Learning in East New York

On its fifth anniversary, the non-profit Groundwork Inc. held its inaugural fall benefit in the Time Warner Building on the Upper West Side. “I’ll keep this brief. It’s very dangerous to keep 400 people from an open bar,” said Richard Buery Jr., co-founder and executive director of Groundwork, to laughter from an audience that included Kevin Fraser, a correspondent for the television show Entertainment Tonight, and Silda Wall Spitzer, the wife of New York’s governor. Standing in front of a mammoth web of windows, Buery gestured toward the expansive view behind him: Columbus Circle lit by the bright glow of its fountain lights, the still trees of Central Park and the red taillights of cars cruising south on Broadway Street, the silhouette of the city’s skyscrapers against the clear night. Buery remarked on the beauty of Central Park and spoke about the reason why everyone had come together that night: less than 14 miles away was East New York, where 10 percent of the people go to college and the high school graduation rate is 40 percent. The crowd–a diverse group of men and women in suits and dresses that paid $300 or $1000 for a ticket–remained silent. Buery then pointed out Groundwork’s successes. The entire graduating class of the non-profit’s high school program–nine in 2006 and 14 in 2007–walked away with diplomas. Ninety-five percent of those students went to college, getting into such places as Cornell University, New York University, Virginia State University, and Kingsborough Community College. The audience applauded. The event and silent auction would raise over $545,000.

Hungry Preschoolers

One recent February morning, twenty preschoolers set about their task with uncharacteristic focus and voraciousness: they had come to eat their lunch. The children gobbled down the day’s menu of roast turkey with gravy, corn and white bread. Most plates were left empty, and others showed speckles of yellow from uneaten corn. Juice and spittle dribbled down chins.

Yet the simple operation of feeding a classroom full of three-, four- and five-year-olds can be as complex as preparing a six-course meal. But you don’t have to tell Peter Metralexis, health coordinator at the Educational Alliance community center in the Lower East Side. His unenviable task: appeasing the mouths while fighting the fat for the building of 200 children – a group of pre-preschool, preschool and day care kids from low-income families, most in the national Head Start program.

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Raising Quality in New York Preschools

Even with the lights off, room five in Williamsburg’s Jonathan Williams Day Care Center glowed. At 1 p.m. the kindergarten children slept in their blue cots as light slid through the partially lowered blinds onto the white walls decorated with the preschoolers’ art.

But only four years earlier room five had another look. One side of the dark and dull classroom was blue and the other pistachio green. The lighting, furniture, and even the cots had been around from before anyone could remember. The building blocks had faded in color, and there were no computers. The city’s Administration of Children’s Services said they had no money for new equipment and a paint job.

Enter Quality New York, an initiative dedicated to getting preschools to meet national accreditation standards. The group is powered by Bank Street College, Child Care Inc. and the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, and funded by United Way of New York City.

As part of a push for accreditation Quality New York recommended the center for grants by a non-profit foundation to buy new furniture and revitalize several of its classrooms, a change that lifted not only the children but also the adults at the center.

“That even built up the morale of the teachers, because they had modern things,” said Mildred Hook, the 71-year-old bespectacled educational director of Jonathan Williams.

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