationships," she said. "One kid is having X trouble with his mom, and another one can go yeah, that was happening in my house, and this is what I did. They help one another."

Smith didn't know anything at all about the Z Crew, which seems so far to still be a well-kept secret at school.

She met Rose right when she started at Shanker in May, and has watched her grow in confidence in that short time. Summer tutoring has helped, Smith said.

"You mean the girl I had to cover up that time?" asked a teacher's aide, a solid woman in a pale blue polo shirt, referring to Rose's habit of wearing spaghetti straps in the summer.

She and Smith swapped information about how a knot of Rose's friends had been broken up, split into separate academies to stop them wasting time socializing.

"It's working better?"

"Seems to be, though it's early to tell."

The aide (I -ouch! - didnt get her name) remembered about the meeting between the Z crew and the principal. "It was cute how they did it," she said. "How they set a meeting, and came here with that minister." She gestured toward her neck, to indicate a collar.

Asked about the uniform controversy, both women had a lot to say - and were joined by Rosalyn Henderson the parent coordinator, a large voluble woman who also wore a school-supplied polo shirt. She said that when parents resist the uniform, she explains it as similar to that of a police officer, or a firefighter.

"I tell them. this is their job now," she says. "If they were a doctor, a firefighter, a business executive, they would have to wear what was necessary for that profession." The school offers discount coupons and a list of acceptable gear: any blue shirt with a collar is acceptable, even a polo shirt that doesn't have the school name on it, as hers does. (Staff are encouraged to wear it 2-3 days a week.)

Henderson also works to remind parents, she said, that they can tell their kids what to do. "Sometimes you just have to let them get in touch with their power, too."

I asked both of them about other schools, and learned that in other parts of the city, there are neighborhood schools with far stricter uniform requirements - and higher compliance. In nearby I.S. 141 has similar struggles with its uniorm requirement, but not at I.S. 145, the Joseph Pulitzer School (!) in Jackson Heights. "They wear ties! They have the creased pants, the jacket, the whole deal," said Smith.

"And they have 80% compliance," said Henderson. The difference, she said, is parents.

Right now, about 40 percent of students are wearing the uniform on any one day. The new measures announced by Scott in the fall are helping a little, according to both students and staff: for each day they wear it, students receive one "Shanker dollar," and must have 100 such dollars if they want to go on school trips or attend special events like the prom.

Henderson added that teachers are pushing it in their classes."Mr. X, the vocal music teacher? I looked into his classroom yesterday, and it was a sea of blue," she said. "It warmed my heart."

Asregadoo, the social studies teacher on the 4th floor, said that students who wear the uniform also concentrate better and are quieter - they remember they're in school, he said. "I wear it, and I am using incentives," he said.

Students in his class receive points for wearing the blue, he said, "and I have told them there will be a prize at the end of the year." Asked if he knows yet what the prize will be, the former geography professor just smiled.

"I will keep my word," he said.

Both Henderson and Smith expressed astonishment, though, that the kids in the Z-Crew would have attached themselves to the issue of the uniform. Most of them don't wear it, said Smith, and "besides, they have a lot more problems they could be dealing with instead."

"Yeah," said Henderson. "I mean - these are kids who have some real problems." No kidding, when you're talking about kids in the projects.

Which is, of course, part of Brady's point - start small with something you can impact. But when I mentioned that to Smith, as we walked up to her office on the fourth floor, she turned it back to the student's personal behavior.

"They need to be more respectful of adults," she said. "The way they talk, the way they dress, the way they present themselves."

I begin to see a little of how the kids don't feel respected either.

When we got to her office, Bree was there; we waved at each other, and agreed to meet later. I went off to stalk the halls, which meant at first peeking into classrooms and looking for blue (my eye said 30 percent, a little lower than Henderson's estimate - closer to Asredagoo's). I lived through the class bell, knowing that I was just a tree the kids could ignore, and met Asredagoo, who took care to make sure I knew he wasn't a history teacher. "I was a geographer originally," he said, "and we always start with information about where events took place."

On all the bulletin boards, and many of the classroom, there were explicit reference to the 4-point scoring scale used by the mandatory "America's Choice" curriculum. The specific criteria varied depending on the subject, but each point on the scale had its 1 2 3 4 carefully delineated, with specific signs of accomplishment. "4: Uses complex sentences to convey well-thought out points."

The sort of thing we talked a lot about in comp college teaching, but this wholesale merchandising of a commercially blessed hierarchy made me blanch.

The librarian at Shanker agreed with me.

Her library is where my last piece of real serendipity kicked in.

I'd noticed a sign that said "Book Fair, Room 304." When the halls quieted again and I had another half-hour before I was to meet Gabrielle, I thought: maybe the librarian will let me sit down for a minute.

As it turned out, I had hit the library on a free period. And the librarian, a slight and cheerful Filipina with a droll smile, was more than happy to talk to me. I dont have time to write down everything she said; I'll recap some of it if I go, as I think I might, back there in 2 weeks to be part of her Ramadan afternoons. (Being comfortable with Islam from her home country. she offers a quiet, safe welcome space for them to spend their lunch hour.) But she said about the 1-4 scale everywhere, "it's terrible. You have kids pointing to each other and saying numbers."

When I met up with Gabrielle, it turned out it was just for a minute: foolish me, to think she was like me at her age, when going off campus for lunch was an option. And on my way out, I took the wrong staircase and ended up exiting via the cafeteria, where I saw Gabrielle's sister Jessie as I was escorted out by a security guard.

To the extent that the uniform thing - which my uncle Joe, the 40-year veteran and longtime middle school principal, calls a "distraction" from what's really needed - is seen as part and parcel of that system, I bet it doesn't have a chance.

Which is the kind of editorializing I can't use in the article, which I need to go write NOW.