Middle school students learn ins and outs of the business world

Brittni Ortiz, 12, arranged fliers neatly on the table as her business partner, Brittany Tirado, 13, pulled out a chocolate frosted cupcake and set it by a poster board.

“Brittany, this is it,” Ortiz said.

After weeks of preparation, students at M.S. 223 in Mott Haven pitched more than 20 different business ideas to their peers, teachers and business people, who acted as judges. The one-day competition gauged which start-ups had the best chance of succeeding. Since the beginning of the school year, all the seventh-graders have been learning about different career options, what their interests are and how to start their own businesses.

“This is Charmed Bake Shoppe and we decided to create this idea because we were upset there’s no Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts or anything like that really close to the school,” Ortiz told a group of students who had crowded around their poster board.

Tirado explained how their bake shop would sell everything from coffee to cupcakes and offer Wi-fi Internet and a quiet place for students to study.

“Is that a real cupcake?” one student asked. “Can I have it?”

Quickly realizing the marketing opportunity, the girls wrote numbers on pieces of paper and handed them out to students so the cupcake could be raffled off later.

M.S. 223 has partnered with the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, a national program that teaches young people from low-income communities the necessary steps to becoming an entrepreneur. Only one other school in the Bronx uses the curriculum to teach students how to pitch their own business ideas.

“I think our country is founded on entrepreneurship,” said Ramón Gonzalez, principal of M.S. 223. “We want these kids to have experiences where they are not only talking about creating companies, but actually doing it.”

The  ideas students pitched in this year’s competition included removable and machine-washable hat inserts to keep baseball caps clean, waterproof sneakers, a pen mp3 player that plays music while it writes and a mobile app that charges phones and saves battery life.

Business professionals from across the city served as judges, grading each business’s pitch based on the quality and creativity of the pitches.

After hearing Charmed Bake Shoppe’s presentation, two judges grilled the girls on whether they had considered creating a mobile business to avoid the expense of a storefront. They also wanted to know if the café would only serve children, or if adults would be welcome too.

“We want our customers to feel like they’re at home, so no matter what age you are, you can go and you can buy whatever you want because we’re there for you, to please you,” Ortiz said.

Afterward, the judges said they were impressed.

“They’re, what, 12 or 13?” said Mark Stein, who works with Meringoff Properties in Manhattan. “They’re extremely poised and very well-spoken. We asked questions and they responded seamlessly.”

Dennis Miller, an engineer, said, “Now, this is the kind of thing that is probably a lot more useful for the real world than some of the other stuff you get out of textbooks.”

Nicole Lentino, a technology teacher, has run the entrepreneurship program at M.S. 223 for the past two years. She uses the curriculum to teach four different classes of seventh graders.

“Students don’t necessarily see themselves as capable of doing that,” Lentino said of students’ self-perception as business entrepreneurs. “You know, just, environmental factors, home life, whatever the reason may be, they just don’t believe they’re capable of this type of success.”

When the competition was completed at the end of the afternoon, four winning groups from each class were announced. Charmed Bake Shoppe was one of them.

The winning entrepreneurs will apply to compete in a regional competition in June, where they will face other fledgling student businesses from across the city.

“I was so excited,” Tirado said. “I thought it was going to be a close tie between us and the mp3 pen. But I think what put us over the top was the real cupcake.”

Students from International High School learned about compost by doing at Brook Park. File photo by Urban Transformers

Friends of Brook Park is assembling a South Bronx Green Team Collaborative to build a new compost system in Brook Park on East 141st Street and Brook Avenue.

Students between 13 and 19 years old who live or go to school in the 10454 or 10455 zip codes are eligible for the summer jobs, which pay $8 an hour.

Applicants must have good communications skills and be punctual. Each intern will be responsible for sharing his or her experience as a members of the South Bronx Green Team Collaborative with at least one classroom in the South Bronx.

Participants must be available on six consecutive weekends for four hours a day beginning in mid-May.

An application form, due by May 10, can be obtained by sending an email to urbantransformers [at] gmail [dot] com, or an application may be mailed to Friends of Brook Park, PO Box 801 Bronx NY 10454, and should include contact information. Applicants should include a two-paragraph statement about why they are interested in participating in this project.

The parent or guardian of those selected for an interview will have to sign a permission and waiver form.

A project of Friends of Brook Park and the Urban Transformers, the collaborative is financed by grants from Citizens Committee for New York and Department of Youth and Community Development, thanks to funds from City Council members Maria del Carmen Arroyo and Melissa Mark Viverito.

Residents learn about recycling, conservation at annual festival

For the fifth straight year, Bronxites gathered at St. Mary’s Park to celebrate Earth Fest, sharing ideas for innovative ways to green the planet.

Representatives from businesses, community organizations, and city agencies combined on April 21st to promote environmental initiatives, through information kiosks, activities for kids and assorted giveaways at Mott Haven’s biggest park.

Julia Wilson, 6, circled a flagpole several times while trying to decide where to tie a bright orange ribbon, to give flight to a sail made of recycled materials. She settled on a spot she could reach at the bottom of the pole.

“Recycling means cleaning the earth and not leaving garbage around,” she said, standing back to admire the plastic bags and ribbons tethered to it that blew in the wind.

“There’s a lot to learn here,” said Levell Peterkin, 40, who was visiting family in the area. “I was over there and talked to Con Ed, who told me you can change all the light bulbs in your house to these things,” he said, holding up a compact fluorescent light bulb. “I could cut my electricity bill by 40 percent.”

With bright green papers in hand, festival-goers like Peterkin strolled from one table to another listening to vendors peddle their wares. The product vendors stamped the papers, allowing participants to collect prizes based on the number of stamps they’d accumulated.

“It’s fun and free, but you have to work to get the free stuff,” said Rachel Amar, the event’s founder. “It’s a way to incentivize green behavior.”

A crowd swarmed the table that was covered with prizes for most of the afternoon. One volunteer yelled, “Hardcover books, three points. Softcover books, two points. All brand new books, come and get them.” Other prizes included t-shirts, healthy snacks and bottles of lotion.

Nearby, a group of kids played a round of Recycling Olympics, the newest addition to Earth Fest. They competed in a recycling toss, where they had to decide whether an item of garbage went in a blue plastics bin, a green paper pin or a black trash bin.

After playing the game, Natasha Perez, 8, reflected on what she learned.

“Plastic should not go in the paper, because later you can’t recycle,” she said.Across from the games, Jayla Garris, 11, stood on stage singing her rendition of Adele’s “Someone Like You,” as part of the youth talent show that featured spoken-word and musical and dance performances. She said it was her first time at Earth Fest.

“It’s nice of people to throw an event because people don’t usually celebrate the Earth,” she said.

Anna Vincenty, a long-time neighborhood activist who worked for many years for housing advocacy group Nos Quedamos and now works as Congressman Jose E. Serrano’s community liaison, was honored with a 2012 GetGreen Environmental Leadership award.

“There is nothing more important than making sure that today you take advantage of everything that you’re learning,” said Vincenty. “We’ve got to make sure we leave our children and our grandchildren a better place than what we found.”

Superhero Global Man Eco-Avenger also accepted an award for promoting green education to children.

“One of the things I want everybody in this community to understand is we believe in you,” he said. “We are committed to making sure the Bronx gets cleaner and cleaner.”

The Bronx Museum no longer charges admission, and has "adopted" 40 Bronx schools, most of which have no arts program, offering children like these from PS 73 a chance to learn. Photo courtesy of the Bronx Museum

That’s where museums and exhibit spaces come in, and, fortunately, the Bronx is leading the way by offering first-class work at a price all can afford—free.

In much of the city the cost of looking at pictures and sculpture is too high for families of modest means. Admission to the Museum of Modern Art would run a family of four $78, plus subway fare. The Metropolitan Museum is free to public school students, but parents who want to accompany their youngsters are asked to fork over $25 apiece. Even to visit the Museo El Barrio–steward of the Latino and Caribbean culture so important to residents of the South Bronx–costs adults $5 and students $3–$16 for that family of four.

But last month, the Bronx Museum dropped its $5 admission charge, saying it had “chosen to focus on increasing access to the museum.” Now visitors can take in Emilio Sanchez’s paintings of buildings in Hunts Point at no cost, and cheer exhibits devoted to baseball in the Bronx, from Melrose’s Club Cubano Interamericano, to Little League teams from Hunts Point, Crotona, Riverdale and Van Nest, to the Yankees.

Across the Grand Concourse from the museum, the non-profit arts organization No Longer Empty has taken over the Andrew Freedman Home to mount an exciting exhibit of work by 32 artists devoted to our borough’s past and future.

In just a short time, the Bronx Documentary Center in Melrose has become an important venue for free photography exhibits, and, of course, the Bronx Council on the Arts Bronx Culture Trolley clangs its way to artists’ studios and galleries on the first Wednesday evening of every month—free.

Unlike the Department of Education, these institutions recognize that imagination is not a privilege of the wealthy. They are tearing down the barriers that keep so many New Yorkers from experiencing their city’s artistic treasure.

SoBRO’s financial education coordinator Stephane Hyacinthe will present ways to best utilize tax refunds, save for retirement, establish good credit, develop a solid budget, and to get ahead of the debt collectors.

The session will take place at SoBRO’s main office at 555 Bergen Ave. near the Hub. To RSVP, call 718-732-7544 or email vseltzer@sobro.org.

'”Reflections,” created by artists How and Nosm, occupies a second-floor bedroom at the Andrew Freedman Home. Photo by Marisol Diaz/courtesy of The Riverdale Press

Works by 32 artists show borough’s many sides at Freedman House

Once known as the “home for poor millionaires,” an elegant mansion on the Grand Concourse has burst to glittering life as the home of a new art exhibit featuring 32 artists whose work meditates on the Bronx’s past and future.

Connoisseurs and artists mixed with hundreds of ordinary Bronxites at the April 4 packed-house opening of “No Longer Empty/This Side of Paradise,” which will run through June 5. Work, transportation, immigration, aging and the tension between reality and fantasy are some of the exhibit’s driving themes, all with local flavor as the common denominator.

“Art is about the community it is serving, and it’s very much a celebration of the Bronx’s culture,” said Manon Slome, the exhibition’s chief curator.

The show re-imagines the public rooms and bedrooms of the Andrew Freedman Home, built in 1924 as a haven for rich people who had lost their fortunes. Artists use broken glass and falling plaster, along with images of the burnt-out Bronx to symbolize the destructive years, and use cast-offs, including silverware and crockery, along with murals, videos, paintings, sculpture and photographs to create images of hope.

In a bedroom taken over by The Point Community Development Corporation, a video of “Village of murals,” the mural-lined route leading from residential Hunts Point to the South Bronx Greenway, plays on walls stenciled with flowers and foliage. As the video plays over the stenciled image of an African American girl, she appears to be walking down the industrial streets.

Detail from The Point's Village of Murals.

In “Trades/Oficios/Metiers,” undertaken in collaboration with The Point, French photographer Martine Fougeron uses photographs to underscore the city’s reliance on the industrial waterfront of Hunts Point and Port Morris. Her photographs are mounted on baking sheets to emphasize their connection with artisanal trades like baking and canvas stretching. They portray a worker in a recycling plant walking toward his crane, a fish handler slicing open a huge fish, a baker posing with one of her cakes.

“Through art I believe you can aim to bridge a knowledge gap,” Fougeron said. “Show what are inside the trades, how they work, to the residents—first by the photos, and I hope soon with a large scale installation of the photos outside the industries.”

The multi-media piece “IRT,” by Elizabeth Hamby and Hatuey Ramos-Fermin of Mott Haven examines transportation in the borough, with a spotlight on commuters and the workers who shuttle them from Point A to Point B.

“IRT” encompasses a video installation focusing on livery cabs, maps visitors can fill in with specific routes to see how to get around and interviews with passengers and the drivers and motormen who get them to where they’re going.

Other artists focused on the younger crowd.

The well-known sculptor John Ahearn collaborated with children from a Head Start program housed in the Andrew Freeman House to create plaster casts of their hands as a way of introducing the kids to their creative capabilities early on.

“From a very early age, it boosts their confidence and lets them know that they can,” said Marcia Fingal of the Mid-Bronx Senior Citizens council, which owns the Andrew Freedman Home.

Not only artists and connoisseurs were welcomed to take in the exhibition. Passers-by were encouraged to see the show, and many did so, joining the standing-room-only gathering.

“The lady said ‘Come, come in! Bring your girls! So I did,” said Maria Bibar, a mother of two. “We liked everything inside.”

Built to house elderly people who had been wealth but had lost their fortunes, the Andrew Freedman Home closed in 1983, and has since served as a community center. Across the Grand Concourse from the Bronx Museum of the Arts, it is now being recast as an arts and cultural space, and will also include a Bed and Breakfast.

“We want an inclusive and interactive relationship with the community,” said Fingal. “We want to make art and culture more inviting.”

The “This Side of Paradise” exhibit is open to the public Thursdays through Sundays between 1 and 7 p.m.  For more information on Andrew Freeman House events, visit www.nolongerempty.org.

Museum officials have also announced the launch of a new program to provide arts education to hundreds of students from Bronx public schools.

“At a time when other New York City museums are raising their admission fees, we have chosen to focus on increasing access to the museum as a resource for our community,” said the museum’s executive director, Holly Block.

Many of the 40 schools where the museum will introduce an arts curriculum do not offer art classes or programming.

Education staff and instructors from the museum will travel to the schools to meet with teachers and discuss the project prior to the students’ visit. The students then come to tour the museum and take in the exhibits, after which they settle in to create art based on what they have observed, with the help of the instructors.

Samuel Gompers High School students Joseph Duarte (gesturing) and Sony Cabral (in hat) pleaded with city officials not to close the Melrose high school at a public hearing in Brooklyn in February. Photo by Claudia Bracholdt.

DOE will replace troubled high school with charter school

Melrose is going to lose what used to be its largest high school. Four weeks after the Department of Education’s Panel for Educational Policy finally decided to let Samuel Gompers Technical High School phase out, the school’s teachers are frustrated with a decision a lot of them already had expected.

The teachers are demoralized,” said substitute teacher Peter Mayer.

Mayer had been an English teacher at Gompers for 30 years. Now he is retired, but he frequently works as one of the school’s substitute teachers. He said he felt that the DOE planned the school’s closure since the school began struggling years ago.

Last December, the city suggested the school phase out because of its low performance and drastic loss of students. Gompers received a failing grade from the city for 2010-2011 and lost about 600 students since 2008, according to the city’s Accountability Report. Last year, the graduation rate was 41 percent.

In early February, the DOE held a hearing at Gompers, one week before its Panel for Educational Policy’s was scheduled to decide the high school’s fate.

About 300 students, alumni, parents, staff and teachers gathered in the school’s auditorium to convince the Department of Education to give Gompers another chance, to no avail.

Mayer said he feels that the school is being closed because the city seeks to privatize public education.

Businesses want to get their hands on education, there is a lot of money there,” he said, adding that the hearing at the school was only for appearances.

Some students said they feel disadvantaged because their school is underfunded and lacks resources.

How are we supposed to meet the city’s expectations, when our history books end after the cold war?” asked Joseph Duarte, a sophomore at Gompers.

He said he could answer a Regents question about 9/11 only because he lived in New York when and after the attacks happened.

A week after the meeting at Gompers, students and staff rented a bus to attend the Panel for Educational Policy’s hearing at Brooklyn Technical High School. The auditorium was full of chanting students, teachers and public education advocates.

The audience chanted over the microphone throughout the hearing, drowning out the panel members. One group continually repeated what speakers said, until the chanted message filled the auditorium.

In the end, all the chanting didn’t help.

The DOE says it plans to replace Gompers with a smaller “transfer school” for students who have struggled in other schools, and a charter school. The two would likely open in the Gompers building in the fall for a new class of ninth grade students.

The charter school would be administered by New Visions, a non-profit organization that has run 80 public and charter schools throughout the city since the 1990s, including two it currently runs in the Bronx.

Tim Farrell, New Visions’  Director of Communications for Public Schools, said the organization would make sure to serve the community’s students – all of them.

We care about the individual needs of special education students and English learners,” said Farrell.

He said that the charter school that will probably be located in the Gompers will focus on the humanities. He added there won’t be any academic pre-selection of students. Students will be selected by lottery. Area residents will receive preference.

Replacing Gompers with a charter school is nothing new, says one education expert. Closing down low-performing public schools and putting charter schools in their place seems to be a “mission” of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former DOE Chancellor Joel Klein, says Jeffrey Henig, a Political Science and Education professor at Columbia University.

New York City’s DOE has been unusual in how aggressively it has worked to try to cooperate with charter school communities and to even provide these schools with school buildings,” he said.

For whatever reason, the mayor and especially Chancellor Klein decided that to bring the rapid change they wanted to see, it would sometimes be easier to work with a new set of actors,” he added.

Bienvenido Hernandez, dean at Village Prep HS in Mott Haven, tries to help students make wise decisions about sex.

Mott Haven’s rate is the highest in city, study finds

As the city has started to introduce a new sex education program for middle and high schools, Mott Haven has emerged as the neighborhood with the highest teen pregnancy rate in the five boroughs.

Even though the neighborhood rate has been going down for years, it hasn’t shrunk as fast as the rest of the city, according to a new report.

“The statistics are scary,” said Bienvenido Hernandez, dean at the Mott Haven Village Prep High School on St. Ann’s Avenue, adding there were seven or eight pregnant teens at the school last year. “We try everything we can to bring these numbers down.”

About one out of every seven women in Mott Haven who gave birth between 2007 and 2009 was a teenager, according to the study, released in November by New York University’s Silver School of Social Work. That was the highest rate in the city. Morrisania and Hunts Point both ranked fourth.

“They want somebody to love them,” said Deandra Plummer, 15, participant in the Changing the Odds program at the Morris Heights Health Center, where teens learn about community issues and sexual health. Right now, there are no program participants who are pregnant.

Dr. Vincent Guilamo-Ramos, who runs the NYU doctoral program and presented the new report at the Morris Heights Health Center after its release, said local young people have long needed a new health curriculum.

“Mott Haven needs an evidence-based and science-informed health education program,” he said.

In his fifth-floor office at Village Prep, Hernandez offers students information on sex, and provides condoms to those whose parents have not pulled them out of the program. He says the majority of kids who come to see him simply want to talk.

“Most of them don’t come to actually get condoms,” Hernandez said.

But family pressures often keep young people from seeking his advice. Seventeen names were on the opt-out list that hung next to Hernandez’ desk, out of the 62 students in the program.

On one of his office walls, Hernandez pinned a poster that informs visitors about sexually transmitted diseases. He said many parents are uninformed about the diseases their kids can get from unprotected sex.

About 70 percent of Hernandez’ students are from conservative, often Catholic families. The parents are hesitant to talk to their kids about sexual safety.

“It’s a taboo for certain folks,” said Hernandez.

Instead, parents rely on the media, he said.

But the media doesn’t do a good job either. In reality-TV-shows such as “Teen Mom”, teenage girls become protagonists and are shown in their daily lives with their babies, said Hernandez.

Almost twice as many teenage girls in the Bronx give birth as Manhattan or Queens girls, according to the NYU report. Brooklyn has the city’s second highest rate with about 30 percent, Staten Island the lowest with about 20 percent, according to the city’s Department of Health.

About one in ten girls between 15 and 19 in the Bronx is pregnant, down from 1.5 out of ten a decade ago.

Still, the rate is unacceptably high, said Dr. Guilamo-Ramos.

The NYU report named a lack of access to health care and mental health services in the Bronx as a key problem.

About 300 students are taking part in the Changing the Odds program, which has been implemented at 12 Bronx schools this year, according to program director Estelle Raboni. Raboni says building self-esteem is crucial for Bronx teenagers.

“Young people in the Bronx unfortunately see themselves not able to affect change,” she said.

Francine J. Rojas, a social worker at Village Prep, said longer hours during the school day give students less opportunity to engage in sexual activity. She said teens often use the window of time between leaving school and their parents’ return home from work to get sexually active.

For that reason, Rojas says, after-school programs could be a valuable support for teens.

School attendance is also a key element in lowering teenage pregnancy rates.

“A lot of girls are just cutting school and hanging out with their boyfriends,” Rojas said.

Students from PS 132 in Morrisania posed in front of a mural they made of the neighborhood. The school is one of five in the area that teaches using an acclaimed, arts-based curriculum.

Five Morrisania charter schools are among 15 in the city that have been honored for using a curriculum that improves student performance through hands-on teaching and the arts.

PS 132, also known as the Garrett A. Morgan School, and 14 other city schools were lauded for using a teaching method that focuses heavily on music, theater, visual art, dance, cooking and games to help raise learning levels among students, many of whom have had little prior exposure to the arts. 

The Carl C. Icahn Charter School on Brook Ave., the Carl C. Icahn Charter School #4 on E. 174th St., the School for Inquiry and Social Justice on Morrison Ave. and JHS 22x are the other Morrisania schools that use the arts-intensive method.

A New York University study concluded a specialized curriculum called Active Learning Leads to Literacy helps raise test scores and strengthens students’ literacy and reasoning skills regardless of socio-economic levels. About 35,000 thousand students are enrolled in schools that use the arts-based program nationwide.

The arts-intensive method devised by the non-profit Learning through An Expanded Arts Program (LeAP) is funded with grants from private foundations and the federal government.

Among other findings, NYU researchers found:

• K-2 students in schools that stress the arts curriculum outperformed their peers almost 90 percent of the time in many of the literacy skills tested.

• Although 50 percent of kindergarten students in the selected schools started the year below grade level in 2011, 81 percent ended the year testing above grade level.

• Over 40 percent of the 6th through 8th grade English Language Learners who scored a level 1 on the state’s English language test improved to levels 2 or 3, compared with only 26 percent of students from other schools.

To learn more about LeAP, visit the organization’s website at www.leapnyc.org.