Tag Archive | "Bronx"

Protesters refuse to give up on Columbus High School

Protesters refuse to give up on Columbus High School

By Clara Martinez Turco

Mary Conway-Spiegel, founder of Partnership for Student Advocacy, asked the DOE to reconsider the conversion of Columbus High School as a charter (Photo Credit: Clara Martinez Turco)

Dozens of teachers and students of Christopher Columbus High School gathered on the steps of City Hall Tuesday night to oppose the Panel for Educational Policy’s decision to close the school. They were joined by several current and past public officials.

“It is critically important for Columbus High School to stay alive and to keeps its doors open,” said former New York Attorney General and former Bronx Borough President Robert Abrams while calling the Department of Education to reevaluate its decision.

The group also called authorities to reconsider an alternate plan to convert Columbus into a charter high school, a plan that was rejected in September by the State Education Department. Under the proposal, submitted by principal Lisa Fuentes in August, the school administration would take control and redesign the curriculum to better serve the needs of the community.

“We in the Bronx, more than in any other place, are impacted by schools that the Department of Education says they are failing,” said City Council Member and Columbus alumni James Vacca. Columbus, along with nine other schools in the Bronx, are set to phase out in September because of low performance in the past four years.

“The Department of Education has to look in the mirror… they have an opportunity to save a school whose tradition in the Pelham Parkway community and in the Bronx is without equal,” said Vacca. “Give us another look, we are worth saving and we want you  to save us.”

Representatives of the United Federation of Teachers, State Senator Jeffrey D. Klein and the Partnership for Student Advocacy group also expressed their support to the charter conversion plan.

As several students took the podium to oppose the school’s closure, 17-year-old senior Wendy Valladares said Columbus has always supported its students. “Many of us come from other countries, and Columbus has always welcomed us, even if we came in the middle of the school year,” she said.

According to DOE’s statistics, 69 percent of the 1,466 students who attended the school between 2008-2009 come from families whose yearly income is lower than $28,665. At least 20 percent of the students have limited English proficiency.

Columbus will be replaced by Bronxdale High School, which will open its doors in September. Although the new school is expected to serve the same community, it will be smaller and will only take 450 students.

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Benchmarks of the Bronx

Benchmarks of the Bronx

We researched  the numbers on the borough and found that the Bronx continues to have the highest unemployment rate in New York.  It is the youngest borough in the city with one out of five residents under the age of 18.  But educational attainment is still a problem.  Only 2 of 10 Bronxites have a college degree, compared with 3 of 10 Brooklyners and 6 of 10 Manhattan residents.

Click on the buttons above to see statistics on education, age groups, employment and the time it takes to get to work.

compiled by Manuel Rueda, Ethan Frogget, Mehroz Baig and Yiting Sun

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With his new school, a Bronx pediatrician looks for another way to keep kids healthy

There are two Richard Izquierdos that Bronx locals recognize. One man, Richard Izquierdo Arroyo, made headlines last year when he was charged with embezzling more than $100,000 from a non-profit low-income housing organization. The other, Richard Izquierdo, known as the “Doc,” is a man who walks with a cane and often plays with his iPhone. He is a pediatrician who founded two health centers in the borough and is now hoping to heal a new generation with The Dr. Richard Izquierdo Health & Science Charter School that opened this fall.

With that resume, Izquierdo–the doctor–doesn’t worry that Bronx residents will confuse him with the other Izquierdo.

Richard Izquierdo was nicknamed Doc because he’s been a pediatrician in the Bronx since 1962, with now-famous patients like U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Richard Carmona, Bronx Borough President Rubén Díaz Jr., and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Trained at the University of Madrid Medical School and the University of Lausanne Medical School in Switzerland, Izquierdo founded a Hunts Point-based bilingual public health center, Urban Health Plan (UHP), now run by his daughter, Paloma Hernandez, and his private clinic, Multi Medic Physician Services, run by his son, Richard. He has chaired the local Community Board and has won many recognition awards from Bronx organizations.

He recently turned 81 and still goes to friends’ homes to perform minor procedures like applying butterfly closures or giving injections, but what he’s most excited about is his new job as chairman of the Dr. Richard Izquierdo Health & Science Charter School in Morrisania. “I live from dream to dream, mountaintop to mountaintop,” said Izquierdo. “I’m a salesman. I sell dreams and then make them come true.”

After the Board of Education denied two requests to open the school because the health and science theme had to be more integrated into the curriculum, Izquierdo teamed up with John Xavier, who wanted to start his own health care school. Xavier gave up that plan and is now the principal of the school, which received a start-up grant from the Walton Family Foundation.

“The school wouldn’t be what it is without him,” said Xavier. “It’s a long, complicated name for a school but every word in that name is essential to what we’re doing. The more I know Izquierdo, the more important it is to me that this school becomes his legacy.”

The 100 sixth grade students (according to Izquierdo, there were a few more enrolled at the beginning that ended up not showing up or moved out) are each given an iPad (which they keep at the school), chess and fencing classes, and instruction on capoeira, the Brazilian no-contact martial art. Starting in January, the students will have to build a science project of vertical plants to study how photosynthesis works, which Izquierdo hopes will help educate them to care about their environment. In keeping with the medical theme, students must wear scrubs (“I don’t do things in a small way,” said Izquierdo). Their science classes run for 90 minutes as opposed to the typical 45 so the students can have an accelerated science instruction that will more readily prepare them to pursue further education or find employment. They will be certified as Emergency Medical Technicians by the time they graduate and, if the school is successful in its mission, their chances of landing a job will be higher than most in the Bronx, which has a daunting 12.5 percent unemployment rate, the highest in the New York metropolitan area.

Not long after school started, Izquierdo chatted with 11-year old Shailoh Cervantes, a student who addressed the school at orientation and who hopes to become a doctor one day. Izquierdo reminded Cervantes of what he said during orientation:

“There are three important things: One, that we were going to give you an education so that you could make a living,” said Izquierdo. ”The second was to be proud of who you are, of your name; and the last one was to make this place a better world to live in and to help other people. Do you remember that?”

“Yeah, I remember that,” said Cervantes. “I think that what you said should help us throughout our lives so that we can have a better life. My dream is to become a famous doctor, that people would remember my name for helping a lot of other people.”

The school received a grant from the Charter School Center, a non-profit organization that helps start charter schools, to hire an award-winning documentary filmmaker, Antonio Ferrera, to record the students as they develop throughout the year. The administration’s hope is that the school can then look back and observe their work objectively and learn from their mistakes. “Nobody’s paying attention to the South Bronx but Izquierdo is making sure there’s a new generation of children that are paying attention to it,” said Ferrera.

Izquierdo wants to develop programs in first aid and health literacy, and try out different curricula to see if an increase in exercise classes will result in higher performance and weight loss. He wants to battle the Bronx’s obesity problem (47 percent of kids are overweight) starting with these students.

“We let the students know what’s expected of them and what they can expect from us,” said Izquierdo. “I call it the CPR of relationships: Consistent, Predictable and Reliable. Cardio Pulmonary Resuscitation. CPR.”

Izquierdo has a strip of white mustache cut in a way that appears to pay homage to his Puerto Rican heritage–a perfectly straight and trimmed line. Though his family is Puerto Rican, Izquierdo was raised in New York City. At 14, he used to sneak into the city’s hottest night clubs because he already had a little bit of this mustache–just enough that he would get away with it–and so he got to know many Latin legends like Noro Morales and Machito. His phrases are interspersed with Spanish sayings like, “Dios los cría y ellos se juntan” (“God creates them and they unite”) and he loves typical Puerto Rican dishes such as rice and beans and plantains. He claims that his salsa moves are still so good that a couple of months before the Urban Health Plan’s annual Christmas party, “The young ladies would say, ‘I want to be on your card.’ ”

“He’s not just always been a medical doctor,” said Jessie Harris, a Bronx Community Board member and book distributor who has known him for 25 years. “He’s also a community doctor. He’s been one man I’ve known whose had goals and reached them–medically, socially and academically.”

Izquierdo’s medical legacy lives on: his daughter and son have taken over the management of the health care businesses he started and he hopes the Health & Science Charter School will help young Bronxites follow in his steps. But Izquierdo is already working on his next dream as a “community doctor.” He’s planning to buy what used to be his father’s bodega and convert it into a green grocery store with health education classes and a salad bar offering hearty meals.

It’s all part of his longevity strategy, he said: “I’m bribing God because if I’m busy with projects, he can’t take me away.”

Posted in Bronx Beats, Bronx Life, Bronx Neighborhoods, Education, Front Page, Southern BronxComments (0)

Norwood jeweler keeping the shine, even in hard times

Keeping the shine, Even in hard times from Connie Preti on Vimeo.

Allan Freilich who presides over the 70-year old jewelry store in Norwood, makes a case for the power of a family business during hard times

Posted in Bronx Neighborhoods, Money, MultimediaComments (0)

Urban slaughterhouses on the rise

Lamb Arriving At a Vivero in the South Bronx. Photo: Zach Schonbrun

Lambs arriving at a vivero in the South Bronx. Photo: Zach Schonbrun

One afternoon in early October, a 16-wheeled tractor-trailer held up traffic along Jerome Avenue in the South Bronx while it backed into an open garage bay. Passersby paused to gaze at the truck’s cargo. Through narrow slats in the trailer, dozens of goats and sheep stuck out their noses, sniffing their last seconds of sunshine before disappearing into the garage.

The truck had traveled from outside Harrisburg, Penn., one of its biweekly trips carrying animals delivered to the vivero, a live butcher shop, sandwiched between two auto body shops and across the street from a gas station. Above the garage bay, a colorful sign blares “Live Poultry!” with cartoonish images of roosters, ducks and goats.

This is “New York Live Poultry,” one in a vast and growing network of over a dozen urban slaughterhouses in the Bronx where customers can choose their dinner from a cage and have the animal slaughtered and butchered within minutes. These viveros are wedged all across the borough — along busy pedestrian avenues, nestled underneath railroad tracks, next to furniture stores, or across from playgrounds.

Once a niche business catering to a distinct segment of the population, viveros are evolving into a dynamic — if not unsettling — staple of everyday Bronx life, capitalizing on the ethnic diversity of a borough that is nearly 30 percent foreign born.

According to the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets, 17 viveros are registered in the Bronx, among 83 total citywide. Some have been in business since the early 1990s. More recently, however, live poultry shops have sprung up with added frequency — thanks in part to the borough’s loose zoning restrictions, lack of supermarket competition and its rapidly growing number of Muslim Arabs and Africans who prefer their meat be killed live in accordance with halal practices. The rapid spread has helped to heighten tension with surrounding business owners. Some wonder how wise it is to butcher animals so near to crowded city streets.

“I don’t ever need my chicken that fresh,” said Bronx city councilwoman Helen Diane Foster. “But people swear by it.”

The Arab population in the city, most of whom are Muslim, has grown by nearly 40 percent since 1990, according to a report by the city’s commission on human rights in 2003. More than 3,100 Arabs currently live in the Bronx, while the African population has more than doubled in the last two decades, to 60,000, many of whom are also Muslim and eat only halal meat products.

The majority of the viveros’ clientele are immigrants, and they frequent the shops for freshly butchered meat at a lower cost than the supermarket.. The prices, at less than $2 a pound in most places compare favorably with $2.50 per pound for a breast of chicken at local supermarkets.  Signs and menus are often written in Spanish, and many have images of mosques or Muslim symbols adorning the walls.

“We have all kinds of people coming here,” said Abdul Nahshel, the 18-year-old manager of Cross Bronx Live on Jerome Avenue. “Africans, Latins, even people from Michigan and Ohio.”

Nahshel said cultural preferences even play out with individual orders. Africans often buy older chickens to make soup from the tougher meat. Dominicans prefer Guinea fowl for roasting. Guyanese favor ducks for curry.

“Arab guys don’t buy from the supermarkets,” said Sah Mohmad, manager at Saba Live Poultry on the Grand Concourse, who added that 80 percent of his customers are either Arab or African.

Saba’s live food selection included turkeys, quails, rabbits, pigeons, sheep, goats, even calves — not atypical of an open-air market in the Middle East or Africa. For many Bronx immigrants, the viveros are a last pure vestige of home.

“I think it’s cultural,” said Foster. “Because of the large Dominican and West African population we have, it’s just really cultural.”

* * *

At about 6 p.m. each weeknight along Webster Avenue in Morrisania, workers at the local vivero drag plastic garbage bins packed with discarded animal parts onto the sidewalk.

A special garbage truck that specializes in hauling away such parts will be around shortly to collect the refuse. Until then, however, the stench of rotting meat chokes the neighborhood.

The vivero, Webster Live Chicken, sits snugly in the center of a bustling commercial district. A large furniture store is its neighbor to the right, a Dunkin’ Donuts to the left. Commuters standing at the bus stop on the nearby corner are subjected to wretched odors each evening.

Though no formal complaints have been made to Community District 3, a small petition was circulated by the owner of a liquor store around the corner, demanding the vivero cease its disposal practices.

Still, their popularity spreads, the locations of these slaughterhouses, often in residential and commercial areas, have led to occasional tension with the surrounding community. For neighboring businesses, the smell is enough to raise objections.

“It’s rotten, the smell is awful,” said Ramon Perez, owner of Olympic Cleaners, a dry cleaners around the corner from the vivero. “They put (the bins) outside and the heat makes it smell awful.”

Several women working in the cleaners shook their heads when describing the odor that often seeps through the wall the two stores share.

“They’re burning hair,” Perez said. “Almost everyday I have to go in there and tell them to stop burning.”

The manager of the Webster Avenue vivero declined comment.

A furniture store manager on the Grand Concourse boarded up the hallway leading to the entrance of the store to block some of the smell from an adjacent vivero and occasionally shoos away fugitive chickens from wandering inside.

“I have problems on many levels — just personally it kind of grosses me out,” Foster said. “But surprisingly enough, I have not heard or received any complaints about them.”

* * *

Cross Bronx Live manager Nahshel scoffed when asked if he hears objections from people in the community. “It’s chickens, everybody in the world eats chicken,” he said. “They’re probably against the slaughtering part but they’re not against eating it.”

Most viveros are characterized by a ramshackle appearance: corrugated iron, warped window signs, dusty fans, plastic windows. Inside, the floors are usually concrete, wet with feathers and entrails that clog the drains.

The screeching of Guinea fowl and persistent clucking of hens drowns out conversation between customers and can often be heard from outside the store. Yet, it is the smell that overwhelms the most. A pungent, soggy odor of blood is overlaid by the barnyard scent of tightly packed farm animals.

Despite their appearance, the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets, the body that regulates these businesses, said that they are inspected at least four times per year and that each store must be given two separate licenses to practice: one to ensure the caged animals are healthy, the other regulated processing practices. Furthermore, since 2003, the outbreak of the Avian influenza virus, stores are forced to shut down for a day four times per year to clean and disinfect their entire facilities.

“We’re very familiar with the live bird markets,” a spokesperson for the Department said. “These stores would not be open if there wasn’t a demand for fresh poultry. We want to make sure they’re done in the cleanest, safest way possible.”

Though concerns have been raised in the past about issues with overcrowding and unsanitary conditions, the Department said, it has not needed to shut down a store in several years.

Some of these stores, like one owned by Musa Samreen on Third Avenue, have been around for decades and have faced the same strict regulations by state inspectors. Samreen, who opened his first store in 1989 and at one point ran three at a time, has voiced his concern that the number of stores has spread out of control.

He has witnessed copycat enterprises pop up throughout the borough, and, as he looked around his own near empty shop, he expressed disdain for how other shop owners have run their businesses with less care and attention to hygiene. Awkward placement in once blighted and now increasingly residential areas has taken its toll on his 21-year-old business, which he has filled with flat screen televisions and a seated waiting area. He foresees similar consequences for others.

“We don’t do 10 percent of the business we did before,” said Samreen, who came to New York from Jerusalem in 1981. “This used to be an industrial area and now it is becoming residential. The new people don’t shop here.”

* * *

On a clear Sunday afternoon, just as nearby churches began to empty, vans pulled up to the curb in front of a vivero underneath a train trestle as a cycle of drivers double park, run inside, and within 10 minutes reemerge with a blue plastic bag filled with chicken meat.

“I like buying fresh chickens; I don’t like frozen ones,” said Victor Reyes who came all the way from Shelton, Conn., for chicken that morning. “It’s organic, you know? You can pick the one you want.”

Outside the shop, a 10-year-old boy named Angel waited for his mother to finish collecting her weekly allowance of two whole chickens. The smell of the store bothered him, so he chose to sit patiently in the cool October air.

“If it was me, I would throw all those animals back into nature,” he said.

Posted in Bronx Neighborhoods, Southern BronxComments (0)

Last center standing

Inside the Morris Heights Birthing Pavilion, women give birth naturally. Photos courtesy of Morris Heights.

The Morris Heights Birthing Pavilion is one of the last few places in New York City where women have a real chance to labor naturally. Photos: Courtesy of Morris Heights Health Center

It was 9 a.m., on a cold November Monday, and the Morris Heights birthing center—one of only two free-standing clinics left in New York City—was buzzing.

Inside, three women were in the throes of labor, each in a private suite with a queen-size bed and home-like touches, including quilts, fluffy pillows, and cabinets.

As their births proceeded, two certified midwives shuttled back and forth, slipping behind spearmint-colored doors. They checked heart rates every half an hour, suggested position changes to alleviate pain, and helped the women in and out of their Jacuzzi tubs.

When the day was done, three healthy babies were born.

The scene seems timeless, and perhaps unremarkable. But in New York City, where the rate of births by Ceasarean section rose by 42 percent between 1998 and 2007, giving birth without medical intervention is increasingly rare. The Morris Heights Women’s Health and Birthing Pavilion is now an endangered species.

“Women’s labors can slow down when they get to the hospital, because they don’t feel particularly safe,” said Jennifer Jagger, a midwife who has worked part-time at the Bronx center for the past two years. “When they get to the hospital—boom!—it’s about what the hospital needs.”

There are currently just under 200 freestanding birth centers in the United States, centers not attached to a hospital that offer a homelike environment.  These are staffed by midwives who help low-risk women deliver naturally, free from medical interventions like inducement, Caesarian sections, or epidurals. Supporters of the natural-birth movement believe it is a better experience both physically and emotionally for mother and child.

Of the 175 some birthing centers in this country, a significant percentage are located in the suburbs. Jagger said she often tells her Bronx patients they’re getting a service that’s normally available only in wealthier, non-urban areas.

“There’s some truth to that,” admitted Ronnie Lichtman, chair of the Midwifery Education Program at the Downstate Medical Center in New York City. “In general, middle class, educated women are more aware of the options available to them and more assertive in seeking them out.”

But the irony is that in wealthier pockets of New York City, birthing centers have closed up shop over the years due, Lichtman said, to a variety of factors—budget shortfalls, management problems, and a medical approach that has made birthing a sickness, rather than a natural process.

Last year, a nonprofit group attempted to raise funds for an independent health and birthing center in Midtown Manhattan, near Macy’s.

The group had secured much of its funding and had put together a high-profile board of directors that included Ricki Lake, the talk show host turned-natural birthing advocate who, thanks to her 2008 pro-natural birth documentary “The Business of Being Born,” has become the poster mom for midwife-assisted labor.

But with the recession, Lichtman said the new center’s efforts were “stymied.” Investors dropped out and the center never opened. And several established centers have faltered as well.

In 2003, the Elizabeth Seaton Birthing Center—which was associated with St. Vincent’s hospital and was this country’s first birthing center—closed along with the hospital. Last September, Bellevue Hospital shuttered its birthing center as well.

The closing of these centers prompted New York City Council’s Committees on Health and Women’s Issues to host a joint oversight hearing on the status of birthing options in New York City earlier this fall.

Advocates who testified in the hearing argued that birth centers are key in helping to lower the cesarean section rate. Patients in natural centers are not hooked up to fetal monitoring machines, which frees them up to move around. Proponents of this approach say it gives women a better chance at laboring naturally, as it uses gravity to help the baby navigate the pelvis.

Low-risk mothers whose babies were delivered by certified professional midwives had significantly lower rates of Caesarean surgery—4 percent—than those delivered in hospitals—19 percent,  said Farrah Diaz-Tello, a lawyer with the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, citing a recent study.

Currently, only three birthing centers remain in New York City—the in-hospital center at St. Luke’s Roosevelt, the Brooklyn Birthing Center, and Morris Heights. The former is the sole facility that caters directly to low-income women, which it does by accepting Medicaid and helping those who don’t have insurance to get it.

“The only time we won’t accept a patient is if someone starts their prenatal care really late—our cut off is after seven months,” said Susan Billinghurst, a clinical manager at the center. “Otherwise, we accept anyone here.”

Indeed, the difficulty isn’t turning patients away, but it’s in attracting the attention of pregnant moms in the first place. 

“One of the biggest challenges is trying to find the time and help them learn and understand what a birth center is and how it works,” said Kristin Paul, midwife. “Many of them come here without necessarily being aware of what the potential benefits to an out-of-hospital setting are.”

To achieve that goal, the center conducts classes for new patients about the benefits of a non-hospital birth—more support, more time to labor naturally, and a judicial use of technology.

Jagger, the part-time midwife, added that there are certain immigrant populations in the neighborhood that seek out the center because laboring naturally is customary for them culturally.

“I’m thinking in particular of Mexican immigrant women,” she said. “There are a lot of them in this neighborhood and they tend to labor naturally out of habit—out of custom. They do it extremely well.”

But for all of that effort, deliveries still represent only a small percent of what the pavilion’s business. It also offers full-spectrum gynecological and women’s health care.

Indeed, of the 2,000 or so prenatal clients that visit the facility every year, Billinghurst estimates that 70 percent are not candidates for the birthing center. Only low-risk women are approved for a center delivery, which eliminates anyone with medical conditions like high blood pressure, obesity, and diabetes—conditions that are rampant in the South Bronx.

Of the remaining 30 percent of clients who come in for prenatal care, only about 60 to 100 actually end up delivering in the birthing center every year.  Some are unable to because of restrictions the center imposes. For example, a woman who plans to birth at the center, but fails to go into active labor within 12 hours of her water breaking is transferred to a hospital, as is a woman who goes two weeks past her due date.

But other women simply opt not to have a birthing center birth, choosing instead to deliver at Bronx Lebanon Hospital, Central Bronx, or one of the other nearby hospitals.

“It’s not easy to get women to be confident that they don’t need an epidural,” Paul explained, “or to be OK with their choice when everyone around them is going into the hospital to give birth.”

Because of the relatively low number of babies delivered, the center relies heavily on revenue generated from other services, like general obstetrics and gynelocgical care to stay afloat. Billinghurst said that some salaries at the center are covered by federal and state grants, but that the bulk of the money comes from billing patients or insurance. There is no set fee for services; the staff works with patients and insurance companies to charge rates according to what they can afford.

And the center also benefits from the fact that non-invasive births are relatively low cost.

In testimony from the September City Council hearing, Diaz-Tello, the National Advocates for Pregnant Women lawyer, cited a 2005 study that found that the national average hospital charge for childbirth ranged from $7,000 to $16,000, whereas a birth center delivery was about $1,600.

But that is true of all birthing centers, and yet Morris Heights is one of the few that thrives.

Billinghurst said that the real reason why the center has continued to succeed where so many others have failed is that it has been in the neighborhood “forever” and has built up a real trust. Women whose mothers, sisters, cousins or friends delivered in the center know they can go there and have the experience that they want, in a private comfortable room instead of in a shared room in a hospital.

“I recently had the privilege of delivering the baby of a 20-year-old first-time mom who was born at the center herself,” said Jagger. “There’s a community here that has been here for a long time.”

Posted in Bronx Life, Bronx Neighborhoods, Health, Southern BronxComments (0)

The Art of Lyrics

The Art of Lyrics is a monthly free styling event
at The Point, a non-profit cultural organization based in Hunts Point.
Watch this video to see how it’s keeping hip-hop alive in the Bronx, where it all began.


Video by Elettra Fiumi and David Alexander

Posted in Bronx Beats, Bronx Life, Bronx Neighborhoods, Culture, Multimedia, Southern BronxComments (1)

Turning up the tech at a Kingsbridge school

William Tsang, MOUSE Squad Coordinator at In-Tech Academy, works with students. Photo: courtesy Susan Schwartz.

William Tsang, MOUSE Squad Coordinator at In-Tech Academy, works with students. Photo: courtesy Susan Schwartz.

At In-Tech Academy in Kingsbridge, the school IT staff is hard at work most weekday afternoons, managing tech support requests like setting up networks, connecting computers to the Internet, and computer troubleshooting.  Staff members like Nick and Jonathan also standby to help teachers with laptop carts, SMART Boards, and videoconferencing.

Nothing too out of the ordinary here, except that Nick’s in the 7th grade, and Jonathan’s in the 11th.

These In-Tech students are part of their school’s MOUSE Squad, a program that trains and supports students in managing leading-edge technical support help desks in their schools, improving the ability to use technology to enhance learning, while also providing a hands-on learning experience for students.

“I have a big interest in technology,” said Nick, now in his second year on the squad.  “It makes me feel important because people rely on my expertise.”

“When I am fixing computers, I feel good,” Jonathan added.  “It’s like the feeling you get when you make a shot in basketball.”

MOUSE is a youth development organization that provides the funds to help underserved students to provide tech support and leadership in their schools.  Since 1997, New York City-based MOUSE has grown to serve 260 schools across four states.  The organization has shown solid results across key indicators of student success, like academic performance and attendance, and helps save schools an average of $19,000 a year on technology support costs.

In-Tech Academy was one of the first schools to get a MOUSE Squad, in 2001.  Today, it is one of 100 New York City schools that will benefit from a landmark $1.1 million grant awarded to the program as part of the NYC Connected Learning Initiative, from the U.S. Department of Commerce Broadband Technology Opportunities Program.

NYC Connected Learning aims to increase the use of broadband technology and enhance educational outcomes for public school students in communities across the city with the highest need.  As part of this program, more than 18,000 middle school students and their families are receiving desktop computers, educational software, training and broadband access at home.

The school’s principal, Yvette Allen listed the many benefits she sees from the federal technology grant.  “NYCL fulfills our vision for providing computers in the classroom,” she said, along with “technology at home, teachers integrating technology in the curriculum with parents involved in the use of technology and student learning.”

It’s this comprehensive approach to technology education – teaching through hands on experience and school and reinforcing lessons learned via access at home – that Allen and her colleagues hope will propel In-Tech’s students to digitally-savvy, successful futures.

Posted in Bronx Beats, Bronx Blog, EducationComments (0)

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