Bronx’s P.S. 53--a School for Scandal

When Winsome Stewart’s 6-year-old son Elisha climbs the steps of Bronx’s Public School 53 each morning, he and the other young students sometimes take the opportunity to practice what they are learning in arithmetic skills.

“They can count how many crack vials they see (littering) the steps,” Elisha’s horrified mother said Wednesday.

P.S. 53 and its overwhelming problems are now at the center of a spreading corruption scandal that is casting a shadow over a quarter of New York’s 32 local school districts.

Drug Use Accusations

Earlier this month, the school’s longtime principal, Matthew Barnwell, was arrested for allegedly buying two vials of crack. His arrest triggered an investigation that has led to the suspension of the local board in charge of P.S. 53, and to board members’ being investigated for a wide range of accusations that include heavy drug use by the members themselves. Barnwell has pleaded innocent.

At least seven other school districts are reported to be under investigation as well, either by grand juries or the central system’s inspector general, and charges of corruption have included stealing school property, extortion and demanding sex for promotions.

On Wednesday morning, Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer stood before an auditorium full of wriggling P.S. 53 students and gave them a mission: “I want you to know that you, all of you from 53, are going to end up being the best soldiers in our war on drugs. . . . Today, in every school in the Bronx, I’m declaring it drug-free day.”

But Stewart and many of the angry parents at the back of the room, though grateful for the attention, were not particularly soothed by his words.

The principal, Stewart said, “is the one who’s supposed to show the example. If he does it, what does that show to the kids? If you cannot even trust what’s happening in the school, what can you expect for the education of your child?”

“The parents are very angry,” added Betty Gardner, mother of a fourth-grader. “If (the charges are) true, I think the majority of parents want to take their children out” of P.S. 53.

P.S. 53 has long had more than its share of problems. Reading scores there rank near the bottom of the city’s elementary schools. And everywhere, parents say, there are drugs.

In the schoolyard, Stewart’s son Elisha said shyly that “one of the big kids”--a fifth grader--has taunted him with crack vials, telling him to pick them up and lick them. Some children, he said, collect the vials like recyclable pop bottles to return to drug dealers for a nickel apiece.

“I see a lot,” he added.

His mother expressed anger that it took an event as sensational as the arrest of a principal to bring attention to these problems. “A lot of parents are feeling rebellious, because it took this incident to bring all of the skeletons out of the closet,” Stewart said. “What has the school board been doing all this time?”

Decentralized System

Many critics are tracing the schools’ problems to New York’s highly decentralized school system, in which local boards run the city’s approximately 800 elementary and junior high schools with relatively few restrictions.

Although many school officials said the charges were overblown, the scandal continued to unfold Wednesday with a series of new allegations.

New York Newsday reported that authorities are reopening the investigation of the shooting death, first believed to be suicide, of a school employee the day before he was scheduled to testify before a grand jury last April. At that time, the jury was probing allegations that a Manhattan superintendent operated a slush fund, according to Newsday’s account.

The Daily News reported new allegations that the same superintendent and another school official took school funds for personal use.