Bloomberg Announces Magnet School as Part of Manhattanville Campus

Columbia Spectator
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Bloomberg Announces Magnet School as Part of Manhattanville Campus

New School Will House Six Hundred in Grades 6-12, Will Receive Advice From Columbia Faculty
By David Greenhouse
Spectator Senior Staff Writer

October 20, 2005

Columbia's proposed Manhattanville campus will include a new public high school for science and engineering, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced Friday afternoon at a news conference in Butler Library.

The school will serve students in grades six through 12; the first of the city's specialized high schools to begin in the sixth grade and the first in which Columbia faculty will play a major role in designing the curriculum.

�[I] always love to collaborate with the city on projects that are mutually beneficial,� University President Lee Bollinger said in an interview after the announcement. �There are many ways we can have a very significant impact.�

The mayor's announcement, part of a larger plan for educational improvement, comes as University officials are moving into a key first round of publicly mandated meetings over their proposed expansion into west Harlem. �I would never say we would never do something like this without Manhattanville, but it would certainly make it far more difficult for us to do a project like this,� Bollinger said. �At the same time, it's my view that the general sense of Columbia in [Manhattanville expansion] discussions ought to be and will be affected by what we are doing in conjunction with this project.�

Against a backdrop of library books and laptops, the mayor said the Columbia school would ease the burden on the city's seven existing specialized high schools, which only accept 15 percent of the eighth-graders who take the citywide specialized admissions test.

�Every year, these schools are forced to turn away thousands of students who perform well on these tests,� Bloomberg said. �These high-achieving students who are turned away need and deserve more options."

Under Bloomberg's tenure, three of those schools have been opened at public colleges. Columbia would be the first private university to integrate one of the schools into its campus, although President Bollinger emphasized that the school would be funded entirely by public money, with the University providing a site to the city on a long-term lease.

The extent of Columbia's involvement in the new school is still being worked out, University officials said. The city's Education Department will run the school, but Columbia professors will help design its curriculum. Faculty members or graduate students might teach classes or give lectures. After science departments move to Manhattanville, high school students would have easy access to research opportunities, and seniors would be able to take undergraduate courses side-by-side with Columbia students.

The school is not the University's first foray into high school science education. Columbia professors teach high school students on weekends in the Science Honors Program, and many SHP students end up majoring in hard science or engineering as Columbia undergraduates.

And high school students also do research in laboratories. University Professor Eric Kandel, a neurobiologist and Nobel laureate who was on hand for the mayor's announcement, said he had a winner of the prestigious Westinghouse science competition and several other outstanding students working with him.

The school will give preference to children living north of 96th Street entering in the sixth grade and will open additional spaces in the ninth grade for students who score high on the test.

But Community Board 9 chair Jordi Reyes-Montblanc dismissed the significance of the preferential admissions for Upper Manhattan residents.

�That doesn't really impress me,� he said. �I don't like these generalities about Upper Manhattan. I don't care about Upper Manhattan. I only care about Community Board 9. � I would expect that CB9 children would be the ones who would receive the lion's share of the preference.�

And with only 650 seats spread over seven grades, the school may have little effect on the space crunch in the existing specialized high schools, especially the three traditional ones, which are many times larger. Stuyvesant High School, considered by many to be the city's best, has 3,000 students; Bronx High School of Science has 2,400; and Brooklyn Technical High School has 4,200.

Bollinger responded that the size of the school was optimal. �We want this to be a very selective school,� he said. �Also, since it's on our campus, we have an interest in not having a very large high school.�

It is unclear how the new school would affect Roberto Clemente Middle School, just north of the site of the proposed campus on 133rd Street. Nevertheless, parents and students expressed enthusiasm for a new school option in the area.

�I think it would be great; I'd want my son to go,� said Helga Rotgans, a teacher's aide at the school and the mother of a 7th grader. �We do have kids here who would benefit from that. � Our classes are pretty large. The less [students] we have, the better.�

But Rotgans, who lives on 140th Street, added that she hoped the school would recognize hardships faced by many neighborhood students, such as single-parent households and drug addiction at home. �I want them to be sensitive to the kids from this neighborhood,� she said. �They're different from kids who live downtown.�

Tiffany Lewis, an eighth-grader at Corpus Christi School and a West Harlem resident, said the magnet school sounded like a place she would like to go to high school. Told that children from northern Manhattan would get preference in admission, she said, �I think that's fair. Other kids might not know the way we operate. Our learning system might be different from theirs.�

Her friend Cierrah Sankar, also in the eighth grade at Corpus Christi, agreed. �I think it's good. It's a great opportunity for kids,� she said.

Erin Durkin, Morgan Sellers, and Jimmy Vielkind contributed reporting for this article.