by Karen Theroux

Where 121st Street meets Broadway, traffic roars by as laughing teenagers pose for pictures, their blue and white graduation robes swelling like sails in the breeze. It’s June 25, 2007 and the first ever graduating class of the Bronx School of Law and Finance is pumped. In five minutes they’ll march into Horace Mann auditorium on the grounds of Columbia University Teachers College, and pick up their diplomas.

At the edge of the crowd, senior David Lopez aims a goofy thumbs-up at Principal Evan Schwartz. Lopez is a school leader with an extraordinary record—honor society, moot court, mock trial—even an internship at leading New York law firm Kaye Scholer. This September Lopez will be a freshman at prestigious Haverford College outside Philadelphia. Quite an achievement for a kid who, back in 2003, couldn’t see himself going to some weird new high school.

“I was in eighth grade when I got a letter saying to come to orientation for a new school starting up in Kennedy High,” Lopez recalls. “Of course I ignored it.”

One of a number of huge, underperforming New York City high schools, Kennedy was about to cut back its enrollment and add several innovative small schools to its campus—Law and Finance among them. “My grandmother said ‘Go to orientation! You have nothing to lose.’ So I went.” Still, Lopez wasn’t sold. “They talked about having a dress code,” he goes on. ”I was just starting ninth grade and couldn’t face the idea of looking different…being made fun of.

	Bronx School of Law and Finance principal Evan Schwartz and David Lopez. All Photos by Everod Nelson unless noted.

“I told my grandmother ‘No,’ and she said ‘Who cares what you want?’ To be fair, she said I could transfer in a year if I really didn’t like it. So I said OK.” As his guardian, David Lopez’s grandmother called the shots. Since he was six years old, Lopez’s parents have been unable to care for him and his four disabled siblings, so they all live with his grandmother.

Lopez and his classmates have since (after a few attempted mutinies) come to embrace the dress code. The administration repeatedly made the point that students needed to dress for success, and sooner or later, the kids got it. It was one of many life lessons woven into the daily routine at Law and Finance. “School,” Lopez says seriously,” becomes a place that gives you what you should get at home, but you might not. And you grow to love it.”

The Power of Relationships
Five years have passed since the startup of New York’s community-based small schools, and the numbers look good: as of 2007, dozens of the city’s worst performing high schools have been successfully reinvented and are on track toward excellence—with key indicators such as graduation and attendance rates significantly above the city’s average. Bronx School of Law and Finance, for instance, boasts a graduation rate of 85 percent, with 95 percent of graduates headed for college, and $2 million in scholarships on offer. It took plenty of research, planning, leadership, community partnerships and financial support for all these schools to come so far so fast. But to inner city kids like David Lopez, one crucial factor lets their school succeed where others have failed: the web of close relationships that makes a school “feel like family.”

Back when Lopez first walked through the doors of Law and Finance, he and 99 other freshmen found little more than four classrooms, plus a closet-sized principal’s office, tucked into a corner on the eighth floor of Kennedy High. Principal Schwartz, a product of New York City’s public school system, majored in economics in college and launched a career in the insurance business. Not getting what he wanted from the corporate world, he left to try teaching, and then spent six years as coordinator of the Academy of Finance at James Madison High in Brooklyn. He was serving as an assistant principal at Kennedy when the opportunity arose to write a proposal for a small themed school to be part of the New Century High School Initiative, a groundbreaking education reform effort launched in New York City with funding from Carnegie Corporation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Open Society Institute.

Schwartz asked Jessica Goring, another Kennedy teacher, now assistant principal, to work with him to conceptualize a small school connecting students to the real worlds of finance and law. The goal was to enable graduates of this high school—where eighty-five percent of the student body qualify for free lunch, and the majority would be the first in their family to go to college—to pursue fulfilling careers in these sought-after fields. After months of writing and revising, they got the green light. Now, Schwartz says, “When I go back and read that proposal, I realize this school is exactly as we envisioned it. There was nothing major we said we would do that we didn’t do: Dress code, internships, field work, advisories. It’s all there.” Even the school’s virtual trading floor, filled with state-of-the-art computers and a digital stock market ticker, was in the original plan.

Leaders of Manhattan Bridges first ever graduating class of 2007: (l. to r.) Caleb Cardona—Born in Honduras, Caleb is an avid American history student with a passion for Big 10 sports who will attend the University of Wisconsin and major in mass communications. Joselina Sanchez, originally from Puerto Rico, was student president for all four years. She says “the school is like a family; the teachers know everyone and are always ready to help you. They never say no.” Headed for community college in Brooklyn, Joselina plans a career in international marketing. Juan Lugo, valedictorian, came from Colombia and remembers “I was very shy at first and didn’t feel I belonged. I was self conscious about my thick accent.” Fast forward four years, and Juan is on the honor roll, has perfect attendance, and is active in model U.N. and on the newspaper. An intern for the New York Daily News, he also loves writing original short stories and poetry. He’ll be a freshman at St. Johns University this fall.

An important part of that plan was substituting block scheduling—90-minute classes every other day—for the typical 45-minute everyday classes. These longer sessions allow for more academically challenging and meaningful lessons and higher quality relationships between students and teachers while cutting down on time wasters like changing classrooms and taking attendance, Schwartz stresses.

Better scheduling is a positive step, but the heart and soul of the school is the advisory system, says psychologist Susan Reimer Sacks, an education professor at Barnard College, one of several partner organizations that works closely with Bronx Law and Finance. (All New Century High Schools rely on working partnerships with community and cultural organizations or higher education institutions to maximize resources and broaden students’ academic experiences.) According to Sacks, Schwartz and Goring’s aim was “to turn ‘homeroom’ into the real thing—a home—a place of community, connecting and caring. And it has really worked for kids, “in big ways and in little ways,” she says.

Every day, each group of about 20 students meets with their advisor—a teacher or school administrator—for one 90-minute period. Ideally, students remain in the same group, with the same advisor, throughout high school. “Everyone is an advisor: the principal, the assistant principal and every teacher,” Sacks points out, “which creates thousands of daily interactions that make a huge difference. The teachers really do care about the students, and the students know it. In advisory, that caring is made visible and concrete.”

Next page: “Advisory—I love it,” says David Lopez. “Teachers really know what’s going on in people’s lives.”

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