'Every Second Counts' at This School

By JULIA LEVY, Staff Reporter of the Sun
September 7, 2004

A yellow school bus pulls up to the Excellence Charter School of Bedford-Stuyvesant at 7:22 a.m., and a long line of little boys dressed in navy blue slacks, white shirts, and navy blue ties jump to the curb.

Standing curbside is Jabali Sawicki, the new principal of New York City's first all-boys charter school, who firmly shakes each tiny hand.

Once inside, Mr. Sawicki doesn't disappear into his office, which looks across the East River to the Manhattan skyline.

He looks on as the children do their "bright work" - quick projects that start their days - and eat breakfast.

He leads "morning meeting," greeting the school's 88 kindergartners and first-graders with a booming "Good morning, Excellence Charter," as the director of community health and fitness, Karenga Arifu, and a kindergarten teacher, Caleb Miller, beat the djembe drums.

He invites two boys who are having trouble adapting to classroom rules into his office, and watches them color cupcakes in a coloring book.

"Between now and 2020 is a very long road," Mr. Sawicki, 26, said, referring to the year when the first-graders will graduate from college. "We have a long way to go and every second counts."

Mr. Sawicki grew up in San Francisco, in a community much like the neighborhoods where his new students live. His father left his family when he was 2 years old, but his mother, a mail carrier, made sure her son was exposed to positive role models - and that he was given as many educational opportunities as possible.

In seventh grade, she sent him to Stuart Hall for Boys, a single-sex Catholic school in San Francisco. He said leaving his immediate neighborhood was a shock.

"My friends from my neighborhood weren't into education, weren't into working hard," he said, sitting in his new office on Friday morning. "There was definitely a push to be cool, to be tough, to over-emphasize sports, to be the class clown...to act as if I was too cool to learn."

He was torn between the expectations of his friends and society and those of his demanding mother.

Sometime in the eighth grade, he said, his mother won out when he realized he had fun at school and that he could put his natural competitiveness toward earning the best grades in literature class. After middle school, he went onto one of San Francisco's most prestigious high schools, University High School. From there, he went off to Oberlin College.

Mr. Sawicki majored in philosophy and biology and was planning on making a career of biology until a fellowship fell through and one of his mentors sent him an e-mail about a science teacher position at the Roxbury Preparatory Charter School in Boston.

He spent three years there. Like most charter schools, Roxbury was trying to close the much-talked-about achievement gap that separates poor, inner-city, black and Latino children from wealthier white and Asian children.

But even as he and his colleagues were making some ground on closing that gap, Mr. Sawicki noticed that there was another persistent achievement gap that wasn't being talked about and wasn't being closed - between boys and girls. He started thinking of how it could be narrowed.

Mr. Sawicki said he realized that boys in inner-city communities like the one he came from in San Francisco and the one where he worked in Boston grow up surrounded by negative role models. He said, "There is really no focus on scholarship, academics, intellectual achievement, professional success."

As a result, he said, young boys grow up feeling "restricted" about what they can become.

When he got a call from that same mentor about starting an all-boys charter school in New York City, Mr. Sawicki saw it as his chance to help. He signed up for duty.

The community where Excellence opened two weeks ago has some of the same problems as the one he came from. In Bedford-Stuyvesant's Community School District 16, a district where 97% of students are black and Latino, girls consistently outperform their male counterparts.

In the district, 37% of fourth-grade girls passed New York State's English standardized test versus just 28% of boys. On the state's math test, 57% of girls in the district passed, compared to 47% of boys. The gap widens as the children get older.

He said creating an academics-focused, all-boys school in the neighborhood would "create an environment where the coolest thing young boys can be is smart." He said he hopes to target some of their specific needs to help them beat the achievement gaps and eventually get into college.

At Excellence, the school year is 192 days, 12 days longer than the New York City public school year.

The days themselves are also longer, starting at 7:30 a.m. and ending at 4 p.m. As the first students get older and move into higher grades and the school expands to its full size - kindergarten through eighth grade - the school day will get even longer, with sports tacked onto the end of the day.

In the course of the school day, as it exists now, each child has three hours of literacy instruction, 90 minutes of math, and 45 minutes combined of social studies and science.

There is regular testing to find out what the students have learned and to target problem areas.

He said that since the school is so young, there's no data yet. But he said it's already clear that there is a range of ability. Some students don't know the alphabet while others are reading on a third- or fourth-grade level.

Regardless of data, parents who send their sons to Excellence seem ecstatic that their numbers were picked in the school's lottery, and they're convinced that the school will do wonders for their children. There's a waiting list of 85 boys.

Toi Washington-Simon drives 45 minutes from Queens every morning to bring her son Seven Small, 6, to the school. "It's well worth it," she said. "Charter schools, they're held more accountable for what they produce."

Felisha Krause, who stood beside Ms. Washington-Simon outside the school after dropping off her 6-yearold, Jorden Plaines, added she could tell what her son is learning because she received a breakdown of his day.

"The focus here is definitely math, English, history," she said.

Both said the "energy level" of the principal is also a bonus.

Ms. Krause marveled at how he met Jorden once and remembered his name.

Ms. Washington-Simon said she knows Mr. Sawicki is involved every day because Seven comes home talking about what his principal said and did.

"He is always full of energy," Ms. Krause said. "He brings the focus back to where it needs to be, on education."