One Block; Two Schools; Different Worlds
A thriving private school shares the same Bed-Stuy block with a shrinking public school
By Leena Sanzgiri
Two schools exist within a block of one another in Bedford-Stuyvesant. P.S. 3, once the largest school in the district, is now suffering from decreasing enrollment and the alarming metrics of a failing public school. The other, the private Brooklyn Waldorf School, is steadily approaching full capacity. They share little but a common playground; P.S. 3’s students are overwhelmingly black. Brooklyn Waldorf’s are mostly white.
P.S. 3 opened in 1950. Brooklyn Waldorf arrived on the block in 2011; four years later, in 2015, the State Comptroller’s office reported that Bed-Stuy’s long-term residents had a median income of just $28,000. That was less than Brooklyn Waldorf’s annual average tuition of $30,000.
P.S. 3 had been an integral part of the neighborhood for over 60 years. But when the decision was made to locate a private school in a neighborhood long associated with crime and poverty, it was clear just how dramatically Bed-Stuy was changing. In 2015, for example, the median income of new residents in the neighborhood was $50,200. That same year the median home value in the neighborhood was $779,400 — a 61 percent increase over 2005’s figure of $484,000.
Walking down Fulton Street, one of Bed-Stuy’s main avenues, storefronts are largely a mix of long-established ethnic markets — West Indian, Korean, and Pakistani — and fast food chains. But the typical retail signs of affluent change have started appearing, as pricey cafes and pressed juice bars dot the landscape. Residential buildings are quickly being erected to cater to young professionals moving into the area, and large empty lots undergo construction, as new properties eclipse the old.
Nearby on Jefferson Avenue, where the schools are located, residential brownstones line the block. The block is a ten-minute walk from where Biggie Smalls grew up, and a ten-minute drive to the Marcy Houses projects where Jay-Z was raised. The crippling neighborhood felony crime of the 1990s that both artists have drawn upon has shrunk by nearly 76% since 1993 in the 79th Precinct, where the schools are located. As longtime Bed-Stuy resident Doreen Mondesir put it, “When I moved to the neighborhood 32 years ago, my folks thought I would come back in a casket.”
P.S. 3 is a brick building that sprawls outwards, occupying most of the street it sits on. The window panes and doors are painted dark green, and an American flag flies on the corner near its entrance. There is a large, open playground with basketball courts and marked areas for children to play foursquare. The building feels solid, as if to affirm its history as a neighborhood anchor. Its principal since 1999, Kristina Beecher, grew up in Bed-Stuy. Most of the teachers have also been at P.S. 3 for several years. But the sobering fact remains that the school is currently at 53 percent occupancy.
Down the block, Brooklyn Waldorf rises upward in a building called Claver Castle. It was once the nearly all-black Catholic school of St. Peter Claver Church, the first African-American Catholic church in Brooklyn, which was established in 1922. “It was designed like a fortress,” said Christina Pantazis-Blades, Admissions Director of Brooklyn Waldorf, “because people would throw rocks at it.”
Doreen Mondesir is part of the congregation that still worships at St. Peter Claver, which like P.S. 3 has seen its fortunes decline: the church has recently been forced to combine with two others, Holy Rosary and Our Lady of Victory.
“Years ago, in the 1980s, St. Peter Claver was going through some major, major demographic changes,” said Rev. Alonzo Cox, who has led Mass at all three churches for the past three years. “A lot of families were moving out of the neighborhood, and a lot of newer families were moving in, who didn’t want to send their kids to Catholic school. So the numbers declined dramatically. They saw the writing on the wall, and they were unfortunately unable to sustain themselves financially.
“Right now, I would say a good chunk of my parishioners at Our Lady of Victory are hipsters and yuppies. Over at St. Peter Claver, a lot of young families are also moving in.”
On a weekday noon Mass, however, the 25 or so parishioners were almost all elderly, many of Caribbean descent, and all of them black. One of them, Anna Davis, 78, was born and raised in Brooklyn, and recalled the church’s Catholic school that was across the street.
“Three of my six children went to school there, in the ’70s and ’80s,” she said. “It’s hard to remember it now, I just remember that the nuns were very nice.”
The school was not just a place of parochial learning; it was the hub of community activity as a recreational center. It shut down in 1988 and the building remained unoccupied until Brooklyn Waldorf moved in after extensive renovations. The school has a 49-year lease as a tenant of the St. Martin de Porres Parish’s churches.
“This was really the place to be in the community,” said Pantazis-Blades. “We’ve had people peek into the school, happy to see kids in the building again.”
The Brooklyn Waldorf School was founded in 2005 by a small group of parents, including Pantazis-Blades, and a handful of alumni of the Waldorf education. Known for its progressive mission and focus on art, accredited Waldorf schools are part of a network of over 1000 schools in 75 countries, three of which are in New York City.
The school opened in a small space at the Brooklyn Music School in neighboring Fort Greene, with an inaugural student body of 12 students. Today, the school has 208 students from nursery to eighth grade, and with each successive year is approaching its capacity of 240. Moreover, the long-term lease with St. Peter Claver has boosted enrollment, as parents are reassured that the school has cemented its base in Bed-Stuy for the foreseeable future. Tuition ranges from $25,267 a year for nursery and kindergarten students to $32,274 for middle school students.
Pantazis-Blades said that when the school moved to Bed-Stuy, parents were not concerned about safety, but rather about distance from their homes — striking given the neighborhood’s reputation for crime. While some Brooklyn Waldorf students do live in the neighborhood, most commute from other parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan. One middle school student commutes from distant Staten Island.
The school opens directly into an indoor basketball court, once the bedrock of the former community center. “We open the court to the community two nights a week,” Pantazis-Blades said. The hallways are lined with students’ work. Each classroom has an intentionally rustic aesthetic, painted in bright pastel colors, and adorned with elaborate chalkboard drawings reflecting the current lessons of each class. Parental involvement is everywhere; on one recent day, three fathers were hard at work on an outside terrace, building a work table.
While Pantazis-Blades is quick to say that the Waldorf system is not purely about art, the arts are integral to the curriculum. Students create their own “textbooks,” supplementing reports with their own original art and projects. From the first grade, arithmetic is accompanied by knitting lessons to help students with counting, which eventually develops into cross-stitching in later grades to help with learning fractions.
The emphasis on the arts, in fact, is the rare common thread between the two schools. Laura Montaño, a “handwork teacher” at Brooklyn Waldorf, brings eighth grade students to P.S. 3 to teach first graders there how to knit. The program is popular in both schools, she said. P.S. 3’s principal, Kristina Beecher, meanwhile, has long worked to maintain the integrity of the arts program, despite constant budget cuts. “Art’s one thing I don’t compromise with. We continue to build it,” she told Inside Schools. “The system rates us around test scores but there’s so much more.”
Those test scores have become a growing concern for the school. (For her part, Beecher declined to comment for this article.) In the 2015–2016 school year, just 32 percent of students at P.S. 3 met the state standards on the state English test, and 35 percent met the state standards on the state math test — as compared with district-wide averages in English and math of 43 percent and 40 percent, respectively.
Both schools may share the same block but not the same zip code. Brooklyn Waldorf’s zip code of 11238 is 42 percent black, 38 percent white, and 9 percent Hispanic, while the racial breakdown of P.S. 3’s zip code, 11216, is 74 percent black, 14 percent white, and 6 percent Hispanic — much more aligned with the racial demographics of Bed-Stuy as a whole.
While she declined to say the precise racial breakdown of Brooklyn Waldorf, Pantazis-Blades did say the school was “predominantly white” adding that it was committed to diversity. “We send parents of color to educational fairs to try and recruit more minorities,” she said. Meanwhile, P.S. 3 is almost entirely populated by minorities: 73 percent of students are black, 11 percent are Asian, and 9 percent are Hispanic.
District 13, in which both schools sit, is adjacent to District 16, which encompasses most of Bed-Stuy, and is better known for the struggles of its schools and a homeless epidemic among young students. Carmen Fariña, New York City Schools Chancellor, held her first Town Hall of the 2017–2018 academic school year in District 16. As she took questions from the crowd of mostly district-wide principals, two common concerns arose: the fate of homeless students who are chronically absent as they move from shelter to shelter, and decreasing enrollment. The Department of Education reports that a third of P.S. 3’s enrolled students are chronically absent, versus the city-wide average of 19 percent. The New York State Education Department reported in October that there were actually more homeless students in District 13–1615 — than in District 16–1366.
“When I say that schools need to have certain numbers of kids, it’s not that we’re going to close the school if it’s less than [that number],” Fariña said at the Town Hall. “It’s just that in order to have maximum resources, you need a certain number. That means, to have the right number of art teachers, of guidance counselors, whatever the other specialties are. So, for middle school, we know because of state requirements, that having between 300–350 gives you the resources you need.” For elementary schools, she went on to say, this number should be over 200.
As the number of students enrolled in a certain school goes down, so does funding and resources from the Department of Education. And despite Fariña’s claim, graver threats do include co-locating with another school, and ultimately, being closed. Although P.S. 3 is not near the 200 mark Fariña cited as a tipping point for elementary schools, decreasing enrollment is still a major concern. From the 2013–2014 school year to that of 2015–2016, enrollment decreased from 516 students to 450. The physical education teacher has been cut, and Inside Schools reports that the Gifted and Talented program is being phased out.
Where, then, are students going? Some of the newer residents are young and do not have children. But an increasing number of parents are sending their children to the district’s growing number of charter schools.
“Bed-Stuy has the highest number of charter schools of any neighborhood in Brooklyn,” the State Comptroller’s office reported earlier this year. Those charters largely serve black and Latino students. Leadership Preparatory Bedford Stuyvesant Middle and Elementary Academy, for instance, just six blocks away from P.S. 3, expanded its student body by 25 percent between 2013 and 2016, adding a ninth grade in the 2015–2016 academic year. It is also 87 percent black and 9 percent Hispanic.
Though many charters have a lottery system for admission, “I wouldn’t be fooled that a lottery means full access,” said Amy Stuart Wells, a professor of sociology and education at Teachers College at Columbia University, and expert on education and school choice. “Because lotteries are strategically marketed, only certain people are in the lottery.” Wells added that sophisticated targeting means that some parents are not even privy to the lottery process for their children.
It can be a strange cycle, however, of moving around students between charters and standard public schools. “There’s always the ways [charters] counsel out kids with special needs,” Wells said. “Some of them, not all of them. There’s no norm in the charter world about how that happens. We have interviews with public schools who are like, we take the kids who are thrown out. Talk to any public school that’s really close to a charter school, particularly one that’s really grinding for high test scores.”
Wells added that emerging charters have also created a new status. Schools with sophisticated lotteries create demand by only admitting a limited number of children, she said, fostering “the psychology of scarcity. And then they’re seen as the schools where your kid’s ‘chosen’, and it creates a whole kind of status to it. They often have a lot of private resources that are coming from private donors and funders, Wall Street people, and then on top of that, they kick kids out.”
As charters approach what Wells called a “critical mass” in neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy, the concern for under-enrolled schools like P.S. 3 is not yet the threat of being closed, but rather of sharing space with a charter.
“There’s a lot of school buildings where there’s a charter school on one floor and a regular public school on another,” she said. “They say when it happens at a high school, a high school’s really in trouble. That’s the kiss of death; it’ll be gone within a few years. In some ways, it’s very symbolic for educators in the city of what’s happening. It’s a slow death, usually.”
It is impossible to know where P.S. 3 stands in terms of potential co-location or worse, closure — the Department of Education declined to comment. Still, the school is bearing the cost of change in Brooklyn.
Meanwhile, on Jefferson Avenue, the two schools exist in parallel universes. The morning drop-off for both schools coincides around 8 AM. At P.S. 3, yellow school buses drop children off in staggered timings, while many parents walk hand-in-hand with their children, dropping them off from nearby homes. At Brooklyn Waldorf, a few students walk to school, others arrive via bicycle or scooter, but most are dropped off in a row of shiny SUVs and minivans that line up around the entrance of the school. By 8:45 AM, the street is quiet again, and the children have begun their day.
Follow Leena Sanzgiri on Twitter: @leenasanzgiri and Instagram: @scenesbyleens
