Academic literature on the topic 'Washington Heights (New York, N.Y.)'

This chapter describes Regina's active retirement years and examines her legacy. Regina lived for nearly a decade as a widow until February 5, 1993, when she died at the age of ninety-one in the Bethel Nursing Home. Regina's death was reported in the New York Amsterdam News—the newspaper that had covered her social engagements, creative pursuits, wedding, and professional accomplishments. Regina's last will was a testimony to her strong commitment to various organizations. Regina left several thousand dollars to various organizations located in New York City, including two thousand dollars to

Essential to a community school’s success is a committed partnership among the school and school district, community organizations, and parents—a partnership that makes students’ academic success a shared responsibility and a shared goal. These partners come together to provide three key sets of supports and opportunities: (1) a strong, coherent core instructional program during the regular school day; (2) supports and services that address and seek to remove barriers to learning; and (3) enrichment opportunities during nonschool hours that build students’ motivation and capacity to succeed in school. Table 11.1 illustrates this concept through a graphic representation of supports and opportunities offered by New York community schools. After the early success of the work at Intermediate School (IS) 218 and Primary School (PS) 5 in Washington Heights, The Children’s Aid Society (CAS) received scores of requests from principals around New York City who wanted their schools to become CAS community schools. Deciding how to respond to these requests became a major issue for CAS, because our intention from the beginning was to enter into a long-term partnership with each school—which meant that the agency was committing itself to sustaining each partnership for multiple years, if not forever. The financial implications of each decision were clear: we needed to build slowly and carefully, with a view toward long-term sustainability. In our strategic plans and discussions with CAS trustees and funders, managing the growth of community schools was an explicit goal. Furthermore, we recognized that implementation of the CAS community school model must focus on adaptation, not replication. This meant that, as we added schools (at the rate of roughly one per year), we would conduct a local needs and resource assessment and make a plan that was responsive to the unique assets and needs of each school and its surrounding community. From March 1992 through June 2003, CAS worked in close partnership with the New York City public schools to develop ten community schools—five in the Washington Heights neighborhood of northern Manhattan, two in East Harlem (also in Manhattan), and three in the South Bronx.

The Children’s Aid Society’s concept of community schools came to life in February 1992 with the opening of the Salomé Ureña de Henriquez Middle Academies (Intermediate School [IS] 218) and the opening in March 1993 of the Ellen Lurie School (Primary School [PS] 5). These were the first community schools operated by The Children’s Aid Society (CAS) in partnership with New York City’s Board of Education. PS 5 is an elementary school whose students advance to middle school at IS 218. The model has evolved into a well-integrated, multidimensional community school involving CAS, the Board (now Department) of Education, and the parents and many other partners from the broader community. Before the two schools opened, several years were spent in preparation and planning. Initially, CAS surveyed New York City communities to identify those that would benefit most from CAS’s services. This was part of an ongoing effort on CAS’s part to examine its current programs in order to modify them to meet current social and familial needs. The survey led to the selection of the Washington Heights community, which was characterized by a large influx of recent immigrants, substantial poverty, large families, and a dearth of services. A more intensive study conducted by CAS in 1987 had documented the dramatic needs of families in this community and the shortage of services available to them. The school system ranked 32nd of 32 districts in nearly every category. The type of poverty that characterizes new immigrants was endemic: very low-wage jobs, two and three families sharing one apartment, and a reluctance to accept outside help. Washington Heights was the substance- abuse and drug-trafficking hub for the tri-state area and had the city’s highest homicide rate. Teenage pregnancy rates were also among the city’s highest. This community is not unlike those that CAS has traditionally served throughout its 150-year history. What was to be strikingly different was how CAS would address these problems. In setting out to plan a service model, CAS drew on its long and rich history of operating community centers in low-income neighborhoods.

The Children’s Aid Society (CAS), founded in 1853, is one of the largest and oldest child and family social-welfare agencies in the country. It serves 150,000 children and families through a continuum of services—adoption and foster care; medical, mental health, and dental services; summer and winter camps; respite care for the disabled; group work and recreation in community centers and schools; homemaker services; counseling; and court mediation and conciliation programs. The agency’s budget in 2003 was approximately $75 million, financed almost equally from public and private funds. In 1992, after several years of planning and negotiation, CAS opened its first community school in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. If you visit Intermediate School (IS) 218 or one of the many other community schools in New York City and around the country, it may seem very contemporary, like a “school of the future.” Indeed, we at CAS feel that these schools are one of our most important efforts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Yet community schools trace their roots back nearly 150 years, as previous generations tried to find ways to respond to children’s and families’ needs. CAS’s own commitment to public education is not new. When the organization was founded in the mid-nineteenth century by Charles Loring Brace, he sought not only to find shelter for homeless street children but to teach practical skills such as cobbling and hand-sewing while also creating free reading rooms for the enlightenment of young minds. Brace was actively involved in the campaign to abolish child labor, and he helped establish the nation’s first compulsory education laws. He and his successors ultimately created New York City’s first vocational schools, the first free kindergartens, and the first medical and dental clinics in public schools (the former to battle the perils of consumption, now known as tuberculosis). Yet this historic commitment to education went only so far. Up until the late 1980s, CAS’s role in the city’s public schools was primarily that of a contracted provider of health, mental health, and dental services.

The Children’s Aid Society (CAS) early childhood initiative is located in two of our New York City community schools, Primary School (PS) 5 and PS 8, in the Washington Heights section of northern Manhattan. This initiative was conceived as a partnership between the New York City Board of Education and CAS. The collaboration brought newborns and their families into the schools in which the children would complete fifth grade. The initiative began in 1994 and has been in full operation since 1996. Since then, the need for such a project has been confirmed and experience has provided insights into how a program for pregnant women and children through age five (often called a Zero to Five Program) can be effectively implemented within a public school. The CAS Zero to Five model connects two federally funded programs—Early Head Start (birth to age three) and Head Start (ages three to five)—to provide comprehensive educational and social services to low-income families and their children. The population attending the Zero to Five Program confronts the obstacles facing all new immigrant families living in poverty in an urban setting. In both schools more than 75% of the families are from the Dominican Republic; another 20% come from other Central and South American countries. The parents’ language is Spanish, and language barriers and acculturation issues result in social isolation. In addition, because many residents lack legal documentation, they are reluctant to access health and social services. The few early childhood programs in the neighborhood all have long waiting lists. A majority of the families share overcrowded apartments with other families or extended family; whole families often live in one bedroom where books and age-appropriate toys are scarce and there may be little child-centered language interaction. However, in spite of the difficulties, these parents have a drive to succeed and they understand the importance of education. By combining and linking Early Head Start and Head Start programs and integrating them into a community school, the CAS Zero to Five Program provides children and families with quality educational, health, and social services, after which the children transition into public school classes within the same building.

William D. Wulff of Michigan State University developed (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2010, 132, 13100; Org. Lett. 2010, 12, 4908) a general enantio- and diastereocontrolled route from an imine 1 to the aziridine 3. Craig W. Lindsley of Vanderbilt University established (Org. Lett. 2010, 12, 3276) a complementary approach (not illustrated). Joseph P. Konopelski of the University of California, Santa Cruz, designed (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2010, 132, 11379) a practical and inexpensive flow apparatus for the cyclization of 4 to the β-lactam 5. Manas K. Ghorai of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, showed (J. Org. Chem. 2010, 75, 6173) that an aziridine 6 could be opened with malonate to give the γ-lactam 8. John P. Wolfe of the University of Michigan devised (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2010, 132, 12157) a Pd catalyst for the enantioselective cyclization of 9 to 11. Sherry R. Chemler of the State University of New York at Buffalo observed (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2010, 49, 6365) that the cyclization of 12 to 14 proceeded with high diastereoselectivity. Glenn M. Sammis of the University of British Columbia devised (Synlett 2010, 3035) conditions for the radical cyclization of 15 to 16. Jeffrey S. Johnson of the University of North Carolina observed (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2010, 132, 9688) that the opening of racemic 17 with 18 could be effected with high ee. The residual 17 was highly enriched in the nonreactive enantiomer. Kevin D. Moeller of Washington University found (Org. Lett . 2010, 12, 5174) that the n -BuLi catalyzed cyclization of 20 set the quaternary center of 21 with high relative control. Yujiro Hayashi of the Tokyo University of Science, using the diphenyl prolinol TMS ether that he developed as an organocatalyst, designed (Org. Lett. 2010, 12, 4588) the sequential four-component coupling of 22, 23, benzaldehyde imine, and allyl silane to give 24 with high relative and absolute stereocontrol. Derrick L. J. Clive of the University of Alberta showed (J. Org. Chem. 2010, 75, 5223) that 25, prepared in enantiomerically pure form from serine, participated smoothly in the Claisen rearrangement, to deliver 27.

Jeannette Brown’s career has included accomplishments in industry, academia, and publishing. Her claim to fame is working in two different pharmaceutical firms, where she was able to contribute her skill to the research teams who produced several marketable drugs. She was also able to mentor minorities to encourage them to enter the field of chemistry, both as part of a corporate effort and as a volunteer. Jeannette Brown was born May 13, 1934, in Fordham Hospital in the Bronx, New York. She was the only child of Ada May Fox and Freddie Brown. She was born in the middle of the Depression, and times were tough. Her father worked a number of jobs in order to feed his family, including shining shoes on the street. Finally, when Jeannette was five, her father got a job as a superintendent in a building in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. This section of Manhattan was just becoming a home for middle-class blacks moving up from Harlem. Since her father was a super, he had a basement apartment in the building. One of the tenants in the house was Dr. Arthur Logan, who became Jeannette’s doctor when she became very ill. Jeannette was in and out of the hospital many times, and she remembers asking Dr. Logan how she could become a doctor. He told her that she would have to study science. Jeannette was only five or six at the time, but that conversation impressed her and she immediately decided to become a scientist. When Jeannette started school at the age of six, she went to the neighborhood public school, which all children did at the time. The children in the school were mostly black, and some of them taunted her because she was interested in being a good student. Her father decided that the only way that she was going to get a good education was for him to try to get a job as a superintendent in a white neighborhood so that Jeannette could go to the mostly white schools.

Before The Children’s Aid Society (CAS) opened its first two community schools in Washington Heights (1992–1993), our staff and board had already begun to address the issue of sustainability—that is, how to plan for the long-term development, implementation, assessment, and institutionalization of this new line of work. Internal strategic planning led to decisions by CAS board and staff leadership to realign existing resources in support of this new work, while external planning resulted in explicit partnership agreements, forged in 1990, with the New York City Board of Education and Community School District 6 (see appendix to Coltoff, ch. 1 in this volume) that also set the stage for long-term sustainability. As CAS’s assistant executive director for community schools, my responsibilities include planning and overseeing our sustainability efforts. This chapter describes CAS’s experience in raising funds for its community schools and offers suggestions for how other practitioners might proceed. CAS views sustainability as involving not only aggressive fundraising but also public relations, constituency building, and advocacy, using a conceptual framework developed by the Finance Project, a national research and policy organization. These four components are interrelated; work in one area supports and complements efforts in the other three. For fiscal year 2003–2004, the operating budget for CAS’s 10 community schools totaled almost $13 million, which included approximately $8.6 million for the extended-day, summer camp, teen, parent, and adult education components and $2.8 million for health services (medical, dental, and mental health). In addition, two sites have Early Head Start and Head Start programs operated by CAS; the costs for these programs are covered entirely by federal grants totaling approximately $1.4 million. Because the programs differ, each school has a different budget, but the estimated additional cost per student per year of a fully developed community school is $1,000. CAS generates support for its community schools from a wide variety of sources. During the initial years, core support came primarily from private sources, including foundations, corporations, and individuals; the exception was the health and mental health services, which were financed partially by Medicaid and Child Health Plus (federally supported children’s health insurance), as well as by other public and private sources.