Half a dozen police cars ring the entrance to the Morris Educational Campus in the Bronx. To enter this venerable Gothic-style building, I have to make my way through a phalanx of policemen and be scanned by a metal detector.
But the show of force doesn’t signal that the high school students inside pose a threat. It is intended to protect the students, who fear getting mugged, or worse, in a high-crime neighborhood situated in the nation’s poorest congressional district.
No one could confuse the Morris Academy for Collaborative Studies, one of four small schools that share this building, with the powerhouse Bronx High School of Science, just five miles away. Some students who arrive at Morris Academy for the ninth grade are reading at the third-grade level. A quarter of the 463 students are classified as special-needs students and a fifth are learning English as a second language. Eighty-seven percent are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.
But compared with demographically similar high schools, Morris Academy is doing well. The rate of chronic absenteeism — students who miss more than 10 percent of school days — dropped to 41.1 percent from 56.5 percent in one year. The graduation rate is 67 percent, an eight percent increase in the past two years, and the school is closing in on the citywide average. In the context of the neighborhood and its cohort of schools, Morris Academy feels like another world.
The main explanation, says the principal, Matthew Mazzaroppi, is that Morris Academy is among the 130 schools that have been converted into “community schools,” a cornerstone initiative in the crusade by Mayor Bill de Blasio and Carmen Fariña, the schools chancellor, to improve public education.
[For more of this story, written by David L. Kirp, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08...im-glasses.html?_r=1]
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