Talk Bronx New York

Two schools created as part of the Bloomberg administration’s effort to replace large, failing high schools with collections of small ones have been added to the state’s list of failing schools.

The state list, officially known as Schools Under Registration Review, includes schools that the State Education Department deems to be performing so poorly that it has the authority to shut them down if they do not improve.

But the list has become less meaningful as Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein has, in recent years, acted on his own to close dozens of struggling schools — some of which have been on the SURR list and some of which have not.

In fact, in announcing the newly named schools, state education officials noted that there were three more New York City schools that would have been placed on the list had they not already been scheduled to close. Read more..

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Number 7 The Lucky Number For A School & It’s New Principal

Junior High School 22, in the South Bronx, had run through six principals in just over two years when Shimon Waronker was named the seventh.

On his first visit, in October 2004, he found a police officer arresting a student and calling for backup to handle the swelling crowd. Students roamed the hallways with abandon; in one class of 30, only 5 students had bothered to show up.

“It was chaos,” Mr. Waronker recalled. “I was like, this can’t be real.”

Teachers, parents and students at the school, which is mostly Hispanic and black, were equally taken aback by the sight of their new leader: A member of the Chabad-Lubavitch sect of Hasidic Judaism with a beard, a black hat and a velvet yarmulke.

“The talk was, ‘You’re not going to believe who’s running the show,’ ” said Lisa DeBonis, now an assistant principal.

At a time when the Bloomberg administration has put principals at the center of its efforts to overhaul schools, making the search for great school leaders more pressing than ever, the tale of Mr. Waronker shows that sometimes, the most unlikely of candidates can produce surprising results.

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Lehman High School Principal Retiring

The veteran principal of Herbert H. Lehman High School has agreed to step down at the end of the school year, Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein said on Thursday, after investigators found that two of his assistant football coaches had for years been paid overtime wages for time spent at home.

The principal, Robert Leder, said he had agreed to retire after 29 years in his post only after Education Department officials said he would otherwise be removed from the school midyear, pending a further inquiry into the payments.

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