P.S. 8 Enjoys Renaissance After Period of Low Enrollment, Shuttered Classrooms

Three years ago, few parents in affluent Brooklyn Heights were willing to send their children to the local elementary school, Public School 8. Enrollment dipped so low that school administrators shuttered classrooms and used them to store old furniture. School officials were told the school needed to be restructured or face a possible shutdown.Under a new principal, however, local parents are returning their children to the old school on the corner of Hicks and Middagh streets. Enrollment has nearly doubled and test scores are rising. Even celebrities have noticed: Madonna swooped in last year to promote her new book, and John Coltrane’s son recently called from Paris to see if there was room for his child.The changes have come fast and furious. This year, the school moved off the state’s failing list and earned a spot in “New York City’s Best Public Schools: A Parents’ Guide,” by Clara Hemphill.“This is a high-poverty school that serves mostly black and Hispanic parents that has suddenly become the darling of the upper-middle-class Brooklyn Heights parents,” Ms. Hemphill told The New York Sun. “It shows how good leadership can turn a school around in a very short amount of time.”At the forefront of the change is the principal, Seth Phillips, a 42-year-old native of Cobble Hill, and the energetic instructional specialist, Olivia Ellis, who hails from the successful P.S. 321 in Park Slope. Both were hand-picked by Carmen Farina, who is now the deputy chancellor for teaching and learning at the education department.In his first days, Mr. Phillips, who was plucked from P.S. 94 in Sunset Park, and a troupe of parents, community leaders, and teachers hauled 30 bags of trash from the principal’s office, including old books and yellowing papers dating back to the 1970s.The door to his office, long painted shut – the only entrance was through the administrator’s office – was stripped and pried open. Now, both doors are always open. Classroom doors were retrofitted with glass panels that allow parents and visitors to peer inside.Dark, empty classrooms were transformed into a bright new art gallery, an art room, and a science lab. Colorful rugs, new tables, embroidered curtains, and beanbag chairs were moved in. A new parent-run library circulates more than 8,000 books. Fellows from the Guggenheim Museum teach art classes to fourth- and fifth-graders.“This place was like a tomb before,” Ms. Ellis said recently as she darted between classrooms.To attract parents who could otherwise afford private schools, the new administration believed it had to go above and beyond the ordinary. The maintenance staff stripped and shined wooden floors, painted walls, and cleaned up stained-glass panels in the auditorium. Ms. Ellis even slapped on a smock and mixed paint colors; a second-grade classroom is painted “Ms. Ellis Red.”The improvements were funded in part by a slew of the grants the school applied for, including a three-year magnet grant of nearly $1 million. A $400,000 grant was used to put computers in the classrooms.The PTA, which once struggled with a handful of parents to raise enough money to buy crayons and scissors, just raised $68,000 to wire part of the building for air-conditioning. Last year, it was able to give each teacher an additional $200.A recent volunteer night attracted almost 100 parents and educators from other Brooklyn schools who dropped by to see what P.S. 8 was doing right. This from a school that until this year was designated by the state as a “school in need of improvement.”The racial makeup has also changed, with the proportion of white children attending the school swelling to 31% this year from 13% the year before.The new leadership believes that a strong community is essential for a well-functioning school. In a neighborhood with brownstones selling for millions of dollars, that community includes a clutch of well-heeled real estate agents. With the Manhattan Bridge twinkling outside the third floor science lab window, one night last year, the school traded test tubes and beakers for white tablecloths and votive candles and hosted a small party for brokers.“You’re looking at the most important piece of real estate. If you sell our school, then you’ll be able to sell more homes,” Ms. Ellis told the brokers, explaining that people could afford to spend more on housing if they weren’t putting $25,000 a year into private school.This year, the school’s enrollment swelled to 380 students, from 282 the prior year and less than 200 students the year before that. With applications soaring, Mr. Phillips and Ms. Ellis have even staked out applicants’ homes to make sure they actually live at the address they claimed.When Mr. Phillips, who graduated from Haverford College and has a master’s degree in education from Fordham University, protested that he didn’t become an educator to go through lists of addresses to weed out people, Ms. Ellis shot back, “What, you didn’t get into education to run a school that everybody is trying to go to?”Because of the magnet grant, the school accepts students from outside the zone, but local children receive first priority. The school offers no gifted program because, Ms. Ellis said, “We believe all students are gifted and talented.”Mr. Phillips, who lives blocks away in his childhood home with his wife and two young children, works from 7 a.m. until at least 7 p.m. every night. The key to changing a school, he says, is believing in it: believing in the students, parental involvement, and a lot of hard work.Test scores have been on the rise. Last year, 77% of the fifth-graders passed on the standardized reading test. Two years ago, just 20% of that same class passed the test when they were in third grade.Mr. Phillips said he felt that figure was important because it demonstrated that students who were already at the school are making strides – that the improvements are not just caused by the wealthier incoming students.Until the mid-1990s, many local children attended P.S. 8. Then, a number of new principals quickly passed through the school. Test scores plummeted and enrollment declined. Local parents pulled out their children, and the school mostly served poor children from the nearby Farragut Housing projects.In recent years, with a swell of young children in Brooklyn Heights and neighboring DUMBO, parents and local politicians started pushing for change.A mother of three former P.S. 8 students who is a member of the influential Brooklyn Heights Association, Claire Mirarchi, started hosting “coffees” in her brownstone parlor to discuss the school.“The Brooklyn Heights folks really went somewhere else looking for leadership and quality standards, which had really been slipping,” Ms. Mirarchi said. “We needed to get some leadership from the Board of Education.”That leadership came when under the newly restructured school system, the well-respected superintendent of District 15, Ms. Farina, was tapped to head the new Region 8. P.S. 8 is the school her 14-month-old grandson, Charlie, is zoned to attend one day.“Seth’s energy is contagious, Olivia’s energy is contagious,” Ms. Farina said of Mr. Phillips and Ms. Ellis. “They also ran school tours every three weeks, it was unheard of at the time.”The Brooklyn Heights Association jumped into the fray, encouraging local residents to get involved. They kick-started a fund-raising campaign by donating $5,000 for furniture in a kindergarten class. On the first day of school this year, they greeted each teacher with a corsage.Before the new leadership came in, a second-grade teacher, Patricia Douglas, had planned on leaving P.S. 8, where she has been teaching for 18 years.“They work along with you, they’re always encouraging,” she said. The last principal, on the other hand, “you could have left the school, and she wouldn’t have noticed.Mr. Phillips is keeping an eye on the future and tends to deflect questions about what went wrong in the past. The focus is on turning the school into a place to which students and teachers want to come to.This is the key, according to Ms. Hemphill, who said, “In general, a good principal is a teacher of teachers, and for too many years, we’ve had principals that are administrators.”

P.S. 8 Enjoys Renaissance After Period of Low Enrollment, Shuttered Classrooms

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