Co-op City — On a recent October morning, as students moved between classrooms at the Equality Charter School, teachers and school leaders took up their regular hallway posts to wrangle the flow of adolescent traffic. One boy, Kintchen, was without his school uniform, prompting a gentle scold from the principal, JoAnn Myers. But speaking with a visitor, Kintchen took the long view. "Last year, a lot of kids got in trouble. This year, there's more rules," he said. "We know what to do so we don't get in trouble."

When the Equality Charter School, on the third floor of PS 160 in Co-Op City, the Bronx, opened its doors to sixth and seventh graders last year, with 141 rambunctious middle schoolers and a corps of 10 teachers and staff, it joined the growing universe of charter schools that comprise the broadest school reform movement in American history.

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Documentary


Equality Charter School

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Helen Zelon
Helen Zelon
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But at its location along the Hutchinson River Parkway, Equality's experience hasn’t much resembled the theoretical debate among reform advocates, teachers unions, parents, and policymakers over the pros and cons of charters.

Instead, it's been about how to create from scratch a disciplined environment, how to provide team-teaching while firing instructors who didn't perform to standards and how to offer legally mandated services to special needs kids.

To these un-pretty problems, there were inelegant solutions, like the decision to hire as deans the husband of one co-founder and the fiancé of another—an awkward, if perfectly legal, arrangement.

In politicians' speeches and much-hyped movies, charter schools can sometimes seem like a panacea. For the students and staff at Equality, their charter school has been a day-to-day reality of challenges and responses.

Change as a constant

In their charter application to the city and the state, the school's co-founders Myers (who serves as principal), Margaret Hoey and Caitlin Franco cited long expertise as educators, data-managers and disciplinarians in institutions, schools and other settings that serve troubled youth.

Equality Charter's first year was marked by near-constant change in staffing patterns and enrollment: Co-founder Hoey left midyear to spearhead efforts to establish yet another New York City charter school, the Swedish-styled Kunskapsskolan school, which aims to open in 2011. Board members and two board chairmen were replaced, numerous teachers were fired and replaced or invited not to return, and nearly two dozen students left the school, many well before the end of the school year, according to Myers.

The year was also marked, parents and students say, by student rough-housing that often got out of control. On the Department of Education Learning Environment Survey conducted during the school's first year, parents, teachers and nearly all of the school's students identified safety as a real concern. Half of the teachers and a third of parents expressed fears about bullying, safety and school discipline. Bullying and threats were an issue for 84 percent of students, who also reported that teachers yell at students (81 percent) and that student get into physical fights (93 percent).

"There is no doubt in my mind that these things happened," current board chair Ehri Mathurin tells City Limits. "I'm surprised that there weren't more upsetting stories." But Mathurin credits Myers and her staff with rising to the challenge of establishing a new school. "It's incredible to come in and ground a group of sixth and seventh graders," he says. "I'm pretty sure those unfortunate things [also] happen in traditional public schools."