Lauren Ballou preparing lunch in the school cafeteria.

Teens run the lunch counter at Mott Haven school

At 16, Lauren Ballou is the manager of a small business. The high school junior is in charge of the Mantis Store, which sells lunch to her classmates at Crotona Academy High School on St. Anns Avenue.

During lunch hour, Ballou can be found at the back of the cafeteria, flipping chicken patties and turning sausages.

“We started out with basics—burgers–and brought in new stuff: bacon and cheese,” said Ballou. “We get new things and see if it sells. After a while, if it sells, we raise prices,” she explained with the air of a seasoned businesswoman.

Victoria Andrades, 18, mans the cash register and dispenses change from her seat at the table that serves as the makeshift store, a few seats away from Ballou.

“I write down what everybody orders, how much it cost, and after the store closes up, I tally everything and put on paper how much we made that day,” said Andrades, whose interest in math led her to take on the job of cashier for her second year at Mantis.

The Mantis Store started five years ago as part of Crotona Academy’s Learning To Work program, a 10-month job training internship, funded by the city Department of Education and operated by SoBRO, the South Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation. The store takes its name from a praying mantis the founders discovered on the school grounds.

“Students gain the skills they need to enter the workplace,” said Eva Lopez, program manager for Youth Programs at SoBRO.

Each year about 70 students participate in the Learning to Work program. In addition to coordinating the program, SoBRO provides one-on-one student counseling that aids with the college application process.

“By the time they graduate, most of the students have a complete resume and know how to write cover letters,” said Lopez. They also learn office etiquette, including the importance of letting the boss know when they can’t come to work.

“I think it will help me get a part time job, if I work as a cashier,” Andrades said. “It gives you a lot of skills you will need for a first job,” said Ballou.

Three other girls join Ballou and Andrades to operate The Mantis Store food stand during the school year. On average, they sell 20 to 30 meals during the 45-minute lunch hour each day.

“If we own a store, this is what’s going to happen; somebody’s going to have to clean, cook and hire people.” said Ashanti Perderaux, 17, who is responsible for keeping the grill and tables clean. It was Perderaux’s idea to sell an assortment of M&Ms and chocolate bars.

She said that before she started the Learning To Work program, she didn’t know much about business.  Seven months into it, she finds running a store fun and enjoys the camaraderie and responsibility she shares with her colleagues. “I’m going to have to use these skills to go job hunting,” said Perderaux.

The students, who are expected to put in 10 hours a week, earn while they learn. SoBRO pays them the minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. In March, Ballou worked five days a week and earned around $400.

The students who founded the Mantis Store wrote a business plan that they presented to the community and development department of SoBRO, which provided the capital to open the store. Each new group of students is charged with maintaining and expanding the business. They’ve done so by analyzing inventory and coming up with new strategies to make the store profitable.

Each week the group meets and considers which merchandise sold well. The students then decide what they need to restock, and whether they need to cook and serve faster or to expand their offerings.

Recently the students decided to make their offerings healthier, introducing fruit cups and switching from hamburgers to the leaner chicken burgers.

The store rings up about $400 in sales each month, yielding a profit of $200.The profit is plowed back into the store, to be spent on merchandise and equipment.

With demand rising, the students have decided to spend some of the store’s income on a bigger grill, one that will also keep grease away from the meat, making it healthier.

Hotdogs sell for $1 and a cheeseburger $2. Candy costs 75 cents while fruit snacks are 50 cents.The profit is modest, said Deborah Claudio, SoBRO’s senior youth advocate on campus “because we try to keep the prices reasonable for them to be able to afford it. We live in the Mott Haven area and money is tight, but we try to keep it as economical as possible and to put a healthy spin on it.”

A version of this story appeared in the June/July 2011 issue of the Mott Haven Herald.

Applications for rental apartments are now being accepted for the 53-unit residential development called The Tiffany which will officially open in May. The Tiffany will also have a playground, pull-up parking, a fitness center and laundry facilities.

There will be 25 one-bedroom units, 23 two-bedrooms and 5 three-bedroom units, all with air conditioning and central heating. At recent community board meetings, residents and board members have declined to throw their support behind developers whose building plans did not include 3-bedroom apartments for bigger families.

The building is being constructed with funding from the city’s Housing Department Corporation and the Dept of Housing Preservation and Development, and will be managed by Bronx-based Mastermind Ltd, in collaboration with Mott Haven-based community organization SOBRO.

To contact Mastermind about applying, contact the company at 718-410-9691 or visit 1150tiffany.com for an application.

Called the New York City Montessori School, its educational philosophy calls for small class sizes, student-led learning and individualized work plans for each student.

Learning in Montessori schools emphasizes the five senses. For example, students who are learning to read are given sandpaper letters as learning aids. They are encouraged not only to see letters, but also to touch and hear them.

A specific site has not yet been chosen, but the school will be in Bronx Community School District 7, which spans Mott Haven and Melrose, said Principal and Co-Founder Gina Sardi.

There are two dozen Montessori-affiliated schools in New York, but this would be the first free one. At the nearby Morningside Montessori School in Harlem, a private school, tuition for a five-day pre-kindergarten program begins at more than $11,000 per year. Tuition at some of New York City’s top elementary schools can climb to more than $30,000 per year.

The idea of a public school offering teaching methods that are usually only available at private schools excited parents who learned about the school at a recent gathering. But some advocates worry that charter schools like the New York City Montessori steal resources from regular public schools.

On a recent Friday morning, Sardi and Director of Instruction Robin Urquart greeted prospective parents at the Brightside Academy on East 150^th Street.

Natasha Rozon said she wanted to find a school that was clean, non-violent and had good teachers.

“I really want a good education for my daughter,” she said.

Also there was Chevell Anderson who said she wants her 5-year-old daughter to find a school that will push her, without lingering on material she’s already learned.

“She already knows what’s in kindergarten,” she said.

Since Maria Montessori created the method over 100 years ago, Montessori schools have sprouted up across the world. The American Montessori Society lists over 1,200 affiliated schools in the United States.

The South Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation, SoBRO, is the new Montessori school’s community partner.  Sardi is working with SoBRO to raise funds, plan after-school activities and parenting workshops, reach out to the community and hire staff.

They agree that finding a location is a top priority.

The choice of a location for new charter schools is a sore point for critics of the new schools. Many of the existing charter schools in Community School District 7 share buildings with traditional schools, and parents and teachers often complain that they rob the traditional schools of space and resources.

Charter schools are publicly funded but are exempt from many of the city Department of Education’s regulations and some provisions of the union contracts that govern traditional public schools.

The Montessori school is one of a growing number of charter schools proposed in New York City since the cap on the number of charters was raised from 200 to 460 last year. The application for another charter in School District 7, Accomplish Charter School, targeted to open in September 2012, is pending.

Some critics worry about the growing number, saying charter schools drain funding from traditional public schools.

“You are seeing programs being limited, or completely undermined, such as dance programs, science labs, other things the D.O.E. considers ‘extras’,” said Julie Cavanaugh, a member of the Grassroots Education Movement, a citywide coalition that lobbies to limit the number of traditional schools the city closes and replaces with charter schools.

Neighborhood activists like Gloria Cruz welcome new charter schools as long as they act as good neighbors to existing schools. Still, she wondered about the children who don’t make it into charters, which “have a higher standard.”

“And a lot of these kids are not equipped with this higher standard,” said Cruz.

Sardi points out that parents have long complained that schools in the South Bronx are plagued with problems. Schools like hers, she says, can improve education for local children.

Initially, the new school will enroll 100 students and have 12 teachers. It will expand to 300 students in the next five years, Sardi said.

Sardi said she received almost 240 applications, in an admissions lottery that was held in mid-April.

There aren’t any other Montessori schools in the area for students after fifth-grade, so graduates of the New York City Montessori School may have to change learning styles, but Sardi said by the time her students graduate, she hopes to see other Montessori-modeled schools in the area to accommodate higher grades.

Before starting the Montessori school in the Bronx, Sardi spent nearly 20 years as educational director of the Caedmon School, a private Montessori elementary school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Planning for the new Montessori school began in the summer of 2009.

Although most Montessori schools in the U.S. are private, public Montessori schools are becoming more common.

Their future in New York could ride on the track record the New York Montessori School compiles. The stakes are high, Sardi says. The director of the American Montessori Society told her: “You have to succeed.”

The owners of the majestic 82,000-square-foot building, developer Henry Weinstein and Liberty Square Partners, hope investors will be attracted by the tax credits they would be eligible for under a 25-year-old federal program, and that big commercial firms will want to rent the space they have renovated.

The landlords have enlisted SoBro, the Mott Haven-based community development organization to help them SoBRO find investors who could be interested in the project.

The Tax Reform Act of 1986 allows investors to get a 20% tax break for certain rehabilitation projects, such as the courthouse, which the owners are hoping will raise the iconic lady’s status among suitors once again.

Circumstances were not always so dire for the courthouse. Although it now sits idle and graffiti-covered betweenthe newly-built Boricua College, a sprawling swath of new Melrose housing developments, and a row of dingy shops, the Beaux Arts beauty served as the Bronx Supreme Court from the time it was built in 1906 until the 1930s.

The city designated the building a landmark in 1986, then closed it down seven years later after years of disuse and deterioration.

“Eliminating the blighting influence that this majestic, yet severely distressed property places on the community is just as vital to preservation as granite walls, mansard roofs or marble floors,” said Rebekah MacFarlane of SoBRO.

“Reviving the original grandeur of the courthouse through adaptive re-use will honor the past, yet promote 21st century practices in energy conservation,” MacFarlane said, adding that rehabilitating older buildings like the courthouse saves money and preserves energy and resources that would otherwise be required to construct entirely new structures.

Nos Quedamos once hoped to make the courthouse the town hall of Melrose, but City Hall blocked its efforts. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani put a thumb in the eye of his rival Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer, turning down Nos Quedamos bid to buy the building from the city for a dollar and renovate it with privately-raised funds. Instead, the city auctioned it.

The current owners bought it in 1998 for $300,000. Over the years they have announced several turning points for the structure, only to have potential occupants bow out because of the cost of renovating the space to make it useable again.

SoBRO’s President and CEO, Phillip Morrow, hopes the tax credit program will “enhance the value of the refurbished property,” and “improve the value of the surrounding housing stock, attract consumer traffic, and revitalize local businesses.”

When it opens, it will be the first Montessori-style elementary school anywhere in the borough.

The New York City Montessori Charter School Board of Trustees will meet on Tuesday, April 5, at 9 a.m. at the law offices of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, 1285 Sixth Ave in Manhattan to confer on details related to the school’s opening.

The school and its partners are now accepting a limited number of seats. Application forms can be downloaded from the website of the South Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation, or SoBRO, www.sobro.org, the Mott Haven-based non-profit that is working alongside the school to develop the project.

Parents interested in securing Kindergarten to 1st grade slots for academic year 2011-2012 at the New York City Montessori Charter School can also ask for application forms from SoBRO’s main office at 555 Bergen Avenue near 149^th St. and Third Avenue in Mott Haven, as well as from the F.E.G.S. Office at 412 East 147^th Street in Mott Haven.

Co-founder and Principal Gina Sardi holds up a typical Montessori school teaching tool.

Montessori School uses methods long available to wealthy

Local children will have access to a method of teaching often used by expensive private schools, but never by a New York City public school when a new charter school opens in Mott Haven this fall.

Called the New York City Montessori School, its educational philosophy calls for small class sizes, student-led learning and individualized work plans for each student.

Learning in Montessori schools emphasizes the five senses. For example, students who are learning to read are given sandpaper letters as learning aids. They are encouraged not only to see letters, but also to touch and hear them.

A specific site has not yet been chosen, but the school will be in Bronx Community School District 7, which spans Mott Haven and Melrose, said Principal and Co-Founder Gina Sardi.

There are two dozen Montessori-affiliated schools in New York, but this would be the first free one. At the nearby Morningside Montessori School in Harlem, a private school, tuition for a five-day pre-kindergarten program begins at more than $11,000 per year. Tuition at some of New York City’s top elementary schools can climb to more than $30,000 per year.

The idea of a public school offering teaching methods that are usually only available at private schools excited parents who learned about the school at a recent gathering. But some advocates worry that charter schools like the New York City Montessori steal resources from regular public schools.

On a recent Friday morning, Sardi and Director of Instruction Robin Urquart greeted prospective parents at the Brightside Academy on East 150^th Street.

Natasha Rozon said she wanted to find a school that was clean, non-violent and had good teachers.

“I really want a good education for my daughter,” she said.

Also there was Chevell Anderson who said she wants her 5-year-old daughter to find a school that will push her, without lingering on material she’s already learned.

“She already knows what’s in kindergarten,” she said.

Since Maria Montessori created the method over 100 years ago, Montessori schools have sprouted up across the world. The American Montessori Society lists over 1,200 affiliated schools in the United States.

The South Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation, SoBRO, is the new Montessori school’s community partner.  Sardi is working with SoBRO to raise funds, plan after-school activities and parenting workshops, reach out to the community and hire staff.

They agree that finding a location is a top priority.

The choice of a location for new charter schools is a sore point for critics of the new schools. Many of the existing charter schools in Community School District 7 share buildings with traditional schools, and parents and teachers often complain that they rob the traditional schools of space and resources.

Charter schools are publicly funded but are exempt from many of the city Department of Education’s regulations and some provisions of the union contracts that govern traditional public schools.

The Montessori school is one of a growing number of charter schools proposed in New York City since the cap on the number of charters was raised from 200 to 460 last year. The application for another charter in School District 7, Accomplish Charter School, targeted to open in September 2012, is pending.

Some critics worry about the growing number, saying charter schools drain funding from traditional public schools.

“You are seeing programs being limited, or completely undermined, such as dance programs, science labs, other things the D.O.E. considers ‘extras’,” said Julie Cavanaugh, a member of the Grassroots Education Movement, a citywide coalition that lobbies to limit the number of traditional schools the city closes and replaces with charter schools.

Neighborhood activists like Gloria Cruz welcome new charter schools as long as they act as good neighbors to existing schools. Still, she wondered about the children who don’t make it into charters, which “have a higher standard.”

“And a lot of these kids are not equipped with this higher standard,” said Cruz.

Sardi points out that parents have long complained that schools in the South Bronx are plagued with problems. Schools like hers, she says, can improve education for local children.

Initially, the new school will enroll 100 students and have 12 teachers. It will expand to 300 students in the next five years, Sardi said.

There aren’t any other Montessori schools in the area for students after fifth-grade, so graduates of the New York City Montessori School may have to change learning styles, but Sardi said by the time her students graduate, she hopes to see other Montessori-modeled schools in the area to accommodate higher grades.

Before starting the Montessori school in the Bronx, Sardi spent nearly 20 years as educational director of the Caedmon School, a private Montessori elementary school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Planning for the new Montessori school began in the summer of 2009.

Although most Montessori schools in the U.S. are private, public Montessori schools are becoming more common.

Their future in New York could ride on the track record the New York Montessori School compiles. The stakes are high, Sardi says. The director of the American Montessori Society told her: “You have to succeed.”

The Bronx Science Cafe Series reconvenes at the bar & restaurant at the corner of 139^th St. and 3^rd Ave. on Monday, February 28^th between 6 and 7 p.m. for Galactic Cannibalism: You are What you Eat, with Jacqueline VanGorkom and Kathryn Johnston of Columbia University.

On Monday, March 28^th, the topic switches from nutrition to waste, as Fordham University’s Donna Heald leads a discussion on Recycling: Benefits and Limitation.

There is no charge for attendance.

The monthly gatherings are sponsored by the Society for Equitable Excellence, and by SoBRO, and co-sponsored by NOVAscienceNOW, the Columbia Alumni Association, and Fordham University. You can see updates on their blog, at bronxsciencecafeseries.blogspot.com.

To contact SweetWaters, call 718-292-9470.

Members Ed Garcia Conde, Robin Dixon, and Katy Guimond stand behind the registers at the Co-Op

When the South Bronx Food Co-op formed in 2007, it was hailed as a watershed in bringing nutritious, organic, and locally-grown food to a densely-populated Bronx neighborhood starved for fresh produce.

But the project that began with great hope and fanfare has run aground. Its storefront on Third Avenue and E. 158th Street is closed and is not likely to reopen. Its entire inventory has been sold.

While members insist the co-op will not disband, without a store, the group must search for another way to fulfill its mission.

A combination of economic issues, internal politics and high overhead made the store insolvent, according to remaining members of the co-op.

“We really have to think long and hard. Is this really the best for the co-op to close? Have we exhausted every solution?’” asked Board President Ed Garcia Conde. “Just the response that we got from the community was really heartwarming.”

He said one customer, who shopped at the store after church, took one of the workers to the back to pray when she heard of its troubles.

The store had developed a solid reputation. Offering more than just food for sale, the co-op also hosted cooking classes, yoga sessions and nutrition courses. In fact, even as the financial troubles began, in July the city named the South Bronx Food Co-Op the Bronx Small Business of the Year.

The fundamental problem, members say, was a membership base that was too small. The South Bronx Co-Op has approximately 260 members. By contrast, the Park Slope Co-Op in Brooklyn, the city’s largest, claims over 12,000 members. Lacking a sustainable membership base, the co-op needed walk-in trade. It didn’t get enough.

The idea that members would exchange their labor for lower prices was fundamental to the co-op, but in the absence of volunteers, labor shortages frequently forced the store to close, which made things worse.

Garcia Conde said the co-op began to founder last spring when it got behind on the rent. The landlord has been reasonable, according to Garcia Conde. “If he didn’t believe in us, he could have thrown us out of here a long time ago,” he said. But months of unpaid rent have been adding up.

The co-op tried to save itself by renting part of its space to SoBRO, the South Bronx Overall Economic Corporation, which needed a place to store Green Carts, the carts street vendors use to sell produce in a city program aimed at providing more fruits and vegetables.

By some accounts, an agreement could have paid half of the co-op’s monthly rent, but the landlord, worried about how the space would look and whether the carts would attract vermin, rejected the plan.

There have been other issues. While a large storefront can be a boon to retailers, the 1,400 square-foot store was too big to keep the co-op looking well-stocked. In October, Member Robin Dixon said even though the co-op had just spent $2,000 on merchandise, the store still looked empty.

“Even if we spent a natural amount of money to fill it up, it’ll still look empty,” she said. “And the bigger the space, the more you have to put out to draw people in.”

While the store has previously received grants to pay employees, members say the main mission of the store was to be sustainable without external funding.

Shifting internal politics have complicated the issue. Amid board disputes, founding member and former executive director Zena Nelson was ousted in April.

Despite the clash, Nelson said she’s still optimistic about bringing fresh food to the Bronx.

“The most important thing at heart is that it was an intrinsically successful attempt to increase healthy food in a community that not only needed it, but does want it,” she said.

The remaining members agree that the co-op is still a meeting ground for food justice and neighborhood activists. Dixon added that people are still devoted to the project.

“I’m hopeful,” said Dixon, “because when I came into the co-op I committed myself. I’m not going to turn my back because things are not going well, because that’s not a person that’s committed. If we’re committed members, we have to see it all the way through the end when there’s nothing.”

She,  John Reynolds and a number of others are in the early stages of starting a new co-op, Dixon said, and finding a store in a new location, possibly closer to the more heavily trafficked Hub.  This proposed co-op would model itself more on the Park Slope model, allowing only members to shop.

Reynolds said he plans to present a proposal to the New York Academy of Medicine at a symposium next month.

Members say even if the store closing is disappointing, they see no reason to stop working to spread food rights issues.

“Its even more of a reason for us to keep fighting to stay alive,” Garcia Conde said.

But the neighborhoods of the South Bronx have an edge: experienced community-based organizations devoted to an idea whose time may have come—green-collar jobs building a more energy-efficient, less polluting economy.

Green jobs have become a buzz word, embraced by the Obama administration as a way out of the economic downturn. It has provided $4 million to a union-backed education organization, which will parcel it out to local organizations.

In this special report, the Herald examines how much of that money will be spent, analyzing what it may mean for residents and for the Bronx and taking readers to the workplaces and classrooms that will share the $4 million to teach new skills. We visit:

• The Osborne Association, which helps people who’ve done time in jail or prison to become gainfully employed.

• Project H.I.R.E. at Bronx Community College, where trainees learn construction practices

• And an after-school program run by SoBRO, where young people get an early start at thinking green.

A version of this article appeared in the June issue of the Mott Haven Herald.

Jarel Ackah, 18, Daniel Pigott, 17, and Ernestina Forwaa, 18, at work at SoBro's after-school program. Photo by Alex Green IV

Throwaways become the basis for a fashion business

The adage “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure” is being given new meaning by a group of high school seniors working with SoBRO, the South Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation.

The students are starting a fashion business that will recycle hand-me-down clothing and plastic soda containers to make handbags, pencil holders and change purses.

The project, called Green Goes Greener 2010, is an add-on to SoBro’s In-School Youth program—a year-round after-school program that provides career planning and work-readiness training to low-income students.

‘We challenge students to answer questions like, “How does scrap fit into the fashion industry? What is eco-friendly?” said Wanda Echevestre, a youth advocate for the In-School Youth program who has worked at SoBRO for three years.  Echevestre believes this effort is not only important as a way for young people to learn about the environment, but also because it gives the students the opportunity to learn new skills, from threading a needle to learning to sew to operating a sewing machine.

“Kids nowadays don’t know how to do stuff like that,” she said.

“This program opens up a new world. It’s good to learn different skills and how to communicate better with people,” said Kimberly Guity, one of those who has learned how to sew. A high school senior at Theodore Roosevelt High School, Guity, 18, has been in the SoBRO youth program since September. She says she is more conscious of recycling in her everyday life as a result saving and reusing materials in the program.

Now, “When people litter and they put it in the wrong bin, I always try to inform them of the proper place,” she said.

The students hold a clothing drive at SoBRO every Wednesday to replenish their supply of old clothing. Sometimes they bring costume jewelry from home to accessorize some of the items that they make.

“I learned how you can make things out of old things; you don’t always have to make something new,” said Leah Saxon, 18, a high-school senior at Morris High School for Violin and Dance. Saxon joined the In-School Youth Program when she was in 10^th grade. She says that she has learned how to write a resume and cover letter and how to do some secretarial work, and that the program has helped her get a part-time job at Bloomingdale’s department store.

“I like fashion—fashion is my everything,” Saxon said.

But for other students in the program, it’s the idea of preserving the environment that motivates them. Davon Hanley, 18, a senior at the Evander Child High School of Computer and Technology, who fashioned a high-heel shoe from an old 2-liter plastic bottle and a necklace out of bottle caps, says his work is collectible, rather than wearable.

“Fashion is not for me,” he said, but he believes the program is important because “you’re actually doing something to help somebody else.”