HARLEM — Harlem Renaissance High School is a place of last resort.
It is filled with kids just out of jail, teenage mothers, immigrants who can barely speak English, special ed students and bright kids who have given up on themselves. They are clinging to the bottom rung of the public education system, and there aren’t many places for them to fall.
Now their school is fighting for survival, too.
Harlem Renaissance, Upper Manhattan’s only “transfer school” for students in danger of aging out of the system, has spent a year on the state Department of Education’s list of “persistently low-performing” schools that should be closed.
A neighborhood outcry and some frantic string-pulling by its inventive rookie principal staved off an immediate shutdown, and the school’s dismal graduation rate has since improved enough to earn a better grade from city education officials.
But Harlem Renaissance remains in limbo.
One bad fight or another failed inspection, and it could disappear from East 128th Street.
The teachers and their 225 students, most of which live in Harlem or the Bronx, worry what would happen if the place ceased to exist. Many would likely get dispersed to bigger schools, where they wouldn’t get the same kind of attention. A good number would probably drop out.
Some would resort to crime. Others would end up in dead-end jobs and the young mothers would probably go on public assistance.
“This is my last school. I ain’t going to transfer to another,” said Felix Medina, a wiry 18-year-old senior with a dark goatee.
Medina said he was kicked out of Martin Luther King Jr. High School on the Upper West Side for “not doing nothing,” and arrived at Harlem Renaissance, a few blocks from his home, in the fall of 2010. It took him a while to settle in, but after he fell in with a new music production program, he began to think about a career.
“If they close this school, they close my dreams,” Medina said.
The music program, and a new video lab where students make films about themselves, are part of principal Nadav Zeimer’s new vision for Harlem Renaissance, where students would become the producers, not just consumers, of digital content.
After barely making it through his first year as principal, Zeimer, a former Silicon Valley software engineer, returned in September and began focusing on giving students more voice.
The idea stemmed from an experience he’d had as the coach of a champion robotics team at George Westinghouse High School in Brooklyn. A documentary film crew followed them, and Zeimer noticed that with the cameras on, insecure students turned confident and articulate. He wanted to make that happen on a larger scale at Harlem Renaissance.
“We want to have students take over the discussion in class and have teachers be more of a coach,” Zeimer said. He is 36, with a light beard, receding hair and chunky glasses. “And I have to lead that way, too. I need to be the lead student.”
Zeimer abandoned the world of high-tech startups because he hated working solely in support of a company’s bottom line. But he uses lessons from that experience to guide him at Harlem Renaissance.
Zeimer introduced systems to make the school run more efficiently. He created a fast-track “credit recovery” program, lunch classes, weekend classes, Regents-exam workshops during school vacations. He increased professional development programs and issued his staff laptops and iPads.
But all of it meant more work, and the teachers began to feel burned out.
“We are trying to do too much to show them how good we are,” English teacher Kathleen Goldpaugh said. “We are doing some wonderful things here. But we’re exhausted.”
One of Goldpaugh’s extracurricular assignments is tutoring immigrant students in English. One of them, 20-year-old Scherwisch Fischer Chochotte, moved from Haiti to the Bronx two years ago speaking only Creole and French. After failing at a school for “English language learners,” she was sent to Harlem Renaissance six weeks into the school year.
She arrived at a recent tutoring session looking like she was about to fall asleep. Goldpaugh asked her if she wanted to go home, but she refused.
“This school is good,” Cochotte said. “I’m really happy to be here because my teachers, they love me and I love them.”
Students and staff say it’s unfair for Harlem Renaissance to be judged on the same field as traditional schools.
The school remains on the closure list in part because the state relies on data that is two years old, meaning that last year’s jump in the graduation rate — from 17 percent to 39 percent — won’t be recognized for another year or so. The city, which relies on more recent data, recently gave the school a B grade, which helped it remain open.
Despite his new management protocols, Zeimer spends most of his days performing educational triage — negotiating peace with gang-affiliated students; fiddling with his budget to find money for an empowerment workshop, scheduling a last-minute staff retreat; attending to the myriad needs of kids who come from broken families or suffer from mental illness.
“Because he’s pulled in so many ways to save the school, he hasn’t been able to do the other things he wants to do,” history teacher Frank Dimaggio said.
Zeimer says that every day is another opportunity for something to happen that will get him fired. He is only half joking. “This is hard, because everything is so slippery and organic and day-to-day,” he said.
But students like Medina see the difference, not only in his school, but in themselves. That is why they can’t imagine going anywhere else.
“You’re not going to get another school like this,” Medina said. “To have a principal and your teachers work with you to develop your talent and your dream. When people help you out like that, it definitely gives you better focus.”
