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Read the press release here.

Principal Lists Compassion as Top School Priority

By Leslie Albrecht | November 30, 2014 9:15pm
 P.S. 295 is an arts-focused school with a diverse student body.
Principal of the Week: Linda Mazza of Brooklyn's P.S. 295
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GREENWOOD HEIGHTS — Sharing a building with a middle school means P.S. 295 is crunched for space, but the school community has plenty of room in its hearts and minds, says principal Linda Mazza.

Parents and teachers alike are motivated by compassion for others, and thoughtfulness about how to reach all the students at this diverse school on 18th Street and Sixth Avenue, Mazza said.

“I've always believed that the people who are here cared about every person in the building and I think it’s become more pronounced in the past few years,” Mazza said. “This community is a very close community no matter what your ethnicity. It is a very supportive community."

About a third of P.S. 295's 519 students are English language learners, and about 40 percent have special needs. Every grade has an ICT class, where general education and special needs students learn side-by-side, and last year the school added one additional ICT class each to the third and fourth grades.

“That was a financial commitment but we knew it was the right thing,” Mazza said.

Mazza — who worked at a bank for 15 years before becoming an educator — has spent her entire public education career at P.S. 295. She started as a third-grade teacher in the late 1980s and also worked as a literacy coach and as an ICT teacher.

When the school's beloved former principal left in 2013, Mazza was appointed to replace her.

"At first [parents and teachers] were like,’Oh my God, she’s leaving, how could she be leaving? And then it was like, ‘Oh thank God, gee, life goes on," Mazza said of the transition. "It shows you, it's not the administrator — it is the community that runs the building."

You've worked at P.S. 295 since the late 1980s. How has the school changed since then?
The biggest thing is that it grew and that the diversity of the cultures here has changed also.

Our ELLs in the beginning years were primarily Latinos. We continue to have Latinos, but we have more Arabic speakers.

We’re also a school called an overflow site. There's a school in Sunset Park called P.S. 94 that’s busting at the seams. We have a bus that comes from there every day with about 42 kids that come from that area, of which 35 to 36 are Chinese. Our Chinese kids come in speaking no English whatsoever and their language at home is Chinese. That was quite a change for us.

We have three paraprofessionals now who are bilingual and speak Mandarin, Cantonese and Fukienese. We have one paraprofessional who is bilingual in Arabic. We have a total of 24 paraprofessionals in our building; at least 10 to 15 them speak Spanish as a bilingual language.

Describe the school community.
The nature of our parents is, they’re very reflective, they’re very thoughtful. What we ask is for everyone to think about everyone before you make a decision — it’s not just what works for you. That’s something that makes us the kind of community people want to be in.

Over the past two years we’ve had two parents suffer injuries. One dad had an accident that left him partially paralyzed. This community stepped up. Brought food to the family. Made sure they were able to get back and forth. Took care of them so that all he had do was worry about healing, not worry about his family. It was wonderfully supportive. This year we had one of our parents have a stroke. The community has supported her immensely. They did a fundraiser to help them, because she was out of work.

It's that kind of community — always worried about kids, always thinking about, let’s have a coat drive, let’s make sure everyone has clothes. They’re always looking to pay it forward and help [families] who don’t have money for the holidays.

The city used to provide swimming lessons for second graders, but they lost funding. We’re a Title 1 school, roughly 62 percent of our parents are below the poverty level. We asked [our parents], can you help a friend? We were actually able to fund the whole thing [with parent donations.]

It’s that kind of effort that makes things happen here. It’s like, ‘What can you do for someone else?’

What challenges does P.S. 295 face?
We share the building with New Voices middle school. There are 1,100 students in the building. There is no more space in the building. No teacher has the luxury of having a room to themselves. Gone are the days of having a speech classroom, and ESL classroom. It just doesn’t happen.

The trickiness of the size of the building and the amount of kids is, we don’t have a lot of common space. We have to share our cafeteria with the other school.

We have an auditorium in the building. That’s where we have any kind of performances, but the middle school uses the back of the room as a classroom. So we have to kind of work around it. It's about being creative.

What’s new this year?
One of the things we’d like to focus on is, we feel the social and emotional welfare of the child is really utmost. We’ve been looking into [teaching] mindfulness with an organization called Mission Be.

They’ll have educators come in and work with our kids. They’ll talk about, where does stress come from? About the body and the brain. And that you can handle it and we’re going to give you strategies to get through it. It’s about stopping and saying where am I?
That’s our goal for this year.