Some articles
Feb. 10th, 2010 01:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
One on an elementary school in the Bronx that focuses on foster kids
Pass the Squishy
By JENNIFER MEDINA
OF all the supplies at Haven Academy, a charter school in the South Bronx, none matter as much as the squishy. Like any elementary school, Haven has pencils, books and desks. But it is the squishy — a colorful rubber ball with dozens of tentacles that can withstand the strength of any young student — that daily absorbs a fit of anger or a mess of tears.
In the office of Jessica Nauiokas, the principal, a forlorn little boy yanks at a squishy and an angry little girl tosses one like a yo-yo. When Marquis, 6, was kicking and screaming one recent morning, a purple squishy was the only thing that could calm him.
Marquis, a kindergartner, had grown so frustrated with reading that he crawled under a table while other students wrote their alphabet letters; then he threw a chair across the room. Gabriella Cassandra, the school’s social worker, literally carried him to the principal’s office, where he again crawled under a chair.
“It looks like he needs all three squishies,” Tynisha Wynder, Haven’s behavior specialist, said to Ms. Nauiokas, who promptly turned around with two more.
Marquis slowly came out from under the chair, moving to slouch in his seat while fiddling with the squishy. He quieted down and hung his head, seemingly ashamed.
Every school has trouble with tantrums, but at Haven Academy, devising tactics to recover from them is a central part of the mission. Opened in the fall of 2008 by the New York Foundling, a 140-year-old foster care agency, Haven is the first school in the city designed to serve children from broken families. A third of its students are in foster care, and another third are under the watch of the Administration for Children’s Services (the remainder come from the surrounding Mott Haven neighborhood, one of the poorest in the country).
Foster children are among the hardest to educate and are more prone to be placed in special-education classrooms. Not only have they often been abused or abandoned, but many are also academically transient, sometimes starting over with new teachers and new friends in new schools multiple times a year.
So Haven, which as a charter school is publicly financed but privately managed, has on its staff a behavior specialist, a social worker, a special-education expert and an operations manager who coordinates transportation, along with two teachers in each classroom. They are, at times, akin to detectives, monitoring to see which children might be attacking their free breakfasts a little too hungrily, searching the hallways for signs that something might be amiss at home. The school has also budgeted $65,000 extra for transportation, promising to keep children enrolled even if they change addresses. This year, the school is relying on $250,000 in donations for the additional services.
“Because they present so many behavioral issues, these kids have kind of fallen through the black hole in public schools in big-city areas, and they need an awful lot of things,” said Bill Baccaglini, the executive director of the New York Foundling. “You want to talk about academic success, but my kids don’t show up ready for the three R’s. There’s no amount of math that a kid can be ready for if you saw your mother beaten, if you were beaten or if you are constantly dealing with turmoil.”
City officials say that nearly 10,000 foster children attend New York public schools, about a third of them in the Bronx. Haven, which has two classes each of kindergarten and first and second grades, plans to eventually enroll 300 students up to eighth grade.
Marquis and his twin brother, Maurice, were abandoned by their mother shortly after they were born, and live with an uncle (the school asked that students’ last names not be published). Both boys started at the school last year but were so far behind socially and academically that they are repeating kindergarten. Marquis, in particular, has trouble paying attention in class.
“It’s O.K. to be upset, but you have to use your words,” Ms. Wynder, the behavior specialist, said the morning of the chair-throwing. “Your uncle is not going to be happy to hear about today. He likes to know when you have a really good day, and this is not one of those.”
The uncle said that Haven had called as often as once a week to report that one or both of the boys had acted out. He is grateful: His sons, who are older, could cut class for days on end without his hearing about it, he said.
Marquis simply nodded when Ms. Wynder reminded him that she would have to call home. A few moments later, he began to write a note of apology to his teachers, one hand holding his pencil, the other tugging at the squishy in his lap.
•
It fell to Gwendy Fuentes, the support services coordinator, to tell a student, Jerome, who had already lived with four or five foster families, that he had to pack up his clothes and toys at home once more. He was being sent back to the family he had left several months before; he referred to the woman as “my mom.”
“Do you know you’re going back home soon?” Ms. Fuentes asked as they sat opposite each other in the principal’s office one morning. “Do you know how soon?”
Jerome’s answer betrayed a beyond-his-years familiarity with bureaucracy. “Very soon, as soon as they get the paperwork,” he said.
“How does that make you feel?” Ms. Fuentes asked.
“Happy,” he said, a question on the edge of his voice.
“Well, guess what?” Ms. Fuentes said. “I think you are going home tonight.”
“Good,” the boy said. But when Ms. Fuentes asked, “How do you feel about leaving?” Jerome looked down. “I feel kind of sad,” he said.
She assured him that it was normal.
“We’re still going to hang out together, and we’re going to go places together,” he said of the foster mother he would be leaving. “I was with her for nine months. That’s a very long time.”
Jerome, who is in second grade, skipped out of the room, apparently unfazed. Ms. Fuentes made certain that her colleagues knew to keep an eye on him for several weeks, just in case something changed.
The conversation was hardly unusual. More than a dozen of the 91 students at Haven last school year moved at least once; one student switched homes six times.
Getting such students to and from class can be a Herculean task. The school hires two vans to snake through the borough and pick up 17 scattered students. One van begins near Crotona Park and winds to the Bruckner Expressway; the other starts near the Bruckner and makes its way north to East Gun Hill Road. The routes change regularly as students move around.
“It’s pretty much an ongoing process,” said Tina Martinez, the operations director for the school. “We’re always changing along with the circumstances.”
•
For weeks, Zakiyah was unable to concentrate in the morning. She would look off into space, or cry inconsolably for more than an hour, or fidget frenetically, distracting all the kindergartners around her. Eventually, the school allowed her to arrive more than an hour after the day began and let her mother stay for another hour after that.
But one Tuesday morning, even those accommodations were not nearly enough. Zakiyah had missed a special pancake breakfast with parents, and when the day’s phonics lesson began, she sat near the front of the room holding a doll. She remained that way for an hour, the doll in her left hand and a felt-tip marker in her right. Her mother watched from a few feet away.
Two hours later, Zakiyah dashed out of the third-floor classroom, an intern chasing her down the hall. Ms. Wynder found her a few minutes later on the ground level and carried her back upstairs to an office.
“Let’s write about what fun you had this morning,” Ms. Wynder suggested.
“I didn’t have fun,” Zakiyah retorted, at once nuzzling Ms. Wynder’s lap and pulling away.
“Did you get to have pancakes?” Ms. Wynder asked. Zakiyah shook her head. “No? Well, no wonder you didn’t have fun.”
For months, the teachers and Ms. Wynder have been grappling with what to do about Zakiyah. Are her empty stares and refusal to engage with classmates signs of autism, which was the diagnosis made for both of her brothers several years ago? Or are they scars from shuttling between her mother and foster homes for much of her six years?
The Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago has found that foster children are twice as likely to be classified as learning-disabled; more than 60 percent of the foster children in a 2004 study by the center were found to be at least six months behind their peers.
Haven’s curriculum is no different from that of many high-poverty schools: It is heavy on basic skills in reading, writing and math. But teachers make aggressive use of timers to lend structure to the day and take pains to present concrete tasks and tangible goals: After reading on their own, for example, first graders might spend several minutes spelling dozens of words out loud.
Differences about the student body are revealed in language more than in lesson plans. Characters in any discussion of family, for example, are likely to include “my birth mommy,” “my other mommy” and “the agency.”
“We want to make sure that it’s a safe place for any of that and nobody views it as anything but normal,” Ms. Wynder said.
Teachers are taught to pay particular attention in the morning, watching for clues that a student might have had an emotional visit with a family member the night before.
The beginning of the school week is particularly trying, especially after a long weekend or holiday.
On the first day back after New Year’s, about 20 of the 130 students were absent. Ms. Nauiokas greeted each of those who made it with a high-five or a hug and made sure they were wearing the school uniform, which pairs traditional khakis with unusual jewel-toned polo shirts that create a vibrant rainbow in every room. She pulled those who were not in uniform aside and quietly took them to the office to find the right size among her supply. When a first-grade student showed up with a plastic shopping bag instead of a backpack, Ms. Nauiokas gave her an extra one.
The children in foster care, Ms. Nauiokas said, have the best attendance and are most likely to arrive with clean uniforms and stuffed backpacks. Those living with their birth families but under the watch of social workers tend to miss the most class, she said.
•
The school relies on what experts call “logical consequences” rather than traditional punishment, and those consequences depend on students’ personal history and circumstances. A boy is allowed to leave the classroom whenever he finds it necessary, for example, permitted to play with his own bag of toys as a way to cool his irritation. Others have a free pass to the take-a-break corner, a chair in a quiet spot where they can pull themselves together until they are ready to rejoin the group.
“You can either freak out if you spill your milk or learn how to deal with it,” Ms. Nauiokas explained. “The same goes for any kind of mistake.”
But one second-grade pupil had struggled to control herself since September. She had everyone’s permission to leave if she could not focus. Yet, sometimes even that seemed difficult to remember. One morning in November, she started screaming uncontrollably.
The girl was taken to the office to talk to Amana Valencia, the special teacher for those learning English, with whom she had grown close.
“Am I in trouble?” she asked meekly.
Ms. Valencia did not answer directly. “We talked about being in class and telling them you need a break,” she reminded her.
The girl, all of 7, pleaded, “I did, but they didn’t listen.”
She pulled anxiously at a squishy. It was Ms. Wynder’s idea to have a supply of the $3 toys, knowing that twisting and squeezing them can be soothing. The school has gone through about a dozen, learning over time which style is least destructible by frustrated little hands.
“I want you to show that you can be a second grader,” Ms. Valencia told the girl. “Lunch is at 12:45. I want you to read a book until then. I will stay with you until you are ready.”
It was 11:30. “What happens if I doesn’t feel ready?” the girl asked.
Then, Ms. Valencia told her, we’ll wait longer.
Soon after, Ms. Valencia started spending much of each day in the girl’s classroom to keep the peace and to let her teachers teach. The girl sat in Ms. Valencia’s lap, and the teacher ran her fingers gently up and down her arm.
But even this extraordinary attention proved not to be enough. Weeks passed, and the girl spent more time outside of the classroom than in it. After a special-education evaluation, school officials and the girl’s foster mother moved her to a school for students with significant academic and emotional disabilities.
“You know all about going to a new school, right?” Ms. Valencia asked the girl one afternoon, sitting at the same table where she had had a tantrum several times before. “How do you feel?”
“Am I still going to get a present?” the girl answered in a kind of non sequitur.
Yes, Ms. Valencia assured her.
“O.K., I feel O.K.,” the girl said.
The new school was not too far away, Ms. Valencia told her. And at 3 p.m. each day, she would be coming back to Haven Academy, where her brother is in first grade, for after-school activities like painting and volleyball. The girl smiled, gently tossing the squishy that had been stashed away on a nearby desk.
One on gay marriage in Mexico
Gay Marriage Puts Mexico City at Center of Debate
By ELISABETH MALKIN
MEXICO CITY — Angela Alfarache and Ivonne Cervantes met at a party 16 years ago and have been a couple ever since, filling their lives with books and writing and friends. After their daughter, Constanza, was born six years ago, they became a family.
Mexican law never saw it that way. Only Constanza’s biological mother — the pair will not say which one gave birth to her because, as they explain, they are both her mothers — is her legal parent. The law does not recognize the other mother.
In a few weeks, that will change. A new Mexico City law goes into effect March 4 that will allow same-sex couples to marry and adopt children, propelling the city to the forefront of the global gay rights movement.
“We want society to change its chip that says there is only one kind of family,” said Ms. Alfarache.
But fierce opposition erupted almost as soon as the law was passed on Dec. 22. In his final homily of the year in Mexico City, Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera said, “Today the family is under attack in its essence by the equivalence of homosexual unions with marriage between a man and a woman.” Roman Catholic groups asked the conservative federal government to intervene.
President Felipe Calderón said the Constitution defined marriage as between a man and a woman, although legal experts disagree. His attorney general filed a challenge before the Supreme Court, arguing that the law violates a constitutional clause protecting the family.
Under its left-wing mayor and city assembly, Mexico City has stretched the nation’s limits in acknowledging just how much the conceptions and realities of family have changed here. The city legalized abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, untangled its cumbersome divorce laws and recognized civil unions.
But while many families have been fractured by migration, teenage pregnancy, divorce and abandonment, most Mexicans still cherish the ideal of a nuclear family.
“The same word cannot have two different meanings,” said Mariana Gómez del Campo, the Mexico City leader of the president’s National Action Party, or PAN. “It will weaken the legal definition of marriage.”
More important, she said, is protecting children’s rights. “One of their rights is to have a family,” she said. “A child does not get to decide what kind of family it is.”
In an unscientific poll taken and cited by the party, just over half of the respondents disapproved of gay marriage and about three-quarters opposed adoption by same-sex couples.
But even if that accurately represents Mexican sentiments, the law’s backers in the city assembly as well as among gay men and lesbians argue that their vote was aimed at expanding rights, a decision that cannot be based on opinion polls or referendums.
“Politically, the federal government is declaring that the Constitution only protects heterosexual families,” said David Razú, the city legislator who proposed the new law. “It’s a government that discriminates against its own citizens.”
The federal government says that Mexico City’s 2007 civil unions law gives same-sex couples the rights they have been seeking. But in practice — when it comes to including a partner in public health insurance plans, applying for state bank loans or recognizing a parent — the law has not worked, said Judith Vázquez, a gay rights activist.
In positioning himself as a defiant social liberal, Mexico City’s mayor, Marcelo Ebrard, is taking a political gamble. He wants to run for president in 2012, and his views may find little resonance outside the capital, where the Roman Catholic Church holds much greater sway.
“We are looking at the recognition of rights and liberties, and in this there is a big difference between conservatives and those of us with a liberal or different or advanced ideas of rights,” Mr. Ebrard told reporters in response to the federal government’s court challenge in January.
The city will not wait for the Supreme Court ruling, which could take as long as a year, Mr. Ebrard added. Once they marry, same-sex spouses will be able to adopt openly as a couple in Mexico City.
The city’s decisions — along with the election of two national presidents from the conservative PAN since 2000 — have emboldened the Catholic Church to speak out and even lobby politically in the past few years. Mexico has a long history of anticlericalism, going back to laws in the mid-19th century. Even after Mexico restored full rights to religious groups in 1992, the Catholic Church was at first careful not to be seen as involving itself directly in politics.
Elsewhere in Latin America there have been steps toward approving gay marriage. In Argentina, the debate over gay marriage is making its way through the courts, although the southernmost province, Tierra del Fuego, welcomed Latin America’s first gay wedding there on Dec. 29. Uruguay allows civil unions and is moving toward allowing same-sex couples to adopt. Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador and Colombia all recognize some form of civil unions.
For the gay rights movement, Mexico City’s law was the result of 30 years of activism. Ms. Cervantes, 44, a fiction writer, and Ms. Alfarache, 50, an anthropologist who works on women’s rights issues, have been able to raise their daughter in the open-minded environment of the capital’s university-educated minority. Working-class couples or those outside the city face many more barriers, they say.
Several members of Ms. Cervantes’s family are conservative Catholics who are struggling to reconcile their faith with their uncomfortable acceptance of her family. “Once you know what scares you, it begins to break down what you believe in,” Ms. Cervantes said.
Even in their liberal enclave, the couple contend that they and their daughter should be assured of their rights.
“Our families, our doctors, the teachers — they all know that there are two mothers,” said Ms. Alfarache, nodding at Constanza. “But you can’t leave rights to people’s good will. We want the whole package, the rights — and the responsibilities.”
One on Access-a-Ride in the city.
A Godsend, Except When It’s Not
By ARIEL KAMINER
Jean Ryan is the kind of New Yorker who makes everyone else feel lazy. She has two master’s degrees and a black belt in tae kwon do. She serves on her local community board. You know the type? Try this one: When she had eye surgery two weeks ago, she refused sedation.
She and her husband moved to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, in 1972, counting on the R train to get to Manhattan galleries and museums and plays and restaurants.
Then Ms. Ryan developed neuropathy in her legs and feet. Now she uses a motorized wheelchair, which pretty much rules out the subway. There’s an express bus near her home, but the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s proposed cutbacks include curtailing it on weekends. Car services are out, since her chair cannot be folded up and thrown into a trunk. So Ms. Ryan, 65, increasingly relies on Access-a-Ride, the vans that provide door-to-door transportation for disabled people, for $2.25 — the same as for a subway or a bus.
One day last week we set out together to see a show of tapestries in Chelsea and run some errands on the Upper East Side. A white Ford Super Duty arrived outside Ms. Ryan’s home right on schedule for a 9:47 a.m. pickup. A friendly, courteous driver opened the door, and Ms. Ryan, wearing black Uggs, a long parka, battery-heated gloves and a hat with little bear ears, rolled onto the vehicle’s sturdy lift. The driver attached some metal cleats to a seam in the van’s floor, then arranged long belts to secure passenger and chair.
Two other women were already on board, so I invited them to join us for tapestries.
“Ancient or modern?” one asked. Modern, I said.
“Machine-loomed or hand-woven?” She seemed surprised that I didn’t know. “It’s a basic question.”
Twenty-five minutes later we were outside the James Cohan Gallery, ready for our cultural moment. They’re hand-woven, by the way.
Service like that is enough to make you wonder if all the 137,000 people who are certified to use Access-a-Ride really need it. Come on, if you could get away with it, wouldn’t you want a personal chauffeur at subway prices?
No, you probably wouldn’t. While the service can be a lifeline, it is far more cumbersome than hailing a cab or hopping on a train.
You have to make a reservation one to two days in advance. That means knowing not only when you’ll be ready to set out, but also where your first stop will be, how long it will last, where your second stop will be, how long that will last, and so on. What if the doctor is running late? Or the movie is a dud? Too bad.
Unless your doorway has a direct view of the curb, you have to wait outside. Tom Charles, the M.T.A.’s vice president for paratransit, said that 95 percent of departures are on time — but “on time” means within a half-hour. Half an hour is a long time to wait on the sidewalk. If you have a serious disability and it’s 34 degrees and raining, it can be downright painful.
The M.T.A. oversees Access-a-Ride, but contracts with 17 private companies to provide the 21,000 rides on an average weekday. So when a passenger calls the dispatcher to see how late a driver is going to be, the private carrier might be overly optimistic, lest the ride — and its fee — be reassigned to a competitor. Ms. Ryan, a leader of Disabled in Action, Taxis for All and other groups that lobby for better transit accessibility, said passengers are often told it will be 10 minutes, then 10 minutes more. After an hour, maybe you duck back inside to use the bathroom. That’s when the van rolls up and you miss your ride for the day.
Perhaps such complaints seem a bit precious in a city the size of New York, where the M.T.A. is facing a shortfall of $400 million. The whole idea of door-to-door service for disabled riders might strike some as a politically correct luxury. But it isn’t political correctness; it’s federal law. Under the Americans With Disabilities Act,public transportation systems have to provide disabled people with “origin-to-destination” service. Even when their destination is a casino, as The New York Daily News recently discovered was the 17th most popular.
Still, the current system costs a staggering $474 million a year, which works out to $66 per ride. That’s a crazy amount to spend on trips to the casino. It’s a crazy amount to spend on trips anywhere. Isn’t there a better way?
The M.T.A. could run its own vans, just as it runs buses and trains. Mr. Charles said that would be more expensive.
Or the M.T.A. could give disabled riders a debit card and let them arrange their own taxi or car service. That would not help Ms. Ryan, since 98 percent of cabs are not wheelchair accessible. But it would work for lots of other people, and it would have to be cheaper — when’s the last time you took a $66 taxi ride?
They have to make some change. M.T.A. budgets are getting slashed, which portends more nightmares like the one Ruth Weber, a 75-year-old paraplegic, wrote to City Hall about last year.
Ms. Weber had requested a 3:30 p.m. pickup at a Manhattan hospital. The van arrived late, then zigzagged through Brooklyn and Queens before delivering her to her home in the Bronx at 8 p.m., by which time she was in terrible shape. Imagine if one day your hourlong commute took four and a half hours. Now imagine if you were locked into your seat that whole time and could not move.
That feeling of being captive — to a system she’s been trying to fix for years — is what Ms. Ryan finds infuriating. She and I rode the white vans all over town last week, and we had attentive drivers, timely arrivals and pleasant passengers. When all goes smoothly, it’s a godsend.
“It’s as good as the day you take it,” she said. “When we’ve missed the doctor’s appointment or the flight, it’s as bad as it was 10 years ago.”
Pass the Squishy
By JENNIFER MEDINA
OF all the supplies at Haven Academy, a charter school in the South Bronx, none matter as much as the squishy. Like any elementary school, Haven has pencils, books and desks. But it is the squishy — a colorful rubber ball with dozens of tentacles that can withstand the strength of any young student — that daily absorbs a fit of anger or a mess of tears.
In the office of Jessica Nauiokas, the principal, a forlorn little boy yanks at a squishy and an angry little girl tosses one like a yo-yo. When Marquis, 6, was kicking and screaming one recent morning, a purple squishy was the only thing that could calm him.
Marquis, a kindergartner, had grown so frustrated with reading that he crawled under a table while other students wrote their alphabet letters; then he threw a chair across the room. Gabriella Cassandra, the school’s social worker, literally carried him to the principal’s office, where he again crawled under a chair.
“It looks like he needs all three squishies,” Tynisha Wynder, Haven’s behavior specialist, said to Ms. Nauiokas, who promptly turned around with two more.
Marquis slowly came out from under the chair, moving to slouch in his seat while fiddling with the squishy. He quieted down and hung his head, seemingly ashamed.
Every school has trouble with tantrums, but at Haven Academy, devising tactics to recover from them is a central part of the mission. Opened in the fall of 2008 by the New York Foundling, a 140-year-old foster care agency, Haven is the first school in the city designed to serve children from broken families. A third of its students are in foster care, and another third are under the watch of the Administration for Children’s Services (the remainder come from the surrounding Mott Haven neighborhood, one of the poorest in the country).
Foster children are among the hardest to educate and are more prone to be placed in special-education classrooms. Not only have they often been abused or abandoned, but many are also academically transient, sometimes starting over with new teachers and new friends in new schools multiple times a year.
So Haven, which as a charter school is publicly financed but privately managed, has on its staff a behavior specialist, a social worker, a special-education expert and an operations manager who coordinates transportation, along with two teachers in each classroom. They are, at times, akin to detectives, monitoring to see which children might be attacking their free breakfasts a little too hungrily, searching the hallways for signs that something might be amiss at home. The school has also budgeted $65,000 extra for transportation, promising to keep children enrolled even if they change addresses. This year, the school is relying on $250,000 in donations for the additional services.
“Because they present so many behavioral issues, these kids have kind of fallen through the black hole in public schools in big-city areas, and they need an awful lot of things,” said Bill Baccaglini, the executive director of the New York Foundling. “You want to talk about academic success, but my kids don’t show up ready for the three R’s. There’s no amount of math that a kid can be ready for if you saw your mother beaten, if you were beaten or if you are constantly dealing with turmoil.”
City officials say that nearly 10,000 foster children attend New York public schools, about a third of them in the Bronx. Haven, which has two classes each of kindergarten and first and second grades, plans to eventually enroll 300 students up to eighth grade.
Marquis and his twin brother, Maurice, were abandoned by their mother shortly after they were born, and live with an uncle (the school asked that students’ last names not be published). Both boys started at the school last year but were so far behind socially and academically that they are repeating kindergarten. Marquis, in particular, has trouble paying attention in class.
“It’s O.K. to be upset, but you have to use your words,” Ms. Wynder, the behavior specialist, said the morning of the chair-throwing. “Your uncle is not going to be happy to hear about today. He likes to know when you have a really good day, and this is not one of those.”
The uncle said that Haven had called as often as once a week to report that one or both of the boys had acted out. He is grateful: His sons, who are older, could cut class for days on end without his hearing about it, he said.
Marquis simply nodded when Ms. Wynder reminded him that she would have to call home. A few moments later, he began to write a note of apology to his teachers, one hand holding his pencil, the other tugging at the squishy in his lap.
•
It fell to Gwendy Fuentes, the support services coordinator, to tell a student, Jerome, who had already lived with four or five foster families, that he had to pack up his clothes and toys at home once more. He was being sent back to the family he had left several months before; he referred to the woman as “my mom.”
“Do you know you’re going back home soon?” Ms. Fuentes asked as they sat opposite each other in the principal’s office one morning. “Do you know how soon?”
Jerome’s answer betrayed a beyond-his-years familiarity with bureaucracy. “Very soon, as soon as they get the paperwork,” he said.
“How does that make you feel?” Ms. Fuentes asked.
“Happy,” he said, a question on the edge of his voice.
“Well, guess what?” Ms. Fuentes said. “I think you are going home tonight.”
“Good,” the boy said. But when Ms. Fuentes asked, “How do you feel about leaving?” Jerome looked down. “I feel kind of sad,” he said.
She assured him that it was normal.
“We’re still going to hang out together, and we’re going to go places together,” he said of the foster mother he would be leaving. “I was with her for nine months. That’s a very long time.”
Jerome, who is in second grade, skipped out of the room, apparently unfazed. Ms. Fuentes made certain that her colleagues knew to keep an eye on him for several weeks, just in case something changed.
The conversation was hardly unusual. More than a dozen of the 91 students at Haven last school year moved at least once; one student switched homes six times.
Getting such students to and from class can be a Herculean task. The school hires two vans to snake through the borough and pick up 17 scattered students. One van begins near Crotona Park and winds to the Bruckner Expressway; the other starts near the Bruckner and makes its way north to East Gun Hill Road. The routes change regularly as students move around.
“It’s pretty much an ongoing process,” said Tina Martinez, the operations director for the school. “We’re always changing along with the circumstances.”
•
For weeks, Zakiyah was unable to concentrate in the morning. She would look off into space, or cry inconsolably for more than an hour, or fidget frenetically, distracting all the kindergartners around her. Eventually, the school allowed her to arrive more than an hour after the day began and let her mother stay for another hour after that.
But one Tuesday morning, even those accommodations were not nearly enough. Zakiyah had missed a special pancake breakfast with parents, and when the day’s phonics lesson began, she sat near the front of the room holding a doll. She remained that way for an hour, the doll in her left hand and a felt-tip marker in her right. Her mother watched from a few feet away.
Two hours later, Zakiyah dashed out of the third-floor classroom, an intern chasing her down the hall. Ms. Wynder found her a few minutes later on the ground level and carried her back upstairs to an office.
“Let’s write about what fun you had this morning,” Ms. Wynder suggested.
“I didn’t have fun,” Zakiyah retorted, at once nuzzling Ms. Wynder’s lap and pulling away.
“Did you get to have pancakes?” Ms. Wynder asked. Zakiyah shook her head. “No? Well, no wonder you didn’t have fun.”
For months, the teachers and Ms. Wynder have been grappling with what to do about Zakiyah. Are her empty stares and refusal to engage with classmates signs of autism, which was the diagnosis made for both of her brothers several years ago? Or are they scars from shuttling between her mother and foster homes for much of her six years?
The Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago has found that foster children are twice as likely to be classified as learning-disabled; more than 60 percent of the foster children in a 2004 study by the center were found to be at least six months behind their peers.
Haven’s curriculum is no different from that of many high-poverty schools: It is heavy on basic skills in reading, writing and math. But teachers make aggressive use of timers to lend structure to the day and take pains to present concrete tasks and tangible goals: After reading on their own, for example, first graders might spend several minutes spelling dozens of words out loud.
Differences about the student body are revealed in language more than in lesson plans. Characters in any discussion of family, for example, are likely to include “my birth mommy,” “my other mommy” and “the agency.”
“We want to make sure that it’s a safe place for any of that and nobody views it as anything but normal,” Ms. Wynder said.
Teachers are taught to pay particular attention in the morning, watching for clues that a student might have had an emotional visit with a family member the night before.
The beginning of the school week is particularly trying, especially after a long weekend or holiday.
On the first day back after New Year’s, about 20 of the 130 students were absent. Ms. Nauiokas greeted each of those who made it with a high-five or a hug and made sure they were wearing the school uniform, which pairs traditional khakis with unusual jewel-toned polo shirts that create a vibrant rainbow in every room. She pulled those who were not in uniform aside and quietly took them to the office to find the right size among her supply. When a first-grade student showed up with a plastic shopping bag instead of a backpack, Ms. Nauiokas gave her an extra one.
The children in foster care, Ms. Nauiokas said, have the best attendance and are most likely to arrive with clean uniforms and stuffed backpacks. Those living with their birth families but under the watch of social workers tend to miss the most class, she said.
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The school relies on what experts call “logical consequences” rather than traditional punishment, and those consequences depend on students’ personal history and circumstances. A boy is allowed to leave the classroom whenever he finds it necessary, for example, permitted to play with his own bag of toys as a way to cool his irritation. Others have a free pass to the take-a-break corner, a chair in a quiet spot where they can pull themselves together until they are ready to rejoin the group.
“You can either freak out if you spill your milk or learn how to deal with it,” Ms. Nauiokas explained. “The same goes for any kind of mistake.”
But one second-grade pupil had struggled to control herself since September. She had everyone’s permission to leave if she could not focus. Yet, sometimes even that seemed difficult to remember. One morning in November, she started screaming uncontrollably.
The girl was taken to the office to talk to Amana Valencia, the special teacher for those learning English, with whom she had grown close.
“Am I in trouble?” she asked meekly.
Ms. Valencia did not answer directly. “We talked about being in class and telling them you need a break,” she reminded her.
The girl, all of 7, pleaded, “I did, but they didn’t listen.”
She pulled anxiously at a squishy. It was Ms. Wynder’s idea to have a supply of the $3 toys, knowing that twisting and squeezing them can be soothing. The school has gone through about a dozen, learning over time which style is least destructible by frustrated little hands.
“I want you to show that you can be a second grader,” Ms. Valencia told the girl. “Lunch is at 12:45. I want you to read a book until then. I will stay with you until you are ready.”
It was 11:30. “What happens if I doesn’t feel ready?” the girl asked.
Then, Ms. Valencia told her, we’ll wait longer.
Soon after, Ms. Valencia started spending much of each day in the girl’s classroom to keep the peace and to let her teachers teach. The girl sat in Ms. Valencia’s lap, and the teacher ran her fingers gently up and down her arm.
But even this extraordinary attention proved not to be enough. Weeks passed, and the girl spent more time outside of the classroom than in it. After a special-education evaluation, school officials and the girl’s foster mother moved her to a school for students with significant academic and emotional disabilities.
“You know all about going to a new school, right?” Ms. Valencia asked the girl one afternoon, sitting at the same table where she had had a tantrum several times before. “How do you feel?”
“Am I still going to get a present?” the girl answered in a kind of non sequitur.
Yes, Ms. Valencia assured her.
“O.K., I feel O.K.,” the girl said.
The new school was not too far away, Ms. Valencia told her. And at 3 p.m. each day, she would be coming back to Haven Academy, where her brother is in first grade, for after-school activities like painting and volleyball. The girl smiled, gently tossing the squishy that had been stashed away on a nearby desk.
One on gay marriage in Mexico
Gay Marriage Puts Mexico City at Center of Debate
By ELISABETH MALKIN
MEXICO CITY — Angela Alfarache and Ivonne Cervantes met at a party 16 years ago and have been a couple ever since, filling their lives with books and writing and friends. After their daughter, Constanza, was born six years ago, they became a family.
Mexican law never saw it that way. Only Constanza’s biological mother — the pair will not say which one gave birth to her because, as they explain, they are both her mothers — is her legal parent. The law does not recognize the other mother.
In a few weeks, that will change. A new Mexico City law goes into effect March 4 that will allow same-sex couples to marry and adopt children, propelling the city to the forefront of the global gay rights movement.
“We want society to change its chip that says there is only one kind of family,” said Ms. Alfarache.
But fierce opposition erupted almost as soon as the law was passed on Dec. 22. In his final homily of the year in Mexico City, Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera said, “Today the family is under attack in its essence by the equivalence of homosexual unions with marriage between a man and a woman.” Roman Catholic groups asked the conservative federal government to intervene.
President Felipe Calderón said the Constitution defined marriage as between a man and a woman, although legal experts disagree. His attorney general filed a challenge before the Supreme Court, arguing that the law violates a constitutional clause protecting the family.
Under its left-wing mayor and city assembly, Mexico City has stretched the nation’s limits in acknowledging just how much the conceptions and realities of family have changed here. The city legalized abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, untangled its cumbersome divorce laws and recognized civil unions.
But while many families have been fractured by migration, teenage pregnancy, divorce and abandonment, most Mexicans still cherish the ideal of a nuclear family.
“The same word cannot have two different meanings,” said Mariana Gómez del Campo, the Mexico City leader of the president’s National Action Party, or PAN. “It will weaken the legal definition of marriage.”
More important, she said, is protecting children’s rights. “One of their rights is to have a family,” she said. “A child does not get to decide what kind of family it is.”
In an unscientific poll taken and cited by the party, just over half of the respondents disapproved of gay marriage and about three-quarters opposed adoption by same-sex couples.
But even if that accurately represents Mexican sentiments, the law’s backers in the city assembly as well as among gay men and lesbians argue that their vote was aimed at expanding rights, a decision that cannot be based on opinion polls or referendums.
“Politically, the federal government is declaring that the Constitution only protects heterosexual families,” said David Razú, the city legislator who proposed the new law. “It’s a government that discriminates against its own citizens.”
The federal government says that Mexico City’s 2007 civil unions law gives same-sex couples the rights they have been seeking. But in practice — when it comes to including a partner in public health insurance plans, applying for state bank loans or recognizing a parent — the law has not worked, said Judith Vázquez, a gay rights activist.
In positioning himself as a defiant social liberal, Mexico City’s mayor, Marcelo Ebrard, is taking a political gamble. He wants to run for president in 2012, and his views may find little resonance outside the capital, where the Roman Catholic Church holds much greater sway.
“We are looking at the recognition of rights and liberties, and in this there is a big difference between conservatives and those of us with a liberal or different or advanced ideas of rights,” Mr. Ebrard told reporters in response to the federal government’s court challenge in January.
The city will not wait for the Supreme Court ruling, which could take as long as a year, Mr. Ebrard added. Once they marry, same-sex spouses will be able to adopt openly as a couple in Mexico City.
The city’s decisions — along with the election of two national presidents from the conservative PAN since 2000 — have emboldened the Catholic Church to speak out and even lobby politically in the past few years. Mexico has a long history of anticlericalism, going back to laws in the mid-19th century. Even after Mexico restored full rights to religious groups in 1992, the Catholic Church was at first careful not to be seen as involving itself directly in politics.
Elsewhere in Latin America there have been steps toward approving gay marriage. In Argentina, the debate over gay marriage is making its way through the courts, although the southernmost province, Tierra del Fuego, welcomed Latin America’s first gay wedding there on Dec. 29. Uruguay allows civil unions and is moving toward allowing same-sex couples to adopt. Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador and Colombia all recognize some form of civil unions.
For the gay rights movement, Mexico City’s law was the result of 30 years of activism. Ms. Cervantes, 44, a fiction writer, and Ms. Alfarache, 50, an anthropologist who works on women’s rights issues, have been able to raise their daughter in the open-minded environment of the capital’s university-educated minority. Working-class couples or those outside the city face many more barriers, they say.
Several members of Ms. Cervantes’s family are conservative Catholics who are struggling to reconcile their faith with their uncomfortable acceptance of her family. “Once you know what scares you, it begins to break down what you believe in,” Ms. Cervantes said.
Even in their liberal enclave, the couple contend that they and their daughter should be assured of their rights.
“Our families, our doctors, the teachers — they all know that there are two mothers,” said Ms. Alfarache, nodding at Constanza. “But you can’t leave rights to people’s good will. We want the whole package, the rights — and the responsibilities.”
One on Access-a-Ride in the city.
A Godsend, Except When It’s Not
By ARIEL KAMINER
Jean Ryan is the kind of New Yorker who makes everyone else feel lazy. She has two master’s degrees and a black belt in tae kwon do. She serves on her local community board. You know the type? Try this one: When she had eye surgery two weeks ago, she refused sedation.
She and her husband moved to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, in 1972, counting on the R train to get to Manhattan galleries and museums and plays and restaurants.
Then Ms. Ryan developed neuropathy in her legs and feet. Now she uses a motorized wheelchair, which pretty much rules out the subway. There’s an express bus near her home, but the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s proposed cutbacks include curtailing it on weekends. Car services are out, since her chair cannot be folded up and thrown into a trunk. So Ms. Ryan, 65, increasingly relies on Access-a-Ride, the vans that provide door-to-door transportation for disabled people, for $2.25 — the same as for a subway or a bus.
One day last week we set out together to see a show of tapestries in Chelsea and run some errands on the Upper East Side. A white Ford Super Duty arrived outside Ms. Ryan’s home right on schedule for a 9:47 a.m. pickup. A friendly, courteous driver opened the door, and Ms. Ryan, wearing black Uggs, a long parka, battery-heated gloves and a hat with little bear ears, rolled onto the vehicle’s sturdy lift. The driver attached some metal cleats to a seam in the van’s floor, then arranged long belts to secure passenger and chair.
Two other women were already on board, so I invited them to join us for tapestries.
“Ancient or modern?” one asked. Modern, I said.
“Machine-loomed or hand-woven?” She seemed surprised that I didn’t know. “It’s a basic question.”
Twenty-five minutes later we were outside the James Cohan Gallery, ready for our cultural moment. They’re hand-woven, by the way.
Service like that is enough to make you wonder if all the 137,000 people who are certified to use Access-a-Ride really need it. Come on, if you could get away with it, wouldn’t you want a personal chauffeur at subway prices?
No, you probably wouldn’t. While the service can be a lifeline, it is far more cumbersome than hailing a cab or hopping on a train.
You have to make a reservation one to two days in advance. That means knowing not only when you’ll be ready to set out, but also where your first stop will be, how long it will last, where your second stop will be, how long that will last, and so on. What if the doctor is running late? Or the movie is a dud? Too bad.
Unless your doorway has a direct view of the curb, you have to wait outside. Tom Charles, the M.T.A.’s vice president for paratransit, said that 95 percent of departures are on time — but “on time” means within a half-hour. Half an hour is a long time to wait on the sidewalk. If you have a serious disability and it’s 34 degrees and raining, it can be downright painful.
The M.T.A. oversees Access-a-Ride, but contracts with 17 private companies to provide the 21,000 rides on an average weekday. So when a passenger calls the dispatcher to see how late a driver is going to be, the private carrier might be overly optimistic, lest the ride — and its fee — be reassigned to a competitor. Ms. Ryan, a leader of Disabled in Action, Taxis for All and other groups that lobby for better transit accessibility, said passengers are often told it will be 10 minutes, then 10 minutes more. After an hour, maybe you duck back inside to use the bathroom. That’s when the van rolls up and you miss your ride for the day.
Perhaps such complaints seem a bit precious in a city the size of New York, where the M.T.A. is facing a shortfall of $400 million. The whole idea of door-to-door service for disabled riders might strike some as a politically correct luxury. But it isn’t political correctness; it’s federal law. Under the Americans With Disabilities Act,public transportation systems have to provide disabled people with “origin-to-destination” service. Even when their destination is a casino, as The New York Daily News recently discovered was the 17th most popular.
Still, the current system costs a staggering $474 million a year, which works out to $66 per ride. That’s a crazy amount to spend on trips to the casino. It’s a crazy amount to spend on trips anywhere. Isn’t there a better way?
The M.T.A. could run its own vans, just as it runs buses and trains. Mr. Charles said that would be more expensive.
Or the M.T.A. could give disabled riders a debit card and let them arrange their own taxi or car service. That would not help Ms. Ryan, since 98 percent of cabs are not wheelchair accessible. But it would work for lots of other people, and it would have to be cheaper — when’s the last time you took a $66 taxi ride?
They have to make some change. M.T.A. budgets are getting slashed, which portends more nightmares like the one Ruth Weber, a 75-year-old paraplegic, wrote to City Hall about last year.
Ms. Weber had requested a 3:30 p.m. pickup at a Manhattan hospital. The van arrived late, then zigzagged through Brooklyn and Queens before delivering her to her home in the Bronx at 8 p.m., by which time she was in terrible shape. Imagine if one day your hourlong commute took four and a half hours. Now imagine if you were locked into your seat that whole time and could not move.
That feeling of being captive — to a system she’s been trying to fix for years — is what Ms. Ryan finds infuriating. She and I rode the white vans all over town last week, and we had attentive drivers, timely arrivals and pleasant passengers. When all goes smoothly, it’s a godsend.
“It’s as good as the day you take it,” she said. “When we’ve missed the doctor’s appointment or the flight, it’s as bad as it was 10 years ago.”
