A School for Senators Turns Up in Brooklyn

At first glance, senators Schumer and Coleman and Senator-elect Sanders are an odd group. Tossed together into a room, the Democratic leader of New York, the right-leaning Republican of Minnesota, and the nonconformist independent of Vermont might not have much in common — that is, unless one started reminiscing about the old days at James Madison High, the school in Brooklyn that graduated all three.

As of Tuesday, the high school can claim something it is unlikely any other high school in the country can: three alumni from three separate parties elected to the U.S. Senate at the same time.

"It's pretty cool," a freshman, Daniel Harrigin, 14, said. "They've got pictures in the hall of fame on the wall."

Only a few other students filing out of the school yesterday afternoon had heard about the accomplishment. But for a school whose alumni list includes both a TV personality, Judge Judy, and a Supreme Court justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the news, first reported on the Web log Under the Hill, didn't seem so surprising to students.

Tony Shenderovich, a 13-year-old freshman, wasn't aware that the trio of senators graduated from his school, but he said, "I know that Chris Rock, Judge Judy, and the guy from Kaplan tests did," referring to Stanley Kaplan.

School personnel said the comedian Chris Rock had attended James Madison but did not graduate.

That the three ended up in such different spots on the political spectrum isn't surprising to those familiar with the school, either.

"That's how diverse it is," the school's PTA co-president, Dorothy Giglio, said. Mr. Sanders said he doesn't think he and the other senators overlapped at Madison. If they did, he said, they probably ran in different social circles.

"Bernie strikes me as the type of guy who spent most of his days studying," a researcher at Project Vote Smart, a Montana-based nonpartisan organization that compiles information about political candidates, Mary Gillepsie, said. She worked for Mr. Sanders when he was a congressman and she was in college in Vermont.

Since their days at James Madison, Messrs. Sanders and Schumer, the two politicians who are a little closer together on the political spectrum, have gotten to know each other, and Mr. Schumer campaigned for Mr. Sanders. Mr. Sanders has represented Vermont in Congress since 1990, but his roots in Brooklyn have stayed with him.

"He's always been the Vermont congressman with the New York accent," Ms. Gillepsie said.

On the outside, the school, a hulking brick building that takes up a block in Midwood, probably hasn't changed much since the senators went there several decades ago. These days, though, students must pass though metal detectors to get in, and the school day is split into four different schedules to accommodate an overflow of students. Back then, it was a school filled with immigrants and working-class parents; these days, the student body still draws an eclectic student body from across the borough.

The academics are the same, too, according to Ms. Giglio.

"It's more crowded, but it's still excellent," she said.

Every year for the past several years, the school has held a ceremony to induct new members to its "Wall of Distinction," where the faces of the school's most celebrated alumni beam down.

Pointing back at his school as he stood outside in the schoolyard yesterday, Daniel Grant, a freshman, predicted that Messrs. Schumer, Sanders and Coleman would not be the last senators the school would produce.

"Somebody in there is going to be the fourth," he said.