Crayons to Chaos: z crew part two

While I'm up, here's that second ed story. I actually did most of the actual writing, including the mandatory pre-blog, yesterday: 12 hours in this dayum chair.

-----------

“Shut up! I’m trying to watch the movie!”

The call came from Guillermo, the curly-haired teenager closest to the TV, to the noisiest of the dozen middle-school kids next to him.

The room, like many church basements, was dark and made darker by the wood of donated furniture. On the walls, Biblical images shared space with framed posters of traditional African art. The kitchen area rattled with the sound of popcorn popping, adding to the noise made by boisterous sixth-graders. And the noise was drowning out Samuel L. Jackson.

The youth group, called The Z Crew. was watching the movie Coach, for lessons in leadership, though the popcorn made it challenging.

Since late last year, the Z Crew has been an invisible but real force in their local school, the Albert Shanker School of the Visual and Performing Arts. Founded last year under the auspices of Father Edmund L. Brady, six members of the team succeeded, last year, in changing the way their school handles its policies on school uniforms.

This partial victory forced the students to grow and change, before they asked their school to do the same.

The exterior of I.S. 126, which was founded in 1925, still echoes the grand public buildings of the era, though its interior has that urban half-prison look so common in public schools, despite cheery posters and bright colors in places.

Even back then, in 1925, Shanker was a school for immigrants, with new Italian and Irish families sharing Astoria with the first Korean and Indian arrivals. Now, student work stapled to the bulletin boards bespeaks the current ethnic blend of the school’s 800 students: Sheikh. Guzman. Edwards. Majic. Harrison. This part of Astoria often hosts new immigrants first, before they depart for the comfier environs of Maspeth or Jackson Heights or the suburbs: 175 students in 2004 were officially “English Language Learners.”

These immigrants study side by side with inhabitants of the area’s poorest neighborhoods, including three public housing units in the area. In 2005 80 percent of students here qualified for free lunch, and the school was designated “in need of improvement” due to flattening test scores. And in 2004, after a close vote, a dress code – known as “the uniform” - became mandatory.

School uniforms have popped up more and more in New York City schools since the mid-1990s, when President Clinton included the idea in his 1996 State of the Union address. The New York Board of Education doesn’t track how many of its schools have instituted the uniform, let alone how many students actually wear it; locally both elementary schools that feed Shanker have the requirement, as does one of the other two district middle schools. Nowhere do a majority of students wear it, unlike in neighboring Jackson Heights, where 80 percent of the students at the Joseph Pulitzer School, I.S. 145, wear a complete uniform, with ties and creases.

At Shanker, the uniform was introduced around the same time as the new uniform curriculum, “America’s Choice” TM. Teachers and “the parents who showed up at the meeting voted it in” said Rosalyn Henderson, the school’s parent coordinator. The requirement is far less exacting than in Jackson Heights: a simple blue shirt with a collar.

Henderson backs the uniform as a way to stop the wardrobe wars among students, as well as students showing up wearing pajamas, see-through tank tops, and other “distracting” attire. “They concentrate better,” she said.

According to Henderson, Shanker has about 40 percent of their students in uniform, though a visit last week showed more like 30-35 of students wearing the required blue shirt, with a collar. As a neighborhood school, they can’t mandate it, or expel students who don’t wear it, she said.

“I tell parents that ‘student’ is the child’s job, and just like a doctor or a police officer or a firefighter, there is a required uniform,” she said.

It’s that 70-30 split that drove the students on the Z Team crazy, and why they organized around it. “Either drop the requirement entirely,” said Gabrielle Sanders, one of the group’s original leaders, “or make everyone wear it. No exceptions.”

That was the demand the Z Crew brought to Shanker’s administration, with partial success. That success, which has so far left both sides unsatisfied, took nearly a year of team-building to achieve – and showed a lot about life at Shanker in the process.

Rose says she’s changed a lot since the group started. "I was kind of a bad girl. I was hanging out too much outside," she said. She lives on 8th Street, right at the edge of the Astoria Homes housing projects. "I know it wasn't good for me." Now, along with Gabrielle, she’s one of the group’s core members.

Guillermo, a handsome 15-year-old with curly hair and a smile that he keeps trying to suppress, shrugs when asked how he got involved. “I don’t usually go to church, but one day I came here with a friend…and then I kept coming,” he said. Even a spate of absenteeism, a combination of “hanging with the wrong crowd” and what sounds like depression -“I just didn’t feel like waking up” - didn’t stop him from coming entirely.

Brady, who’d been working with parents on these issues for years, characterizes the Z Crew as an experiment. “It was difficult at first,” he said gently, “to get them to focus. But I think we have been successful in helping them think differently about themselves.”

At the very first meeting, he said, he asked everyone in the room to say something positive about themselves.

“There was total silence,” Brady said.

Part of the problem may be a school system that explicitly rates them along a scale of 1-4. The walls at Shanker feature explicit illustrations of the school’s educational targets in each subject, imported directly from the Board of Education’s three-year-old uniform curriculum, “America’s Choice.” Laid out with the precision of a businessman’s PowerPoint plan, each illustration uses a 1-4 scale, with 4 at the top. "4: Uses complex sentences to convey well-thought out points."

Members of the Z Crew, interviewed for this story, used numbers to describe how they, or friends were doing. “I’m a 2 in x and a 3 in y,” they say – language that worries many educators, including the librarian at Shanker, Rosa Pasione.

“You have children thinking of themselves as ones and twos. It’s terrible,” said Pasione.

Self-respect, then, came before talking about school, and where they might actually be able to change something. The group then had a lot of ideas: cleaner bathrooms, food in the cafeteria. But the one thing they all agreed on was the uniform.

After more training sessions, the group appointed Rose chairperson of their committee. They practiced what to say. When kids in the practice sessions had side conversations, Rose would grow stern: “I’ve had enough of you.”

And they made an appointment with the principal, Dr. Candice Scott.

At the meeting, according to Brady and team members (Dr. Scott didn’t return repeated phone calls last week), Scott pointed out the non-wearers each in turn: “What are you doing here? Why don’t you concentrate on your studies?” And when Rose and Jason, the timekeeper, noted that they had come to the end of their allotted time, Scott waved her hand, they say, and continued to speak.

“She was disrespectful!” each team member said in turn, in interviews. “She didn’t show any respect.” Certainly they didn’t expect any changes in policy.

However, when the new school year started, Bree called: “We just got a flyer about the uniforms!” And over the next few weeks, a number of strong incentives were added. For each day wearing the uniform, student receive an already-established coupon called a “Shanker Dollar,” good for games and snacks: and only those who have accrued 100 such points will be allowed to go on the class trip or, for 8th graders, the prom.

These measures seem to already be having an effect, said parent coordinator Henderson. “I looked into the vocal music class,” she said, “and there was a sea of blue.” And social studies teacher Verna Asregadoo says he has built in a series of “incentives” to get his students to wear the blue.

“Students receive points for wearing it,” 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.

To Gabrielle, these new rules are evidence that the Z-Crew’s efforts worked, and she’s anxious to try new challenges, though she’s not sure yet what they are.

To Rose, the bargain’s still not met: a lot of kids will just choose not to go on the trips, she said.

“I think there should be some kind of punishment,” she said. “I know you can’t expel us – but there’s detention, there’s stuff you can do.”

Asked if she’s interested in taking the fight to the district level, Rose gives a slow smile. “If I can be chair again,” she said, then allowed that Gabrielle was also well spoken enough for the job.

These aren’t the kind of thoughts that she, who’s just now getting serious about school, ever had before the Z Crew. She wants to see the group thrive, she says, until it’s well known for years to come.

“I want people to know we changed something,” she said. “That we made a difference.”

END