A day at Sardine High
1,757 frustrated students fill packed school in B'klyn
By ELIZABETH HAYS, DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

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Overcrowding has forced students at Maxwell Tech to attend classes in the auditorium and the library.

Jam-packed hallways. Classes in the library and auditorium - sometimes several at once. Lunch at 10:30 a.m. for some students. And a school day that lasts until 5 p.m. for others.
Welcome to daily life at the city's own Sardine High - William H. Maxwell Career and Technical Education High School in Brooklyn.

Stuffed with more than twice the number of students it should have, the former all-girls technical school in East New York is the most overcrowded high school in the city, the city Independent Budget Office said in a recent study.

"I was looking forward to coming back this year, but they've ruined it," said senior Rene Cruz, 17, who for the first time has to enter through a metal detector that was set up to keep the bulging school safe. "Now I hate it."

In the past three years, enrollment at Maxwell has skyrocketed more than 30%, from 1,341 to 1,757. And that's in a building designed for 722 students.

It's a tight squeeze: The library, the auditorium and specialized shop rooms all have been turned into class space.

Senior Tene Brathwaite, 17, of East New York, takes Spanish in the auditorium, just steps away from another Spanish class taught by a different teacher.

"I can't even hear what the teacher is saying when the other class is yelling out words," she said. "This school is outrageous."

"It's so crowded I couldn't even get in the stairwell today to go to lunch," Tene said.

The hallways are "very, very, very, very crowded," said 10th-grader Monay Johnson, 16. "It's harder to get to class."

And the school's long-praised career training can't help but be strained: "You don't have a lot of one-on-one with the teachers," said Bushwick senior Diane Santiago, 17. "If you're confused, you have to do it on your own."

Maxwell is the flip side of Chancellor Joel Klein's high school reforms. As Klein shrinks enrollment at some schools, others swell with the overflow.

Staffers blame their school's ballooning enrollment on the overhaul of several nearby high schools, such as Thomas Jefferson and Bushwick. As those schools get carved up into small academies, the extra kids have been dumped on Maxwell, they said.

"Why should we have to battle for things that should come naturally - like a classroom for every kid?" said cosmetology teacher Jeffrey Bernstein.

At Maxwell, the day starts early and ends late as classes are staggered through four sessions.

Some students get up at dawn - or earlier - to make it to school by the new "0 Period" at 7:12 a.m. Other students, mostly freshmen, start later but don't get out of class until 4:45 p.m., when the winter skies grow dark.

Social studies teacher Alex Oplachko said he wakes up at 4:30 a.m. to make it from his home in Sheepshead Bay.

"It's a little bit more hectic but you have to do what you have to do despite everything," he said.

During a recent tour of the school with a Daily News reporter, Principal Barbara Elk Duncan said the school is coping with the influx. "We defy everything that people would expect. There's no chaos," said Duncan, adding that parents are still clamoring to get into Maxwell because of the school's reputation for safety. "We're handling things well."

But staffers worry the influx will hurt the solid reputation that Maxwell has built training mostly teen girls for jobs in cosmetology, fashion, communications and other fields.

Education Department spokeswoman Michele McManus said officials are working "to keep the enrollment stable" at Maxwell and hope to ease overcrowding throughout the city with their ambitious capital plan. But the $13billion plan relies on $6.5 billion from Albany that has not been approved.

Staffers said the influx of new kids - many of whom are poorly prepared for high school - is already taking a toll. Maxwell was added to the state's list of failing schools, or SURR list, for the first time last year.

Many teachers worry that efforts to fix nearby broken schools will end up hurting a school that was working - especially because many of the additional students have no interest in the careers taught at Maxwell.

"They should be helping us achieve instead of inundating us with more children," said Bernstein, also the union representative. "I think Maxwell is still a wonderful school - I just want to see it stay that way."


Dunce cap for Ed Dept. science gap
Specialty teachers lackingBY KATHLEEN LUCADAMO, DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

With dreams of becoming a neurosurgeon, 12-year-old Kaitlin Silva makes the long trek from her home in Queens to a special Brooklyn middle school for the sciences.
But three weeks into classes at the School for Health and Biomedical Sciences in Sunset Park, Kaitlin still doesn't have a science teacher.

"How do you have a science program with no science teachers?" asked Kaitlin's mom, Pat Silva, 45. "I'm beginning to think they have a themed school in name only."

With a dwindling national pool of science teachers combined with the city's race to boost reading and math scores, science-themed schools may be suffering, parents and education watchdogs fear.

Over the summer, the school - one of three small academies at Intermediate School 220 - lost four science teachers: one retired, another began maternity leave, a third moved to Long Island and a fourth decided to teach another subject in another school.

"It's a perennial problem to find math and science teachers," said Elizabeth Arons, chief executive officer of human resources for the city Education Department.

She held a job fair for principals to find last-minute science teachers last week. She said 45 were hired.

"Statewide, colleges only produce about 500 science teachers a year. New York City alone could use double that," Arons said.

Poor planning, pressure to boost math and reading scores and dried-up funds for magnet programs may be the culprit for a science school without science, said Clara Hemphill, who reviews city schools for the Web site Insideschools.org.

"With the mayor and chancellor's laser focus on reading and math, science is getting squeezed out of schools," Hemphill said.

Some 30 city schools have "science" in their names, but, like Kaitlin's academy, many can't back up the promise with instruction.

Eva Moskowitz, chairwoman of the City Council's Education Committee, who at a recent hearing championed better science teachers, calls IS 220's tale "false advertising."

"If it is a science school and science is the theme, you would not ask if there would be science teachers. You would assume that's what you are getting," Moskowitz said.

Education Department officials said they've hired two new science teachers for Kaitlin's school, including one for her grade, who will start this week. In the meantime, Kaitlin was learning, "How to Be a Class Leader," taught by a substitute teacher in health class, she said.

"To be a neurosurgeon, I need a good science degree and I need good science teachers," said Kaitlin, whose grandparents drive her from her Ozone Park home to the Brooklyn middle school each morning. "I joined this school to learn about the body and all different kinds of stuff. The first year was great, and there were after-school clubs that dealt with science. But there isn't any of that this year."

Her mom understands the crunch for science teachers but isn't sympathetic to the school system. "They should have had these teachers in place before school started," griped Silva. "Clearly, they didn't make science a priority."