Talk Bronx New York

Students from Christopher Columbus High School and Global Enterprise Academy marched to protest the scheduled closing of their schools  The boos cascaded over the auditorium as a city education official read out the case against Christopher Columbus High School, one of the last remaining large high schools in the Bronx.

Columbus has had “long history of sustained academic failure” and “chronically poor performance and low demand,” Santiago Taveras, a deputy chancellor, told the standing-room crowd. As a result, he said, it should be closed.

But the frustrated teachers, soft-spoken students and former football players who stood up at the hearing said otherwise. They described a school that had served some students well, despite the difficult circumstances faced by many. They told of a school that, even after the city identified it as struggling, continued to receive ever-growing proportions of the city’s most demanding students — the very students that needed the most help.

“And now that they have found a home here, and have been welcomed with open arms to our family, you want to take that away from them, too,” said Jaime Allen, a special education teacher.

Closing schools for poor performance, especially large high schools, has been one of the most controversial hallmarks of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s control of the school system. And it is taking on a new urgency, both in New York and around the country, with the Obama administration putting a premium on “school turnaround” policies in its nationwide competition, called Race to the Top, for billions of dollars in federal education grants. Read more..

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“It is beyond anybody’s imagination when I started that a Puerto Rican could ascend to that position, to the Supreme Court,” said Edwin Torres, who in 1959 was hired as the first Puerto Rican assistant district attorney in New York

In the summer of 1959, Edwin Torres landed a $60-a-week job and wound up on the front page of El Diario. He had just been hired as the first Puerto Rican assistant district attorney in New York — and probably, he thinks, the entire United States.

He still recalls the headline: “Exemplary Son of El Barrio Becomes Prosecutor.”

“You would’ve thought I had been named attorney general,” he said. “That’s how big it was.” Read more..

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The city shut two more school buildings in Queens on Wednesday and another charter school decided to cancel classes amid a sharp increase in flulike illnesses that brought the total to 30 closed schools across the four boroughs.

As the number of cases rose, worried parents flooded hospital waiting rooms with their children as officials tried to exercise caution in shutting more schools.

Since the swine flu virus first surfaced last month at St. Francis Preparatory School in Fresh Meadows, Queens, which had 69 confirmed cases, schools have been a major incubator of the virus. After a brief respite the strain, formally known as H1N1, re-emerged, leading 24 city schools to close in the last week. In addition, six more private and parochial schools in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan elected to shut down because of the rising numbers of ailing students.

By Wednesday afternoon, the city closed P.S. 242 in Flushing and P.S. 130 in Bayside, a building that also includes part of P.S 993, which offers special education. The New York City Charter High School for Architecture, Engineering and Construction Industries industries, which shares a building with a South Bronx elementary charter school also closed Wednesday. The charter school had closed on Tuesday.

Despite the 201 confirmed cases of the virus in New York City, most have been mild and there has been only one confirmed death from the virus, that of a 55-year-old educator. The funeral for Mitchell Wiener, an assistant principal at I.S. 238 in Hollis, Queens, who died of complications from swine flu on Sunday, was held this afternoon in Flushing. Read more..

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James Cromitie, one of the men arrested in an alleged terrorism plot, was escorted by federal agents from 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan

Four men were arrested Wednesday night in what the authorities said was a plot to bomb two synagogues in the Bronx and shoot down military planes at an Air National Guard base in Newburgh, N.Y.

The men, all of whom live in Newburgh, about 60 miles north of New York City, were arrested around 9 p.m. after planting what they believed to be bombs in cars outside the Riverdale Temple and the nearby Riverdale Jewish Center, officials said. But the men did not know the bombs, obtained with the help of an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, were fake.

The arrests capped what officials described as a “painstaking investigation” that began in June 2008 involving an F.B.I. agent who had been told by a federal informant of the men’s desire to attack targets in America. As part of the plot, the men intended to fire Stinger missiles at military aircraft at the base, which is at Stewart International Airport, officials said.

“This latest attempt to attack our freedoms shows that the homeland security threats against New York City are sadly all too real and underscores why we must remain vigilant in our efforts to prevent terrorism,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said in a statement. The mayor was expected to appear at 6:45 a.m. Thursday at the Riverdale Jewish Center morning services, joined by Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. Read more..

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The number of confirmed and suspected swine flu cases spread today beyond the Queens high school that has been its epicenter here, with new cases now suspected at a Queens public school for autistic children and a Catholic school in Manhattan, and additional scattered cases in Brooklyn and the Bronx.More over, Gov. David Paterson and state health officials said possible swine flu cases were being investigated in all regions of the state.

New York City remained the hardest hit, with now 45 confirmed cases and many more suspected. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I) said the numbers likely include “hundreds” of students, staff members and family members from St. Francis Preparatory school in Queens who have become ill. He said the city would be testing only severely ill people, because most of those hundreds of others can be assumed to be suffering from the virus and testing was not necessary. The school was closed Monday and Tuesday. Read more..

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