MIDTOWN — Jon Levin is about as dedicated to District 2 as they come.
He lives in the district, sends his two sons to District 2 schools, and has spent his entire 15-year career with the Department of Education in Manhattan schools. He did a four-year stint as the assistant principal at M.S. 131, which serves Chinatown and the Lower East Side, before coming to the Clinton School for Writers and Artists on 33rd Street, where he is now in his fourth year as principal.
Next year the school will move into a brand new building near Union Square, and add a high school. Clinton will only admit new sixth-graders and ninth-graders next year, allowing the school to grow gradually year by year.
DNAinfo New York sat down with Levin to talk about being a middle school principal, what it means to be a school for writers and artists, and his plans for his new school.
What are some of the challenges of being a middle school principal?
When I say that I’m a middle school principal, sometimes people back away slowly, like ‘Oh great! How nice for you.' But almost everyday, I think it’s the best job out there. You can’t take anything too personally, because they love you one day, they hate you the next day, then they love you — it’s just sort of up and down. As someone pointed out to me, it’s a time in their lives when they don’t necessarily love themselves, so you sort of have to do that work for them.
It’s strange being principal. It’s a different relationship than you have as teacher. It’s harder to build a close relationship and know exactly what’s going on. It’s tough — I miss that part of it, just having that relationship with a group of 30 or 100 kids.
What do you do to form relationships with the kids?
I supervise lunch and recess. It gives me an opportunity to informally have conversations with kids about how things are going. You always see the good, the bad, the ugly at recess, you know? Who’s playing with who, who’s left out on the sidelines, who’s struggling. It may be tough to know in a classroom when academic ability is hiding some of that, but on a social playing field, it all becomes fairly obvious.
How do you address those issues when you notice them?
Some of it is really social engineering, like, "Oh, would you like to play with so-and-so?" or "I noticed they’re playing basketball, can we get you in?"
Sometimes kids just want to be left alone. As long as it’s not consistent, I really don’t have a problem with it. If there’s a kid who’s consistently alone, who I feel like I’m not getting anywhere with, I usually deploy a surrogate to speak with them, like the guidance counselor or a teacher they feel connected to, to see if we can try to pull them out of that shell a little bit.
And in the world of middle school, sometimes there’s something more going on. You find out a little bit more about them — an issue at home, or something health-wise. Trying to build a compassionate response from everybody in the building is a challenge, because there are issues of confidentiality. You can't just say, "Well, the reason why so-and-so never turns any homework in is because they don’t have a place to live." But it’s something that I think is so important.
Middle school sometimes has a bad reputation, but it should be a great experience for the kids. It’s a time in their lives when they’re struggling with a lot, figuring out who they are, and not always feeling great about who they are. So we try to at least make school a place where kids want to come to.
What does it mean to be a school for writers and artists?
Every student takes five periods of visual arts, performing arts and music. With the Common Core, we try to balance the amount of non-fiction and fiction writing the kids are doing.
We have something called “The Triple E,” which stands for “Enrichment, Electives, and Extended Learning Time.” It’s an opportunity to do some intervention with students who struggle, and also offer creative writing. Everyone takes seven periods of English Language Arts, and some also take three periods of creative writing workshop, devoted to producing film scripts or stories.
Just culturally, things here around writing and the arts just tend to be the biggest school events. I don’t think we’ll ever have the top basketball team in the city, but the school musical is a HUGE deal here. We have five shows, it’s unbelievable. This year we did a drama for the first time, and we’re going to have a musical. The director who came in to do the drama was like, "Oh, this was amazing," and I was like, "Just wait 'til the musical."
What's the Clinton School for Writers and Artists going to be like as a high school?
We’re going to apply to be an International Baccalaureate school. Students who come to Clinton will take a lot of their Regents courses in ninth and 10th grade to build their capacity for 11th and 12th and get the state requirements out of the way. And all students will be in IB courses for 11th and 12th grade. There’s no opting out.
How are you preparing for the move to the new building next year?
One of the things that we’re talking about is the new building. I think the new building will be our home for the next 50 years. It should be a place when you walk around that you want to be in. So how do we move in? How do we have art projects that capture the work that the kids do but also make it theirs a little bit in ways that are meaningful? Sometimes we spend more time with them than their parents do, at least while they’re awake. So why not make it something where they’re like, "Oh, this is cool, this is interesting"? It’s their home.