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APRIL 2003

Principal For A Day Cheered By The Changes
At Morris High
by Tom Kertes

“You wanna’ go where everybody knows your name” applies not only to Boston bars but to New York Public Schools as well. So there’s a lot to “Cheers” about the goings-on at Morris High School.

As “Principal For A Day” Dr. Charlotte K. Frank, a Senior Vice President at McGraw-Hill, remarked, “the changes [Principal] Jose Ruiz are implementing are nothing short of remarkable.” These changes include helping the administration to break up the venerable old school, established in 1903, into five smaller Academies, all featuring a specialty major (languages, violin and dance, etc.). “We believe that this will pique the students’ interest in school–and the far smaller student-to-teacher ratio will be enormously beneficial as well,” Ruiz, a brilliant bundle of energy, said.

Ruiz, on the job less than two years, has already accomplished some miracles: he took a school in dire need of improvement and raised the performance dramatically. Between January 2000 and 2003 school years, the percentage of all Morris students passing English Language Arts regents went from 32.2 percent to 60.8, math regents 18.1 to 38.1, science regents 6.3 to 43. These as-yet-unpublished numbers are still unofficial—“but that doesn’t make them any less remarkable,” according to Frank.

This particular “Principal For A Day” knows exactly what she’s talking about; Frank, a onetime New York State Regent, spent 25 years in the public school system, including nine as Executive Director in Charge of Curriculum and Instruction for New York City public schools. For the past eleven years she’s been the point person for the close relationship between Morris and McGraw-Hill. “We try to support this school in every way we can, from donations, to corporate internships e.g. Standard and Poor’s, to sponsoring the robotics team and Moot Court, to creating Big Brother-Big Sister mentoring type relationships between our people and the students. They attend the annual shareholders meetings, she said. The Robotics Team is one of the best in the nation; it recently received an $11,000 donation from the New York Yankees. With troubled students, “we try to focus in on every problem sharply, on an individual basis, like a laser” Ruiz says. “We waste no time doing something about it.” This includes holding onto enthusiastic and highly qualified—but young and without-seniority—teachers or paying for individual math tutoring sessions by a NYU graduate student.

Even in this difficult budgetary environment, “if you really want to get something done, it can be done,” Frank said. “And Jose Ruiz is the ideal example of that type of thinking.”

Indeed, when talent and good will team up, miracles can happen. As Frank was visiting the nascent “High School of Violin and Dance” at Morris High School, freshman Carlos Irrizary was practicing a routine that was Broadway caliber. “He’s had some martial arts background,” said teacher Marisol Rosado. “But it’s his first year dancing.” Another student, after just a few violin lessons with the Suzuki Method, was playing complex Chopin and Beethoven pieces purely by ear on the piano. But the school HAS no piano.

A sad waste of exceptional talent? Not necessarily. “I promise you, we will do something about this piano situation,” said Frank. “I don’t exactly know what we’ll do just yet. But we will put our heads together and make something happen.”#

 

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