Teacher Isolation

At the end of the day, for about five minutes, I sat with a colleague while he played Pink Floyd's The Wall on his personal laptop. We talked about it -- the themes, where we were when it came out -- I was graduating from 8th grade, he saw the movie with a group of friends. The movie had gotten to me later, in high school, along with Tommy. I always want to go right home after school, which is a new feeling for me. I used to sit with kids for hours or just work with a colleague. But now I wondered why I wasn't right out the door. I needed those five minutes. And then I pushed myself out the door.

Last week someone stole my cell phone and I lost all of my contacts -- it's easy to erase your identity when a person has your handset. There are so many people whom I will never see again, whose phone numbers kept me connected to them. It gave me the semblance of a community. Now, I'm a pushy person. There are colleagues I know who have probably never asked for the phone numbers of colleagues with whom they have worked for years. While people worked closely together, they were much more conscious of their privacy in the generations before me. There was no Facebook to casually sign up on, and they probably wouldn't have, anyway. Perhaps they might have shared their "Linked-In" pages. I doubt it. A recent study of new teachers found that many of them are leaving the profession because they feel isolated, too -- although mentoring programs have helped to reduce some attrition. (How Mentoring Programs Can Reduce Teacher Isolation http://cie.asu.edu/volume8/number14/) There's been a lot of writing on the plight of new teachers, on the need for teachers to collaborate, to communicate with the outside world -- but little on what is happening to the school community itself which makes these, and just connecting with long-time colleagues, near impossible.

With all the closings of schools and the shiftings of personnel, there must be scores of teachers who have lost their communities, and some of their only long-term friends. Working together means you talk to each other every day. But without that ritual, you don't have a way to continue the intimacy. Some people will call each other for a while, perhaps. Juxtaposing the feelings you have for the colleagues with whom you were close and trusting and that of terror which has come with this new era of instability makes it harder to talk to anyone, though. You don't know if your friends have changed. Are they still for real? Are you for real?

In the coming weeks I want to look at studies on teacher loneliness and see if anyone is looking at what is happening to the population of teachers in NYC who are being continually displaced. Are they socializing anywhere? Are they eating alone? Sure a lot of teachers have joined the blogosphere. What about those who haven't. What does it mean to all of us that we have lost direct human contact with so many, so instantly.

Anyone who wants to write in, please do.

article on BCNHS in City Limits.org

www.citylimits.org


City Limits WEEKLYWeek of: March 19, 2007Number: 579

GOOD NIGHT, NIGHT SCHOOL:BROOKLYN COMP TO CLOSE
When this nontraditional school closes next year, only one other similar school will be left for students who are busy from 8:00 to 3:00. > By Matt Sollars
Ladonna Powell, 19, lives on her own, works at a bakery in Manhattan to pay the rent, and attends high school classes at Brooklyn Comprehensive Night High School because they fit into her schedule. Powell says the school, one of only two night high schools citywide, is important for struggling students who can’t make it to a day school but want to earn a diploma.
“Each person has their own problems,” she said. “We need this school to stay open. It’s a second chance.”
The public school is slated to close, however. The city announced in December that Brooklyn Comprehensive, which opened in 1990 to help students who had trouble in a traditional high school setting, would close this June. Teachers and students said they felt stunned and betrayed. The teachers’ union mounted a lobbying campaign, and by late February the staff was told the school would remain open until June 2008.
The city says five new "transfer schools," designed for “overage, under-credited” students, will replace Brooklyn Comp’s services. But while they will have some nighttime classes, it looks like they may not have an after-hours curriculum as complete as Brooklyn Comprehensive, which has the full high school curriculum except art and P.E. The other similarly complete nighttime school in operation is the Manhattan Comprehensive Night and Day High School, located on Second Avenue near Stuyvesant Town. The Department of Education cites “low demand” as the reason for closing the night school.
“Attendance has dropped significantly in recent years,” said Melody Meyer, a department spokesperson. She pointed specifically to an abysmal 33 percent attendance record at Brooklyn Comp last year.
The school’s former principal, Malaika Holman Bermiss, says “attendance was always horrendous.” But she and some current teachers counter that the attendance rate dropped precipitously after the school was moved from Midwood High School to South Shore High School in Sept. 2004, due to space constraints at Midwood.
Indeed, school attendance records seem to support Bermiss’s argument. Brooklyn Comp had a 66 percent attendance rate in 2003-04, its last at Midwood. That’s not too far from the 72 percent average for transfer schools in the city. But in the next school year – the first at South Shore – attendance fell to 49 percent. Then it dropped to 33 percent last year. Meanwhile, attendance at traditional high schools citywide is 90 percent.
South Shore, which itself suffers poor attendance and is slated to close, is a large white building at the intersection of Flatlands and Ralph Avenues in Canarsie. A 20-minute bus ride from the nearest subway stop, the school is remote to reach even by car. In addition to the long commute for a student population scattered throughout Brooklyn, teachers and students do not feel safe, particularly at 10 p.m. when the school day ends. The day begins at 4 p.m.
“Muggings have been bad,” according to English teacher Sharon Pearce, in an observation echoed by several others. “Some parents won’t allow their kids to come to school any more,” says the 14-year Brooklyn Comp veteran.
Current principal Catherine Bruno-Paparelli did not respond to requests for comment, and officials declined to show a reporter around the school.
Charles Turner, Brooklyn district representative at the United Federation of Teachers, called moving a night school to such a remote location “a thoughtless decision.” He believes Brooklyn Comp has become “collateral damage” of the decision to shutter South Shore, one of five schools that DOE announced in December would close.
Pearce finds it ironic that the city decided to close Brooklyn Comp and send students to transfer schools, which accommodate up to 250 students. “We were one of the new ‘small schools’ before there was the expression,” she said.
Bermiss fears that a new school, even one that looks like Brooklyn Comp but meets during the day, will miss out on helping a certain sliver of students. “It’s a time frame issue,” she said. “Some of our students had neither children or jobs, but what they needed is what we offered them at 7 p.m. in the evening.”
She believes Brooklyn Comp was hampered by not ever having its own facility. Before she retired in 2005 after 34 years in the city school system, Bermiss did propose an expansion of Brooklyn Comp that would have include a dedicated facility. Now she hopes that the extension through next school year will allow the teachers and staff at Brooklyn Comp to keep the school going in a different format and location.
“My concern is that there be a full-time night school in Brooklyn to meet the needs of students,” Bermiss said.
Student Natalie White, 19, certainly agrees. White started at Brooklyn Comp in September after she “messed up” at Erasmus Hall High School in Flatbush. Close personal attention from teachers quickly helped White gain confidence in herself.
“I never got an A in any class before,” she said. But after getting help from teachers in English and Spanish and A’s in both classes, she said, “I kind of knew I had some kind of potential.”
However, White knew she would not have enough credits to graduate by June 2007, so she stopped going to school. “I thought it was the end,” she said. “I was kind of thinking of giving up or going to another school.”
Now that another school year has been added, White says she will return and hopes to have enough credits for her diploma by January 2008.
- Matt Sollars