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HURRICANE SANDY
COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY
COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY
“I spent the whole break taking the front end off one car with a
ratchet set and putting it on the other car. It was mechanical, finger-banging,
hand-scrapping, back-breaking work,” he says. “I remember
thinking, ‘This isn’t for me.’ I knew I had to throw myself
100 percent into education.”
He was hired full-time as a fifth-grade teacher at P.S. 236 Mill
Basin in Brooklyn in 1992 and rose to assistant principal in 2000.
But that December, he found himself “in a funk,” having lost out
on a principalship. He turned to technology, always his hobbyhorse,
and started videotaping his best teachers in action in the
classroom. On staff development days, he showed the videos to
staff, and the highlighted teacher would present on how his or
her style worked.
In April 2003, O’Connell was promoted to principal of Belle
Harbor School, the elementary school where he realized just how
few Rockaway students stayed in the Rockaways for middle and
high school. That summer he was tapped by Cashin and started
on what he calls “the dog and pony show of selling a school.”
He pitched the district and the community the idea of a gifted
middle school program that could retain the peninsula’s best and
brightest.
Scholars’ Academy opened in 2004 as a sixth-grade middle
school program, with the students divided between two locations
in East New York. A year later the staff and students moved
into a permanent home, which they shared with a struggling
local high school, P.S. 180. By 2006 Scholars’ had morphed into
a full middle school, hosting grades six through eight. In 2007,
based on community response, it expanded into an accelerated
high school program by adding one grade a year until 2011, when
its first senior class graduated. P.S. 180 was eventually phased out
and Scholars’ Academy has since earned straight A’s on its NYC
Department of Education Progress Reports for both the middle
and high schools.
If you found yourself in a Scholars’ classroom today and
thought you’d wandered onto the set of Star Trek, you couldn’t be
faulted. Technology is one of O’Connell’s core interests, and using
it to enhance the classroom experience was a founding tenet
of the school. It shows. There’s more technology packed into the
700-sq.-ft. rooms than your typical Apple store. The white boards
are digital — three, four, sometimes five to a room. All the administrators
and teachers carry iPads. There are carts with dozens
of iPads and Kindles for the students to use. There are few textbooks
and no paper. Every lesson is posted online and beamed
to the walls and the tablets. Parents have logins to the school’s
website and can track their children’s progress.
The curriculum is built around the SCALE-UP model, which
places students at round tables, not desks, in “learning triads” or
“cooperative learning groups” to encourage collaborative learning
and team problem solving. “It’s about promoting interdisciplinary
learning, where it fits,” Cashin says. “We created a strong framework
with lots of reading, fiction and nonfiction, a lot of writing
and a lot of project-oriented learning. Brian took that framework
and moved it to a new level. He’s so talented, so intelligent that he
saw how technology can reach out to parents, enhance communication
and heighten integration in the classroom.”
Approximately 25 percent of Scholars’ Academy students
come from east Rockaway peninsula, which is predominantly
black and Latino, and another 25 percent come from the west
peninsula, which is primarily white. Roughly 40 percent of the
students come from District 27, which makes up the outer edge
of Queens. Ten percent come from elsewhere in the city, some as
far away as Park Slope in Brooklyn and Forest Hills in Queens.
“The school is literally smack in the middle of the peninsula,”
O’Connell says, thumping a map of the Rockaways on his office
wall. Despite the technology and all the innovative learning strategies,
he considers the central mission of Scholars’ Academy “positive
integration” in the middle of a socially, economically and religiously
diverse community. “The round tables are about equity,”
he says. “The triads are about social cooperation.”
“We lost our home. We lost our business. Eight
feet of water covered everything,” says Lintia
Lyons, whose sixth-grade son, Caleb,
had just received his Outstanding Scholar
certificate from O’Connell. After the storm, the family bounced
from a Hilton to a friend’s home to staying with family to a rental
near their property so they could continue down the long road of
reconstruction.
Such stories were typical among Scholars’ families and many
others across the city, and NYC public schools shut down for an
unprecedented five days after the storm. When they reopened,
O’Connell’s students were displaced out and around the five boroughs.
With the help of Google Docs and cell phone contact with
parents, his assistant principals pinpointed the neighborhoods
with the highest densities of Scholars’ students. They set up charter
bus depots to transport kids from those neighborhoods to
temporary schools in East New York. “I didn’t even know how
we’d pay for it,” O’Connell says. “But I figured, hey, that’s what
FEMA is for.” (FEMA did come through with some funding.)
Yet the night before that first day back, a major miscommunication
occurred. The NYC Department of Education sent a notice
to parents to have their kids at the Scholars’ Academy site to meet
district busses, not at the bus depots the Scholars’ staff had set up
and already communicated about to parents.
O’Connell drove to Scholars’ that morning from the Bay Ridge
hotel where he’d been living with his wife and children since the
storm. Fourteen students had shown up at the school (the majority
had gone to the bus depots anyway). It was freezing. A nor’easter
was approaching the city.
“I got on the bus with them and asked, ‘How many of you
have electricity’” he recalls. Not a single hand went up. “How
many of you have heat” Not a single hand. “How many of you
have hot water” Not a single hand. “How many of you want to
go to school” Every hand on the bus shot up.
All told, Sandy displaced 30 percent of the school’s staff and 60
percent of its 1,200 students. The Department of Education committed
$200 million to repair the flooded and broken building but
even with such funding the work was slow. Demolition teams
brought down walls, chiseled away the rotted gym floor and collected
all the school’s trashed paper records in a cargo container
by the front door. For their part, the parents, students and teachers
worked just as hard, bearing down on the work of teaching
and learning in their temporary East New York schools.
Four months later, when the kids finally moved back into the
Rockaway Park school building that had become a home away
from home for so many, O’Connell handed them all T-shirts. On
the front, it read “Scholars Strong,” and on the back, “Rockaway
Resilient.”
For more photos of and to view a video about Hurricane Sandy’s impact
on Scholars’ Academy, go to Web Extras at college.columbia.edu/cct.
Michael R. Shea ’10 Arts is a freelance writer who lives in New York
City.
Alumni
News
58 Message from the
CCAA President
59 Bookshelf
61 Obituaries
64 Class Notes
112 Alumni Corner
Members of the cast of the 1940
Varsity Show, called Life Begins
in ’40, take advantage of beautiful
weather on March 20, 1940, to
rehearse on Low Plaza. Their dance
routine, “Pony Ballet,” included
student-athletes with a combined
weight of more than two tons.
Life Begins in ’40 was written by
famed Varsity Show alumnus I.A.L.
Diamond ’41, who went on to write
Some Like It Hot (1959) and The
Apartment (1960) with Billy Wilder.
PHOTO: WIDE WORLD PHOTOS, INC.,
COURTESY COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
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