“I’m Here Too”
One girl in the mostly male automotive class tackles a career path less traveled
The class of 17 automotive technicians-in-training grabbed their navy-blue coveralls and hard-toed boots from their lockers for their 10 a.m. class one Monday in March. The students in Brooklyn’s William E. Grady’s Career and Technical Education High School were gearing up for their engine reassembly project for the day.
“Let’s go guys, let’s get dressed!” said Lawrence Green, the automotive teacher at the Brighton Beach career and technical education school. He’s been a veteran post-secondary education automotive teacher for 17 years, but this was his first time handling a large group of oft-distracted, high-spirited adolescent black and Latino boys.
One girl made it a point to stand apart from the group. As one of only two girls in class, sophomore Syrina Ganpatt, 15, slipped on her coveralls bedazzled in lavender rhinestones from the other side of the room.
She then joined the class in the auto lab stocked with compressors, engines, bolts and other car parts.
At Grady, where the student population this year is 79 percent male and 21 percent female, Syrina was the only girl in the automotive program at first. Girls in the school tended to favor the culinary arts or the nursing programs.
Syrina followed her rebellious instincts and decided to take the road less traveled. In a field such as automotive repair and maintenance, where women occupy less than 10 percent of the jobs, she decided owning her own auto shop one day was the path for her.
Working with guys has its challenges.
“Knowing that this is a male dominated field, she has to not just be good, she has to be on top of her game in whatever she’s doing, because they are looking for ways to discredit her,” Green said, “But I’ve taught many women, and quite a few have successful careers, so the opportunities are out there.”
The adjustment isn’t always easy for Syrina. “The boys will make you feel like you’re lesser than them sometimes because I’m a female and they think I can’t do what they can do,” she said. One time last semester, she said the boys wouldn’t let her help them reassemble an engine. “I had to put my foot down.”
In a city with over 130 CTE schools and nearly 300 CTE programs — the largest selection in the world — there are only 10 schools that offer automotive and transportation, distribution and logistics programs. Among them, eight schools are less than 40 percent female.
Brooklyn’s George Westinghouse Career and Technical Education High School does not offer automotive classes, but its electrical installation program is also predominately male. Susan Caprio, an assistant principal of Westinghouse and a former assistant principal at Grady, said that she is now working to encourage more girls to join the vocational track in her capacity as a member of the CTE Advisory Council. Caprio often asks representatives from the Non-Traditional Employment for Women to speak to students.
“There’s national stigma about vocational education,” Caprio said. “Most parents don’t want their little girls to go into the automotive field or a construction field.”
Studies show that even when women do choose career and technical fields over college, they tend to gravitate to low-wage careers such as childcare, where workers earn on average $9.34 an hour, or cosmetologists, where they earn $10.85 an hour. In male-dominated careers like automotive body repairers and electricians, hourly pay averages $18.36 and $23.71 an hour, respectively. Furthermore, the pathways that career and technical schools are offering is changing.
In the early to mid-20th century, schools offered “vocational or trade” pathways like home economics, welding and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) to keep up with the demands of the labor needs. Now those same schools are trying to meet the demands of a technologically-driven workforce. For instance, this past February, NYC Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza joined the Brooklyn Borough President and other community stakeholders to open to the Brooklyn STEAM Center, which aims to serve up to 300 students in Brooklyn in high demand STEAM-related industries such as computer science and design engineering.
Grady was once an all-boys school that focused on heating, ventilation and air-conditioning jobs. Today, 12 girls out of 94 boys are now in its Information Technology classes — a broad career field where annual salaries average $84,580, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics 2017 data, over double the median annual average for all other occupations.
According to Grady’s principal Tarah Montalbano, over the years, the school has waged an uphill battle to repair its reputation as a failing school. Grady has the highest number of black male students and the highest number of students in special education programs in the predominately white District 21 of Coney Island.
In 2010, the school was one of the 34 NYC schools that was listed as “persistently lowest achieving” by New York State. At one point in time, it was mis-categorized as scheduled for closing, when it was actually a “transformation school,” because its graduation rates and its academic scores were improving. Under then-mayor Michael Bloomberg, principals were fired at the such schools who were in their role for more than three years. Schools also had to offer more support services to the students as well as make changes to the school schedules.
Still, the negative reputation lingered, causing the Grady student population to drop from 780 students to 405 students in just six years. Losing so many students in such a short period of time places Grady in a difficult situation.
“If your enrollment is low, it affects your budget,” Montalbano said, “So if less students are coming to your school, you’re getting less money, which means you have to excess teachers.”
Other risks include losing funding for extracurriculars, co-location with another school, or in the worst cases — school closure.
“That’s the biggest risk,” Montalbano said.
This year, however, there are signs that Grady might be making a comeback.
In just a year, Grady went from having 568 student applicants to 1100, the result of a concerted five-year process for Montalbano and her staff.
“We put in a lot of effort into our school tours and into our middle school partnerships,” Montalbano said.
Montalbano and her team persistently and rigorously reached out to middle school families in District 21 and in the surrounding districts to publicize the programs that Grady has to offer.
As the school continues to grow, Montalbano now hopes to increase the number of girls in the automotive program as well. Just this past January, another girl joined Syrina’s automotive class — making the ratio of girls and boys in the program 2 to 60.
For the 2019 to 2020 school year, 31 girls applied for next year’s automotive program. It has yet to be determined how many of those girls were matched to Grady and how many will actually attend the school.
As for Syrina, she continues to put forth her best effort in class.
Back in class, after donning their work clothes, the students divided themselves into different stations. Some were working on finding the right-sized bolts for fixing a bad engine. Some were configuring a bad engine. Syrina’s five-person group focused on four diagrams. Their job to analyze everything, wire everything and put all the hoses back together.
“So, using the diagram to figure out where all of the wires go,” said Saim Wasim, 16. Syrina stood on a green crate on the right side of the Nissan Xterra.
She worked with Sebastian Cann, 16, to tighten up the bolts of the engine using a tool called a ratchet.
“Yeah, Syrina. Tighten it all the way down make sure it’s straight,” said Aaron, who was observing the group. “Nice. Sabastian, help her adjust that real quick.”
“Shut up, Aaron,” Syrina said.
“I’m just trying to support you,” Aaron said.
Not all the boys were as openly condescending. Some showed admiration for any girl who would choose this class. “Not every girl would want to do this,” said Manny Torres, 15. “They want to stay pretty. One girl left because she didn’t want to get dirty.”
Syrina said she has spent her entire school experience, from elementary school onward (six schools altogether), fending off bullies. She doesn’t know specifically why other kids chose to pick on her — other than she is quiet, and keeps to herself.
Her mother, Marjorie St. Felix, thinks it is because of her distinctive look. Syrina has Native American, Indian and Haitian heritage. Her hair is jet black, long and straight. One time, she said, during an altercation, the other girl pulled Syrina’s hair, taking chunks of it out, causing her daughter distress.
“I had to keep talking to her so that she could learn to accept herself,” St. Felix said. Last year, at another school, St. Felix remembered putting her foot down finally. She dyed Syrina’s hair honey blond, then red.
“That was my way of dealing with it,” St. Felix said. “Because you’re pretty and you got long hair, I’m really going to make them jealous and I just went and I dyed her hair and it just stopped.”
“It got to a point where I was tired of everything,” Syrina said. “I was tired of people picking on me and feeling like they could take advantage of me.”
The predominant male culture at Grady caused a new set of challenges. Science teacher and basketball coach Denise Spencer remembered when Syrina first came into class.
“She just had a look on her face, like she was short-tempered and it could be because she just came into the school,” Spencer said. “You don’t know anybody or whatever, you’re not going to come in with a Kool-Aid smile, you have to protect yourself.”
St. Felix herself wanted her daughter to join the culinary program. “She claimed there was too much drama with girls in culinary and that she didn’t have time for that.
“So, she said she wanted to try automotive,” St. Felix said. “I was like…what’s wrong with her? What’s wrong with this child? Why doesn’t she do the culinary like I told her…I asked her…. are you sure? She said yes.”
According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, if Syrina decides to continue into the car repair and maintenance after high school and post-secondary education, she could make an annual wage of $43,920. If she decides to go into the military, which is her current plan, she could move up the ranks to earn even more.
This past Saturday, St. Felix saw potential in her daughter. After buying a used car for her 19-year old daughter Andriana Ganpatt, the car battery died.
Syrina lifted the hood of the car, rolled up her sleeves and got to work. “I’m standing there, and I’m watching her and I pull my car in and say to her, what am I supposed to do?” St. Felix said. “And she’s telling me what to do. It was the first time I saw her in action. I guess she is going to make this work out for her.”
