Helping Immigrant Teens Stay in SchoolFebruary 10, 2006 Louise Radnofsky
When Sarai Paredes arrived in New York from the Dominican Republic with her mother, she visited one of New York City’s large high schools – and found it terrifying. She worried about being lost and looking out of place, and feeling out of place. So instead Paredes enrolled in a small school, Gregorio Luperon High School in Washington Heights. It seems to have been the correct decision. Paredes now edits the school newspaper and has her eye on the future.
Another student, Jimenez Julio from Honduras, explains how difficult
things can be for a new immigrant. In his contribution to the school paper,
written in English, he confides, “I am living in the biggest city in
the world, and I feel like an ant trying to survive."
Certainly, the odds in the public school system are overwhelmingly stacked
against Latino immigrants who arrive not speaking English. A recent
study by the National Center for Education Statistics
of Hispanic students born outside the U.S. found that 44.2 percent dropped
out of high school without graduating. New York City does not provide a racial
breakdown of its dropout rate. But given that only about half the city’s high
school students graduate in four years, indications are that many Hispanic
high school students here face bleak odds. More than half of all recent male
immigrants and about 44 percent of females aged 16 to 24 no longer in school
do not have a high school diploma, according to a
study (in pdf format) by
the Community Service Society.
Teenage immigrants face acute disadvantages in the classroom: limited or no English, interrupted educations, and disorientation in the challenging social scene of high school. Outside of school, they often cope with homesickness, separation from one or both parents, and crowded living conditions.
Luperon High School is
a bilingual school serving about 400 of the area's recently arrived Latin American
teenagers. It opened 12 years ago in the windowless warehouse it still occupies
as a language transition program and became a diploma-granting public high
school in September 2002."
Luperon’s challenges (in pdf format) are formidable: 97.3 percent of students
in 2003 were officially English language learners, 62.5 percent of them were
overage for their grade. Still, according to the principal’s records, it graduated 58 of its 62 students last year, and every member of the senior class is looking at colleges.
Luperon gets its students to stay in school and meet required standards in English and other core subjects because it is ethnically segregated, homogenous and bilingual, says Ofelia Garcia, a professor at Columbia University Teachers College. In an upcoming article, she concludes, "Gregorio Luperon High provides a compelling model of schooling for Latino, newcomer, immigrant adolescents."
Homogenous and bilingual are not popular in education. The left mistrusts homogeneity, while the right remains skeptical of bilingual education. Voters in California and Arizona vetoed bilingual education programs in favor of "English immersion" in 2001. New York is often cited as the next target, though anti-bilingual activists’ main focus has been on younger students. "Immersion education is the answer for New York City's children struggling with English proficiency," argued Sarah Means Lohmann, a Lexington Institute scholar, in the New York Post.
The teachers at Luperon disagree. "They learn so much better when they're learning in their own language," said Ydanis Rodriguez, who teaches social studies. Only in their senior year at the school do students take every class except Spanish Language Arts in English. Rodriguez said that allowing students to grapple with freshmen and sophomore science, mathematics and social studies in their native language stops them from falling behind in these subjects. And when students fall behind, they are more likely to give up on school and drop out.
The all-important results for the state's Regents exams back up Rodriguez’s
argument. Students must pass five of these tests to graduate with a Regents
diploma. Almost 55 percent of the Luperon class of 2004 achieved 65 or higher,
about the same as the citywide average and far above the rate for what the
Department of Education considers similar schools..
The use of Spanish encourages parental participation, which Luperon principal
Juan Villar said is crucial in keeping his students in school. The New York
Immigration Coalition has found (in .pdf format) that 47 percent of parents
with a limited knowledge of English could not access any school information
or services in their native languages.
At Luperon, if a student fails to arrive by 10 a.m., his or her guardian will immediately receive a telephone call. “Open School Night” meetings bring more than 200 attendees, and guardians can drop into the school at any time.
Most of the staff can sympathize with the students and their parents. Villar, who emigrated from the Dominican Republic, tells how he went from living in a shack when he was 16, to attending college in Santo Domingo, and then started over again unloading trucks in America before he put himself through night school and became a teacher.
Villar sets high expectations for his students. "We're planning to send our newly arrived kids to college, so we have to train them to be competitive with those
American kids," he said, adding that even after they are in their final years of the school, they must attend 141 minutes each day of English as a
second language classes.
The opposition to bilingual education surprises Sarai Paredes and her friend, Angela Morel, who also arrived here from the Domincan Republic as a teenager. "It works," Morel said. "We're the proof."

Inwood: Rowing on the RiverMarch 10, 2004 By Jennifer Sabella
In the early 1900s, boathouses belonging to various
clubs lined a stretch of the Harlem River popularly
known as Sculler's Row.
They attracted hundreds of rowers including high
school students, trolley workers, people from Wall
Street and one of the first female rowing crews.
Eventually, though, rowing's popularity faded, and the
boathouses closed.
But Sculler's Row may rise again. It has been restored
as part of Swindler Cove Park, five acres of land at
the northern tip of Manhattan along the Harlem River.
For years, the area was neglected and underutilized.
It was a boat graveyard, complete with litter and
trash, said Jane Jackson, director of programming at
the New York Restoration Project. That changed because
a public-private partnership provided the funding to
beautify and restore the cove. Work was completed last
summer.
While such partnerships have become common, they
usually occur with parks that are either large or in
affluent areas such as Central Park or Bryant Park.
How did such an arrangement come to rescue a small
piece of land far from midtown in a relatively low and
middle-income area?
In the mid 1990s, Billie Swindler, after whom the park
is named, brought the neglected area to the attention
of Bette Midler,
founder of the New York Restoration Project. Midler and project president
Joseph Pupello became interested in the site because
it went along with the group's mission to "reclaim and
restore neglected open space in under-served
communities," said Jane Jackson, director of
programming for the project.
At that time, Midler wrote recently, "It may well
have been the saddest place in Manhattan. It was
littered with all kinds of garbage, tires, cars and
other refuse. The Harlem River shoreline was a dumping
ground for household waste and abandoned boats. It was
a blight on our city."
During the course of researching the site, the project
found that Swindler Cove had been targeted for
improvement a number of years ago, but nothing had
ever been done. The area had been designated "a
wetland mitigation site," meaning that if someone
developed a wetland, Swindler Cove could be improve
upon to compensate for the loss of the other area. As
Restoration Project executive senior vice president
Amy Gavaris explains it, in the early 1990s, the state
Department of Transportation did work along the FDR
Drive that affected wetland there. Because of that,
one acre of wetland had to be created or improved, and
Swindler Cove was selected. However, the
transportation department's consultant for the project
died, and Swindler Cove was forgotten.
When the restoration project notified the state of it
inaction, Albany decided to revive the project. The
transportation department was appointed to oversee the
construction of a five-acre park around a three-acre
salt marsh at Swindler Cove. The state expanded its
initial contribution of $8 million to $10 million.
But now that construction is complete, the state no
longer contributes funds for the park. Instead, the
city owns the parkland, and the restoration project
maintains the park and supplies the staff needed to
run it. The group acquires money for this through
donations and other fundraising activities.
The restoration project sought out other private
funding for the construction of a boathouse to restore
rowing in the area. The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation
provided more than two thirds of the $3 million for
the project. Speedo, the swimsuit maker, donated the
rest.
The Peter Jay Sharp Boathouse is being constructed
im Norwalk, Connecticut. The completed boathouse will
then be transported by barge to Swindler Cove, where
it will remain floating, so as not to disturb the
environment. The New York Rowing Association will
manage the facility, which will be the site of
athletic and competitive rowing programs that will be
open to the community and largely free.
For those who prefer to stay on land, the restoration
project has established the 18-plot Riley Levin
Children's Garden in the park. This garden, which is
maintained by the project, was created with a $1
million donation from Barbara Riley Levin.
The restoration project is working to provide
environmental education programs to students at nearby
P.S. 5. It also hopes to offer instruction on such
themes as gardening and water quality to members of
the community.
This is part of the project's focus on bringing people
from the surrounding area into the public space. The
goal, says Jackson, is to instill in community members
"a sense of stewardship and responsibility" for
Swindler Cove, onetime urban blight that is now a
park.
............................
Related Story:
New York is building new parks and restoring old ones -- at a time of budget cutbacks and staff reductions. Anne Schwartz reports on how this has been possible.

Rising RentsJuly 25, 2003 Many recent arrivals to Washington Heights are from other parts of the city or from out of state. They are increasingly white, young, and middle-class and some residents of City Council district 10 say that the latest wave of newcomers is driving up rents.

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