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Police say a 3-year-old New York City boy was left alone on a school bus for an entire six-hour school day.The bus driver and matron were arrested Thursday on charges including reckless endangerment and child endangerment.

Police say the bus workers overlooked the boy when dropping off children at a Bronx elementary school. He was stuck on the bus until his mother came to pick him up in the afternoon and discovered he had never arrived at school. Read more..

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High Test Scores, and Criticism, Follow a South Bronx Principal

A South Bronx elementary school that adopted the motto “The Best School in the Universe” on the strength of soaring tests scores is being investigated for allegations that teachers helped students cheat on state tests.

Several students who attended P.S. 48 said last week that teachers would examine their answers during official test administration periods and point out mistakes and how to correct them.

“They would give you the answers on the state tests,” a graduate of P.S. 48, who is now in seventh grade, said. “You’d say, ‘I need help,’ and then they’d tell you what the answer was.”

The Department of Education is also investigating cheating allegations at a nearby school, M.S. 201, which this year was taken over by P.S. 48’s former principal, John Hughes.

Mr. Hughes moved to the middle school after running P.S. 48, to great acclaim. He told the Web site InsideSchools.org that he oversaw a 30-point jump on a math test in 2004, and that year Chancellor Joel Klein spoke at the school’s graduation — reportedly while wearing a “Best School in the Universe” T-shirt.

The test scores subsequently oscillated, but the general upward trend won Mr. Hughes favorable profiles in the New York Times and on PBS, and he has developed a good rapport with a teacher-recruitment nonprofit, Teach For America.

In his first year at M.S. 201, scores have also shot up; the percentage of students passing math tests this year jumped by 17 points, and the percentage passing reading increased by nine points. (Citywide, scores rose by nine points in math and seven points in reading.)

Yet Mr. Hughes has butted heads with many of the teachers at M.S. 201, many of whom have not been invited to return next year when the school is restructured.

Some of those teachers said in interviews that they fear Mr. Hughes is importing a culture of cheating to their school.

In a recent letter to the Department of Education, a group of teachers reported that Mr. Hughes asked several teachers to help students during the state tests.

One teacher, Sandra Ameny, who came to M.S. 201 through Teach For America, said Mr. Hughes asked her to help her students on the math test, but that she refused.

“He asked me to guide my students to the right answers during the test, and I said that’s helping them; I’m not supposed to do that. And he said, ‘Well, just guide them towards the right answer,’” Ms. Ameny said.

She added: “He basically said during the exam that I should go over close to them, and for example if they mark ‘D’ and ‘D’ is not the right answer, tell them, you know, ‘That’s not the right answer, try something else,’ and just keep guiding them until they get the right answer.”

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Photo source: The Gothamist

Ever since Taja, 10, joined the Keltic Dreams, the Irish dance troupe that is the unlikely pride of her Bronx elementary school, she has been so consumed by high kicks, heel clicks and treble hop backs that she practices “on the street, at the bus stop, sometimes at the train station, in the living room, on the bus when I’m standing up and there’s no seats.”

Oh, and also in class. In class? That’s right, with her fingers, she explained, demonstrating the way her index finger acts as the left foot and her middle finger as the right.

“I look at the teacher,” Taja chirped, her eyes gleaming mischievously behind wire-rimmed glasses, “and do it at the same time.”

With a student body that is 71 percent Hispanic and 27 percent black, Public School 59 does not seem an obvious home for a thriving Irish dance troupe. And when Caroline Duggan first arrived from Dublin at age 23 to try her hand as a New York City public school music teacher, it wasn’t. Many of her students had never heard of Ireland. Why, they wanted to know, did she talk funny?

Then, to stave off homesickness, Ms. Duggan hung a “Riverdance” poster in her fifth-floor classroom, and one thing led to another. The children pointed to a long-haired dancer on the poster and asked if it was her. No, she laughed, but I could show you a few steps. The impromptu lesson grew into a wildly popular after-school program and, for the first time last year, a trip to Ireland that still inspires dreamy looks among those lucky enough to go.

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Bronx elementary school to close due to poor report cards

A Queens high school and a Bronx elementary school are on the chopping block after getting poor report cards, officials said Wednesday.

Far Rockaway High School, beloved by alums but suffering from low graduation rates, and Public School 220 in the Bronx were the latest schools to learn they’re being shuttered.

Six other schools were told Tuesday they’ll be closed or phased out as a result of poor performance on the first-ever report cards.

Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum yesterday criticized the administration for not consulting school communities or holding public meetings before making decisions.

“These closings have a devastating and destabilizing effect on the community,” she said. “The DOE shouldn’t make these decisions without input from parents and the larger community.”

But Mayor Bloomberg defended the closures, saying the schools needed a new start.

“We just can’t sit here and let a school that does not do what it’s supposed to do continue on its merry way,” he said.

SOURCE: NY Daily News

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