The Principal’s Office
I loved this cover story in Sunday's NYT Metropolitan section about a great NYC principal. By breaking the mold and doing what's right for kids, he's already in trouble with the bureaucracy, so mark my words he'll be at a top charter school before long – it's what The Blob does over and over again: drives out stars and entrenches nightmares:
WHEN Pedro Santana arrived as principal of Middle School 391 in the South Bronx four years ago, it was, as he likes to put it, "a hot mess." Fights were frequent, windows were slathered over with paint. Only 11 percent of seventh graders had passed their most recent state math tests.
Had Mr. Santana fled, teachers and parents would not have been surprised. Instead, he went shopping. He returned with delicate curtains, a white couch, silver lamps and a slate water fountain, transforming his office into something that looks like a hotel lobby in Miami Beach.
"I'm a closet home decorator," he explained.
Staff members, especially those who had watched the school shut and reopened with new leadership and a new name twice in the 1990s — only to fail again — had other thoughts.
"I thought he was nuts," said Letitia Laberee, 54, the school's coordinator for English as a second language. "I thought, he's just another one. Three years, he's gone."
Mr. Santana is still around, but the school is not the same. Last year, 59 percent of its seventh graders passed the state math test — below the 81 percent who passed citywide, but enough of an improvement to help the school earn an A on its report card. Suspensions have plummeted and attendance has improved, though problems persist: Ninety-five of the school's 253 eighth graders did not graduate this month (summer school may save many).
But these days, sixth-grade boys with good behavior are rewarded with lunch in Mr. Santana's office, where they talk about "guy things," as one of them put it, "like wrestling."
posted by Whitney Tilson at 2:41 PM
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