Principal For A Day Cheered
By The Changes
At Morris High
by Tom Kertes
“You wanna’ go where everybody knows your name” applies
not only to Boston bars but to New York Public Schools as well.
So there’s a lot to “Cheers” about the goings-on
at Morris High School.
As “Principal For A Day” Dr. Charlotte K. Frank,
a Senior Vice President at McGraw-Hill, remarked, “the
changes [Principal] Jose Ruiz are implementing are nothing
short of remarkable.” These changes include helping the
administration to break up the venerable old school, established
in 1903, into five smaller Academies, all featuring a specialty
major (languages, violin and dance, etc.). “We believe
that this will pique the students’ interest in school–and
the far smaller student-to-teacher ratio will be enormously
beneficial as well,” Ruiz, a brilliant bundle of energy,
said.
Ruiz, on the job less than two years,
has already accomplished some miracles: he took a school
in dire need of improvement and raised the performance dramatically.
Between January 2000 and 2003 school years, the percentage
of all Morris students passing English Language Arts regents
went from 32.2 percent to 60.8, math regents 18.1 to 38.1,
science regents 6.3 to 43. These as-yet-unpublished numbers
are still unofficial—“but
that doesn’t make them any less remarkable,” according
to Frank.
This particular “Principal For A Day” knows exactly
what she’s talking about; Frank, a onetime New York State
Regent, spent 25 years in the public school system, including
nine as Executive Director in Charge of Curriculum and Instruction
for New York City public schools. For the past eleven years
she’s been the point person for the close relationship
between Morris and McGraw-Hill. “We try to support this
school in every way we can, from donations, to corporate internships
e.g. Standard and Poor’s, to sponsoring the robotics
team and Moot Court, to creating Big Brother-Big Sister mentoring
type relationships between our people and the students. They
attend the annual shareholders meetings, she said. The Robotics
Team is one of the best in the nation; it recently received
an $11,000 donation from the New York Yankees. With troubled
students, “we try to focus in on every problem sharply,
on an individual basis, like a laser” Ruiz says. “We
waste no time doing something about it.” This includes
holding onto enthusiastic and highly qualified—but young
and without-seniority—teachers or paying for individual
math tutoring sessions by a NYU graduate student.
Even in this difficult budgetary
environment, “if you
really want to get something done, it can be done,” Frank
said. “And Jose Ruiz is the ideal example of that type
of thinking.”
Indeed, when talent and good will
team up, miracles can happen. As Frank was visiting the nascent “High School of Violin
and Dance” at Morris High School, freshman Carlos Irrizary
was practicing a routine that was Broadway caliber. “He’s
had some martial arts background,” said teacher Marisol
Rosado. “But it’s his first year dancing.” Another
student, after just a few violin lessons with the Suzuki Method,
was playing complex Chopin and Beethoven pieces purely by ear
on the piano. But the school HAS no piano.
A sad waste of exceptional talent?
Not necessarily. “I
promise you, we will do something about this piano situation,” said
Frank. “I don’t exactly know what we’ll do
just yet. But we will put our heads together and make something
happen.”#
