On Tuesday, Oct. 5, members of the Fordham community, the Trust for Public Land, the Department of Environmental Protection, elected officials, and staff and students from two Bronx public schools came together to celebrate the groundbreaking of the brand new $2.2 million schoolyard. The Center for Educational Partnerships at Fordham’s Graduate School of Education has for the past six years provided administrative help to MS 331, one of the schools on the site.

“Our schoolyard is used by the whole community, and we wanted to have something here that people could use that is a state-of-the-art facility. Right now, we have a lot missing here, including any sort of green space for kids to sit outside,” said Serapha Cruz, GSE ’05, the principal of MS 331.

The staff at the Center for Educational Partnerships, which began working with the school in 2015, played an invaluable role in the project, she said.

“One of the things Fordham did was keep the momentum going, pushing for us to get the design process done and getting the council members involved who funded the project,” she said.

“It’s a lot of stuff that I don’t have the time to do because I’m busy running the day-to-day school operations and the instructional agenda of the school. They are always super helpful with helping us reach out for outside partnerships.”

New Courts and an Outdoor Classroom

The ceremony took place in the 46,342-square-foot play area of MS 331/PS 306X in the Morris Heights neighborhood. As elevated 4 trains rumbled by alongside the school, attendees viewed renderings of the space, which will be transformed from a cracked and crumbling parking lot into an environmentally friendly play destination.

When it opens in the fall of 2024, the space will feature a basketball court, a volleyball court, a turf field for soccer and football, game tables, play equipment, an outdoor classroom, and a gazebo. The Department of Environmental Protection will also help address drainage issues that have caused flooding in the area.

The ceremony included Cruz; Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr.; a representative of New York City Council member Fernando Cabrera, whose offices secured the funding; and Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham.

A Proud Partner in Serving Bronx Children

Father McShane said that playgrounds are “magical places,” because they are where we make friends, and because they are where the music of the Bronx—the joyful shouts of children—can be heard.

“We are happily, proudly a Bronx institution, and from the very beginning, we felt we had a special mission to and for the people of the Bronx. All of us at Fordham want to be of service and in partnership with everyone in the Bronx, so this is a great day,” he said.

“Today, I tip my hat to you. Thank you for dreaming of this; now make sure this is filled with fun, friendship, and the music of the next generation of New Yorkers.”

Cruz, who has been at the school for 17 years, said she was thrilled to see so many disparate participants of the project, which began three years ago, together in one place.

Students worked with staff from the Trust for Public Land to design the play area, which will serve a little over 1,000 students, and then staff, students and parents choose from two designs their favorite.

Like Father McShane, Diaz Jr. pegged playgrounds as more than just a place to exercise.

“When we were students, how many of you can recall a memory if not more, of the playground? For me, at PS 5, I remember playing kickball, then at PS 31, I remember playing punchball. I remember starting what I thought in my mind was going to be my basketball career there,” he said.

“It breaks my heart to see the current state of this playground, but I know that good days are ahead.”

Anita Vazquez Batisti, Ph.D., associate dean, and director of the Center for Educational Partnerships, said the project exemplified the center’s focus on providing services and support to all members of the school community.

“Jesuit education is steeped in the notion of cura personalis, or care for the entire person as an individual endowed with particular gifts and insights. So too is our work,” she said.

“The new student-designed schoolyard, where students will exercise their bodies, stimulate their minds, and rejuvenate their spirits, is a perfect embodiment of that ethos.”

“Now with the coronavirus, there’s just so much more pressure on everyone,” said Anita Vazquez Batisti, Ph.D., founding and executive director of the Center for Educational Partnerships, part of Fordham’s Graduate School of Education, which applied for the grant this past summer. “A lot of adolescent children are at their tipping point, and they need even more help.”

New York City schools have historically struggled to prevent in-person and online bullying. This past December, Mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled a mental health plan that aims to bolster social, emotional, and academic support for students citywide this fall. This $588,233 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice, received by Fordham in October, will enhance the mayor’s goal, said Batisti. 

Identifying Triggers

“Our focus is on the psychological and environmental triggers, which often result in at-risk adolescents engaging in antisocial behaviors,” Batisti explained. “We feel that the people working with the kids need to identify these triggers so things can be avoided and deescalated before they reach a very serious situation.” 

The Center for Educational Partnerships plans on training teachers, students, guidance counselors, principals, and safety officers on how to prevent and reduce student violence against others and themselves through school-specific tactics, including anti-bullying training and strategies for mental health crises. The training program will also host workshops aimed to help the school community better understand negative emotions, recognize trauma and grief in students, and involve parents and caregivers in restorative justice practices.

The training program will be conducted by mental health consultants and faculty from Fordham, including social workers and psychologists. They will operate virtually and transition to on-site training when it is safe to do so.  

The center will work closely with Meisha Ross Porter, the executive superintendent for the entire Bronx borough and doctoral student at the Graduate School of Education, to select eight schools each year in the borough that would benefit most from anti-violence training, for a total of 24 schools at the end of the grant-funding period in 2023. 

School-Specific Strategies 

Before training begins, the center plans on conducting an outside assessment with school faculty and staff and examining each school’s unique challenges, past training experiences, and current mental health support systems. In a few weeks, the center’s new project coordinator will form a small advisory group with the schools from the first cohort of eight and begin virtual training.

“The committee will be formed with members from the learning community and the staff who serve the children so that needs are met at a very granular level,” said project coordinator Kathleen Walsh, Ed.D., GSE ’77, who was previously a school superintendent on Long Island and founding principal of a high-needs school in Brooklyn. “The needs are focused on the realities of each school.”

De-Escalation Strategies for the Future

At the end of each training period, the center will evaluate the success of the program by analyzing anecdotal feedback and school incident reports. The center, in collaboration with the Bronx superintendent’s office, will later create a custom list of de-escalation strategies and recommendations for each school. 

Students and staff from eight Bronx schools will be trained by the end of September 2021, and the second cohort of schools will start training in October. 

Walsh said she hopes the program will reduce negative mentalities toward struggling students and provide much-needed support for school personnel, safety officers, and parents.

“There is respect that we have to grow, earn, and work with,” Walsh said. “But when you believe in students and bring good people together, I know it works.” 

Thanks to a new app created by Fordham’s Graduate School of Education (GSE) and Department of Computer and Information Sciences, parents of children who are in distress will have an easier time finding resources in New York City.

The app is being introduced to three Bronx Community schools that have partnerships with the GSE. It will provide the schools’ social workers and guidance counselors with quick access to services that parents might need if their children are facing domestic challenges—an eviction, or other household unrest.

“If a child has pressing problems—say they spent a night in a shelter, or are living in an abusive situation—they’re not exactly going to be the first one raising their hand to answer questions,” said Anita Batisti, Ph.D., associate dean for educational partnerships at the GSE.

“Do they need a shelter that can accommodate a pet? Do they need shelters just for single mothers or for a family? Do they have health needs? The app offers more specifics than what we’ve been doing in the past, which is sending parents the contact person and hours for facilities,” Batisti said.

Harnessing the Power of Data

The app’s development began in 2015 with a $10,000 grant from Lilian Wu, Ph.D., a former member of the Fordham Board of Trustees and program executive for IBM Global University Programs. When former Board of Trustee Chairman John Tognino told her about Batisti’s partnership, Wu suggested they harness the power of the company’s Watson Blue Mix platform to help.

“There are so many real-world problems that have a three-way piece to it,” said Wu, an expert on data analytics who delivered the Clavius Distinguished Lecture at Fordham in 2011.

“The faculty wants to research problems and develop solutions, and students need to learn how to find solutions. And then there are residents—in this case the families with so many needs that the elementary school can’t possibly produce these answers with a handful of staff persons. It’s not easy to find good projects, but this is a good one.”

Students working with Frank Hsu, Ph.D., Clavius Distinguished Professor of Science and Professor of Computer and Information Science, interviewed social workers and principals to get a sense of what kinds of questions the app would need to answer. Hsu’s Laboratory of Informatics and Data Mining has been conducting research on cognitive computing for several years using IBM Watson system through the cloud.

A Community in Need

Dawn Johnson Adams, the center’s director of the community school program at Community School PS85X, and Cesarina Javier, the center’s social worker, also worked closely with the staff of the school, just south of the Rose Hill campus, on the project.

The school has 1,116 students who attend pre-k through fifth grade. Poverty is a significant issue; last year, 93 percent of students received free or reduced lunch. Many parents work two or three jobs, so she said that if they come to see her, they really need help because they’ve taken off from work. It’s hard to set up follow-up meetings to connect them to food pantries, mental health services, clothes, or the nearest emergency room. Nailing down accurate information quickly can be a challenge.

“I’ve tried to help a family with food stamps. I called the general number, they gave me another number, and when I called that number, they told me to call the general number.  You would be amazed how difficult the system is,” said Javier, who works as a bilingual social worker there.

“If I get a parent in for 15 minutes, I want to be able to actually help them. I don’t want them to leave feeling worried or that they wasted their time.”

PS 85X principal Ted Husted said that things get particularly challenging when students, 16 percent of whom live in temporary shelters, are dealing with multiple issues at once. On top of an unstable housing situation, a student might have family member who is incarcerated or living in another country.

He hopes artificial intelligence will be better at weaving all these issues together.

“I was impressed with the Fordham students when they interviewed us,” he said. “They had an opportunity to do something with their education that really has an impact on society.”

“Even when my social workers work as a team, giving good advice is very labor intensive. My expectation with this app is, they’ll be able to serve more parents because they’ll be able to get the information faster.”

The app is still in beta mode. And although it is designed to be a hyperlocal resource oriented toward specific New York City schools, Hsu and Batisti are hopeful that it will eventually be scaled up and expanded.

“This kind of collaboration is what Fordham is striving for,” Hsu said.

“If we ask these questions, what kind of answers are we going to get? In the course of working on this project, we found out that some of the websites in New York City are not as good as they should be. We can improve that with this kind of research. That’s the significance of this project.”

As a child, Wills looked up to her father and, although she didn’t know much about him, enjoyed her life with her family growing up in Rockaway Beach. When her father was killed in a motorcycle accident when she was thirteen, Wills began to wonder about the man she never knew and kept her curiosities with her until her adulthood, when she finally had the resources to learn about her family.

“My father was always a mystery to me, even though he was such a strong force in my youth,” said Wills. “I wanted to find out where he came from— and by learning about him, I wanted to learn more about myself.”

By using Ancestry.com and other resources, Wills found out that her great-great-great grandfather Sandy Wills was born a slave and fought for his freedom during the Civil War in the U.S Colored Troops. Discovering this connection, said Wills, was the validation she had been looking for as a child.

“To me, as a journalist, this was breaking news!” she said. “I had to find out more.”

After requesting more than 1,000 government records, she was able to piece together the life of her Grandpa Sandy and used it as an inspiration to write two books, Die Free: A Heroic Family Tale (Bascom Hill Publishing Group, 2011) and The Emancipation of Grandpa Sandy Wills (Lightswitch Learning, 2015), a children’s book.

“He did not let the world define him. He stood up and fought for what he wanted,” said Wills. “I want children to know that they can do the same in their own lives.”

Wills now travels to schools across the country speaking about her family’s history. She wants children to understand the fight that led to civil rights and free education for all people. She also wants to empower them to learn about their ancestors and become part of their own family narrative.

“Tracing your history and knowing who you are brings your life full circle. It completes you in a way that is hard to express,” said Wills. “It’s worth it.”

The evening was also a celebration of the 10th anniversary of GSE’s Center for Educational Partnerships and its director Anita Vazquez Batisti, Ph.D.

Batisti was given the President’s Meritory Service Award for her dedication to improving the educational environment to over 100,000 children in New York. She has raised over $200 million for New York City schools.

The Center for Educational Partnerships is a “research-based, outcome-oriented” initiative that works to enable all children to achieve and succeed academically.

—Mary Awad