WHAT'S GOING ON NOW:

TURNAROUND MIDDLE SCHOOL

Setting the Stage for Learning
Partership with Columbia and the non profit Turnaround for Children helps high-needs schools

If a conflict breaks out during class at M.S. 118 in the Bronx, students can make a choice: Do they want to stay in class or take the problem outside?

“A classroom is not an appropriate place for conflict resolution,” former Principal Giulia Cox said. “A kid can say ‘I’m mad, but how mad am I?’ A kid who is really mad about a situation would be better served getting help with that issue immediately and be better able to focus later.”

That’s not how it used to be at M.S. 118, a middle school where there were fighting, bullying and teasing problems, as well as unaided students with mental health conditions like depression and bereavement.

Now, students with a conflict in class can go to the Unity Center to resolve their issues, writing down their homework assignment before they depart. The Unity Center was introduced as part of a partnership between the school, Columbia University’s School of Social Work and Turnaround for Children, Inc.

Turnaround for Children is a New York-based nonprofit that targets high-need schools, helping them introduce systems to address things like behavioral issues and school-wide safety. The ultimate goal is to make the school environment more conducive to teaching and learning. Turnaround works through a number of avenues, including identifying students with mental health problems and providing teachers with professional development support.

“We think schools staff is competent in ideas around learning,” said Greg Greicius, senior vice president of educational initiatives at Turnaround for Children. But Greicius said teachers are often not trained in identifying when students need mental health support or social service support. One of the goals of Turnaround for Children is to provide a school with the resources to identify the root cause of a child’s difficulty, whether it’s a learning disability, mental illness or just growing pains.

Working with Turnaround, former Principal Cox introduced many changes during her tenure at the school. She hired one full-time social worker and five interns completing their master’s degrees at Columbia University to staff the Unity Center she opened. Cox left the school to become executive director of student support services for the citywide alternative schools and programs district, but ?Turnaround program was able to carry on without her.

“We created a very high-functioning social work center that could handle problems from mental health to ‘mean girls’ issues,” Cox said.

Another element that Cox introduced was the Youth Development Cabinet, a place where teachers, deans, assistant principals, the principal and the Turnaround education coach come together weekly to discuss ways to support students in learning. For example, the cabinet identified the issue of attendance as a major problem and came up with solutions to tackle it, including student and parent outreach.

According to Cox, examining attendance helped them identify students who were struggling for reasons other than simply needing help with academics.

“When teachers and support staff talked to students about absences and lateness, we often learned that students had underlying issues that were obstacles to their regular attendance,” Cox said. “We got better at using attendance as an early warning sign for student struggles that could be addressed with a variety of interventions inside or outside school.”

Cox also moved all the homerooms off the first floor when she realized that those students felt isolated from the rest of the school.

“Fairness is a very big deal to early adolescence,” she said.

Edi Vogel, who worked as Turnaround’s education coach at M.S. 118 from January 2006 until June 2007, said that one of the unique things about his program is that staff stays with the school, and that Turnaround is not reliant on any one individual for continued success. “One principal was able to seamlessly hand off to another,” Vogel said.

But Vogel attributes a lot of M.S. 118’s success to Cox’s dedication and enthusiasm.

“They really had a dynamic and incredible principal,” Vogel said. “Giulia Cox really understood and devoted herself to the Turnaround model. Everything has improved: the climate and the culture. The tone of that building is refreshing. All their scores have gone up and I know their attendance has improved.”

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein recently sent a letter supporting Turnaround for Children’s request for financial backing to the Carol and Milton Petrie Foundation, an organization that aids city education programs. Klein estimates that there are a few hundred schools that could benefit from the program. He said Turnaround for Children is “unique among organizations helping New York City schools in that they choose to work with the most challenging schools.”

— Lucy Kennedy