The Norma Rae of Boerum Hill, Brooklyn

I've been joking that I'm going to become the Norma Rae of Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, regarding Clyde's education. Our biggest issue with our house is that we are zoned for Public School 38, which is 2 blocks away from our house, but it is considered an "underperforming school," everything from "in transition" to just plain "not good enough" for people we have talked to to send their kids. We live next to a housing project, and most of the kids from the project go to PS 38 (ranging from K through 5th grade). As well, a lot of very upper middle-class families are moving to the neighborhoood (the house two doors down from us, same layout, sold for a million dollars, and the buyers are a young, pregnant couple who are gutting the house and renovating it). All of this is to say that there are a lot of class differences involved with the families zoned for PS 38.

We love where we live--love the neighborhood, love how close we are to Smith Street and 5th Avenue in Park Slope and Atlantic Avenue, and love how we've met all of these new families with kids around Clyde's age, since we've moved here. Our biggest concern, though, is how Clyde will be educated. We can't afford private school (that costs roughly $25K a year from kindergarten on), and we certainly can't afford private school for more than one child, in case we want to have a bigger family. And so our options are to send Clyde to PS 38, to apply to private school, or to go through numerous bureaucratic petitions to try to get her into a different public school.

In past years, parental communities have gotten involved to get schools to improve. It happened in Carroll Gardens and Park Slope, apparently, the best schools in Brooklyn. So Ingrid and I thought, why not in Boerum Hill, and why couldn't it start with us?

We decided to start with a tour of PS 38. I called the parent liaison, this lovely young man named Mr. Hassan, who gave us a great tour of the school. They have a very diverse student population, a new principal in the last two years, and a gifted and talented program, and a very diverse roster of after-school cultural activities, from Israeli dancing to painting to karate.

Ing's and my biggest concern after that tour was this: if your child tests into the gifted and talented program (she has to take a written test of 160 questions as a kindergartner!), she has the option to go to the gifted program in any school in the district that has a gifted program, but has to win acceptance by lottery. If she doesn't win acceptance, she is automatically admitted into the gifted program at the school she is zoned for (38, in our case). But then we discovered that the gifted program takes those kids out of the classroom of the other kids for five days a week--they only share time with the general population for lunch and recess and gym. We didn't like the idea of the gifted kids being segregated out so completely. We left there with a big question mark.

Then, we went to a stoop sale this past weekend, at a public school in Park Slope, and met someone who was a teacher at PS 38 last year. She told us she had lovely students, but that there were some behavioral problems, and that she spent so much time disciplining the kids that she didn't get to fully, effectively teach. Ingrid and I wanted to know exactly what "discipline problems" meant, and this teacher gave us an example: 1st graders calling their peers "crackhead ho's." Hm. She also said, off the record, that the new principal is black and that she sensed some racial tension with her, in that she sensed that the principal didn't feel that the white teachers really identified with her nor the student body.

We've got a challenge ahead of us. (That teacher, incidentally, left the school and is teaching at another school in Brooklyn, now, and loves it.)