November 15, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Feed the Billionaire, Starve the Students
By BOB HERBERT, NY TIMES, November 15, 2004

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The juxtaposition of the two articles, one in the news section and the other in sports, was instructive.

We learned from a page-one story in last Thursday's Times (see below) that pupils at Public School 63 in the South Bronx have to take their gym classes in the school's lobby. They don't have a gymnasium. Their teacher, Rose Gelrod, has marked a jogging path on the lobby's floor. These makeshift classes, as reporter Susan Saulny informed us, "are regularly interrupted by foot traffic to bathrooms and deliveries to the cafeteria."

Welcome to the wonderful world of neglect, which is the daily life of New York City schoolchildren.

Ah, but on the front page of the Sports section of that same paper comes a different story. It was a profile of the pampered billionaire owner of the New York Jets, Robert Wood Johnson IV, who is known as Woody to his close friends and those many public officials who stumble all over themselves trying to kiss his ring.

The very people who are crying poverty as they deny gyms and playgrounds to the city's schoolchildren - starting with the billionaire mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, and the governor, George Pataki - are pulling out every stop in an effort to round up and hand over hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to their friend Woody so he can have the grandest, most luxurious, most expensive sports stadium the country has ever seen.

The stadium would sit on some of the most valuable real estate in the country, prime Manhattan riverfront property, which would also be handed over for Woody's use. Oh, it's good to be a billionaire.

As for the kids. Well, forget about them. They don't have any money. For 30 years, at least, they've gotten the back of the hand when it comes to playgrounds and athletic facilities. Nearly a fifth of the city's schools lack gymnasiums. Ninety-four percent have no athletic fields. More than half have no playgrounds.

The politicians will tell you we can't afford to do better than that for the kids in the public schools. But a billion-and-a-half-dollar playground for the rich and famous, hard by the Hudson River? No problem.

In the article about Mr. Johnson, The Times's Duff Wilson said:

"He is one of the biggest Republican fund-raisers in the nation, and his grateful allies - President Bush, Gov. George E. Pataki and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg - make up a rare triple play of powerful support."

When you lavish money on politicians, you expect something in return. Among the things Mr. Johnson wants is $600 million in city and state funds (at least) to make up the difference between the $800 million he is putting up and the estimated $1.4 billion the stadium will cost.

The state and the city are responsible for financing the city's grossly underfinanced schools and they fight like gamecocks over who should pay for what. But they are in the most harmonious agreement that the estimable Woody should get the hundreds of millions that he wants for his stadium.

It couldn't be because he's greased so many palms, could it? I personally think this entire project is a scandal, a wholesale giveaway of tremendous public assets to an incredibly wealthy private interest. In the old days somebody would have called the sheriff. But you don't hear much about bribery or quid-pro-criminal-quos anymore because the rascals have figured out how to make it legal.

Woody Johnson is not big on publicity. He goes out of his way to avoid the spotlight. "He declines interviews for a profile," Mr. Wilson wrote. "He tells his closest family members and longtime business associates not to talk about him, either."

He would like the public to know as little about him as possible. And yet he has his hand out, palm wide open, ready to seize as much of the public's money as he can get.

The neglect of New York City's schools goes far beyond the lack of gymnasiums, athletic fields and playgrounds. Classrooms are overcrowded and there is a dangerous shortage of qualified teachers. Bathrooms in some schools aren't even equipped with toilet paper or hand towels. Parents and teachers are often forced to buy the most basic supplies.

You might think the powers that be would address those sorts of things before catering to the wish lists of greedy, grasping billionaires.

You might think that. But if you did, you'd be wrong.

November 11, 2004
Schools Pushing for Exercise, Even Without a Place to Play
By SUSAN SAULNY, NY TIMES

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Rose Gelrod teaches gym in the lobby of Public School 63 in the South Bronx. She traces her own footprint with a green marker to outline a jogging path on the tile floor. End zones are drawn in pink around concrete pillars that subdivide the space. Classes, which include tai chi in the afternoons, are regularly interrupted by foot traffic to bathrooms and deliveries to the cafeteria.

Despite all that, in the New York City school system, Ms. Gelrod's classes are considered examples of good physical education.

Recently, Ms. Gelrod was showing her techniques to a gathering of New York City gym teachers, some of whom hold their classes in cafeterias and make do on $200-a-year equipment budgets.

"I'm here today to pass along what I learned and to say, no matter what your situation is, there is a way to get students moving," she said.

Confronted with health data suggesting a crisis of obesity among New York City children, and mounting pressure from elected officials to do something about it, the Department of Education is adopting its first standard physical education curriculum in years, hiring a fitness director and 10 regional assistants and proposing millions of dollars worth of construction to create or upgrade sports facilities.

Ms. Gelrod's seminar was part of the department's new efforts, which aim to reverse years of neglect when it comes to providing regular sports and fitness classes. Many schools do not even come close to meeting state requirements - a violation for which the school system has never been penalized because the state does not track compliance.

Last year, a report by the City Council Education Committee found that 18 percent of New York's schools do not have a gym, 94 percent are without athletic fields and more than half the elementary schools have no playground. Even the schools with gyms and play spaces frequently use them as classrooms to ease overcrowding, the report said.

At P.S. 63, Ms. Gelrod is hesitant to encourage her young students to run full-speed in the lobby out of fear that they might crash into a pillar or a deliveryman. How do you play a simple game of tag like that? (Children who do not show respect for speed limits face a three-times-and-you're-out rule.)

"You can't have them crashing into walls," Ms. Gelrod said. "It's better for them to sit out than to go home with a cracked head."

City officials are clear-eyed about what the schools can accomplish in the short term, given the city's lack of investment in physical education since the fiscal crisis of the 1970's. "We have a lot of constraints," said Lori Benson, the newly appointed fitness director.

Still, the city's new efforts are not without critics. Nancy Lederman, a lawyer who wrote a report in 2000 on physical education in city schools, is among those who say the city is not going far enough, fast enough. It is, she said, "so much less than it should be." She added, "And from my point of view it's so sad. It's a failure in so many ways for the kids."

Last year, the City Council estimated that $922.2 million was needed to upgrade and renovate physical education facilities in the schools.

But just a fraction of that, about $150 million, went toward such improvements, according to the Department of Education. That money was a combination of state and city funds and the contributions of a nonprofit group, Take the Field, dedicated to rebuilding athletic facilities in the schools.

In its latest capital plan, the department has proposed bringing to $300 million the amount to be spent upgrading sports facilities over the next five years. Even these proposals, however, amount to a wish list since it is still unclear how much in additional funds the city school system will receive.

For the time being, making do is the name of the game. Yvonne Ebea, a physical education teacher at Middle School 391 in the South Bronx, said that she and two other teachers each receive $200 annually to provide equipment for 950 students. Ms. Ebea says she keeps her eye out for sales, when she can get "a really nice basketball for $25."

At P.S. 130 in Kensington, Brooklyn, the principal, Maria Nunziata, is grateful that the 103-year-old school will finally be getting a playground after years of lobbying for attention and funds. The groundbreaking ceremony was held last week. A gym is the next item on Ms. Nunziata's wish list. For now, however, the basketball hoops are in the cafeteria.

"One thing we want is more physical activity because the children need it," Ms. Nunziata said. "Many don't have an opportunity to be a part of organized sports or recreation outside of school because their parents can't afford it. "So it's imperative that we do as much as we can."

Often the students do not know what they are missing. Curtis Mojica, 15, a student at the New School for Arts and Sciences, said that when he attended P.S. 63, he thought that his lobby gym classes were normal. "I didn't even know it wasn't a real gym," he said. "We would play, run around."

School officials began to roll out the new curriculum, called Physical Best, last year in a limited number of schools in Brooklyn the Bronx and Harlem, where the health survey showed the greatest concentration of overweight children. Recent studies have shown that nearly half the city's 1.1 million schoolchildren are overweight; 21 percent of kindergartners are already obese.

The philosophy behind Physical Best, which is used in many school systems around the country, has little to do with traditional notions of competitive sports, but focuses rather on setting personal fitness goals.

In other words, gone are the days of games like dodgeball; students who probably need exercise the most were the first to be eliminated and head to the benches in such games.

Under Physical Best, parents receive occasional reports called Fitnessgrams about students' progress at building strength, endurance and flexibility. The Fitnessgrams show whether a student is in the "healthy fitness zone" or not. Ms. Benson said all of the system's 3,000 or so physical education teachers are expected to be trained to use Physical Best by the end of the spring term in 2006.

Jill Chaifetz, the executive director of Advocates for Children, a nonprofit group that monitors the schools, said that physical education and sports had suffered because of an emphasis on test scores, math and literacy. And while no one would advise against focusing on those things, children would be better served if schools kept an eye on the big picture, she said.

"If you look at asthma and obesity you can see how at best, the schools aren't helping and at worst, they are making things worse," Ms. Chaifetz said.

Robin Brown, the president of the United Parents Association of New York, said she had not really seen a difference in the schools yet.

"On paper, everything looks great - it's the implementation that's always problematic," she said. "In theory, their plan, yes it looks bright. In reality, it's something totally different."

At P.S. 9 on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, parents were so intent on getting more physical activity into their children's school days that they banded together and hired a private group to go to the school at recess and encourage group sports.

And last year, Christine Cirker, a graphic artist whose children attend P.S. 9, organized basketball games at the school. She and a handful of other parents gave up their mornings to open the gym and provide security; they also made T-shirts and hired coaches.

"If you're a parent you want your kid to have movement and exercise and if you can't afford the nice classes that are offered around Manhattan, this is the alternative," Ms. Cirker said.

In setting up the program, Ms. Cirker said, she faced a bureaucratic maze and found herself "jumping through hoops so small poodles couldn't get through them."

At one point, she said, she got a bill for thousands of dollars from the Education Department for renting the gym. She was outraged that parents who had volunteered so much of their time would then get a bill for their efforts. Eventually, the dispute was resolved and she did not have to pay. But still, she said, "It shouldn't be so hard."

But Richard Berlin, the executive director of Harlem R.B.I., the local branch of Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities, said he sees reason to be optimistic about physical education in public schools.

"The positive thing that's happened over the past year is that it's surfaced as a real issue," he said.

"Translating that crisis into dollars and action is another thing altogether. But at least it seems like some energy is there."

GYM CLASS WITHOUT THE GYM Slide Show

AUGUST 16, 2004

PEOPLE

Can Woody Johnson Make It In New York?
Jets owner Robert Wood Johnson has yet to sell New York on his football stadium

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Robert Wood Johnson IV, philanthropist and owner of the New York Jets, knows how to work a room. It's a warm June evening and Johnson is hosting a luau-themed benefit in New York to raise money to find a cure for the autoimmune disease lupus. Clad in a Hawaiian shirt, Johnson moves around the room, high-fiving one supporter and playfully grabbing the lei of another. Then he takes the stage with the night's honoree, James L. Dolan, chief executive of Cablevision Systems Corp. (CVC ) As they banter casually, it's barely apparent that the two men are actually engaged in a bitter war over Johnson's push to build a football stadium for the Jets in Manhattan.

Johnson will need all the diplomacy and persuasiveness he can muster. Four years after paying $635 million for the Jets, Johnson has teamed with New York state and city officials in a controversial proposal to build a $1.4 billion stadium on the west side of Manhattan. It would be the most expensive sports facility ever built in the U.S.

True, the 57-year-old billionaire heir to the Johnson & Johnson (JNJ ) fortune is known for his relentless energy and unbridled enthusiasm, whether he's talking up biomedical research or handicapping the Jets' prospects this fall. But his stadium plan faces some powerful enemies, ranging from community groups to city and state politicians. What's more, New York's Madison Square Garden -- a facility that's controlled by the Dolan family's Cablevision -- has attacked the plan in television ads.

All this hubbub has thrust the normally press-shy Johnson into an unaccustomed spotlight. But Johnson -- who goes by "Woody" because he deems his full name "too serious" -- seems to be enjoying the exposure. After turning away from the family business as a young man, Johnson spent much of his early adulthood searching for a passion that would excite him as much as running J&J had driven his father and grandfather. The Jets, coupled with his philanthropic ventures, have filled that void in his life. "I think I'm finally there," he says.

The Jets, while far from a charity case, definitely need help. Johnson, a lifelong football devotee, bought the team in 2000 following the death of longtime owner Leon Hess. Professional sports finances are rarely made public, but Marc Ganis, president of Chicago-based consulting firm Sportscorp Ltd., estimates that once the cost of capital is factored in, the Jets have actually been losing money ever since Johnson bought the team.

Part of the problem is that the team has a lousy deal with the Meadowlands complex in New Jersey, where it shares a stadium with the New York Giants. The Jets only get a fraction of revenues from sources such as signs and luxury suites, with the rest going to the Giants and the New Jersey entity that runs the facility. And the rent the team pays is 15% of game receipts, vs. a National Football League average of less than 10%. "They have one of the worst stadium deals in the NFL," Ganis says. Not only would the new stadium sport more amenities like high-priced suites and club seats but the Jets would keep all the revenues from them.

COMPETING CAMPAIGNS
Johnson's political ties haven't hurt his efforts to grab some prime New York real estate. He's a big GOP fund-raiser. In 2001 and 2002, Johnson gave $27,500 to New York Governor George E. Pataki's campaign. With New York City looking to add convention center space and build a stadium as it bids for the 2012 Olympics, Johnson was able to craft a plan with the governor and New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to share the cost of the facility.

It will take more than Johnson's political glad-handing to close the deal, however. Legislators in Albany threatened to try to block the $300 million in state funding Pataki has pledged to the project. And some politicians are up in arms over possible plans to allow the Jets to use tax-exempt bonds to cover part of its stadium tab -- a move they argue increases the already generous subsidies going to the Jets. Dolan's Madison Square Garden ads ask New Yorkers whether the millions being spent by the city should go to schools and other services instead.

The tactic irks Johnson. "They are mounting a massive disinformation campaign," he says. Johnson believes the Dolans are only worried about a possible threat to Madison Square Garden. The Dolans referred questions to a spokesman for the New York Association for Better Choices, who says the cost to taxpayers is "irrefutable" and that the ads are accurate. Still, Johnson has kicked off his own ad campaign arguing the stadium will generate enough revenues to cover the investment. Of course, with Los Angeles looking to land an NFL team, Johnson could always up the ante in negotiations. He says he has no plans to move the team out of New York. But Jets President L. Jay Cross says with the Meadowlands lease up in 2008, if the team can't get a suitable stadium in the New York area, "We would have to explore all our options."

Johnson's feistiness doesn't surprise those who know him. An avid sailor, he competed twice during the 1970s in a race from Rhode Island to Bermuda -- traveling through hurricanes so brutal "you thought the keel was going to come off." And he has driven across the country on his motorcycle with buddies such as Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner and AOL Time Warner's former chief operating officer, Robert W. Pittman. Once, he and Wenner drove for one hour at the highest speeds the bikes could handle. "It was sunset, and we were hauling buns," he laughs.

A life of privilege, to be sure. But Johnson's formative years also were marked by tragedy. Johnson lost two younger brothers within months of each other when he was in his 20s -- one to a drug overdose and the other in a motorcycle accident. His father, a onetime senior executive within Johnson & Johnson, had died a few years earlier at the age of 50. That death followed a nasty feud between Woody's father and grandfather, family patriarch Robert Wood Johnson II, who ran J&J from 1932 through 1963. Woody has one surviving brother and a sister, who along with his mother have stakes in the Jets. "The situation he grew up in was very difficult," says retired J&J Chairman James E. Burke, who took the helm at the company in 1976 and led J&J through the Tylenol tampering ordeal.

Determined to chart his own course, Johnson never pursued a career at J&J. He worked just one summer there as a teen. Johnson instead made a series of investments in the cable-television business and real estate in Florida, where he grew up, before moving to New York in 1984. There he began managing investments for several family members. In the 1990s, after one of his three daughters was diagnosed with diabetes, he began raising money for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. And he founded the Alliance for Lupus Research in 1999 when another family member was struck with the disease.

In many ways Johnson is more passionate about biomedical research than he is about football. He once hopped on a plane to visit a wealthy woman in Qatar who had a family member with diabetes. He returned with a $10 million donation for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

Regardless of whether the subject is philanthropic or Jets-related, Johnson can get even his competitors to let their guard down. Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, who opened a stadium for his team in 2002, has allowed Jets executives to take a close look at his operations to help them plan for their own facility. "I wouldn't do that for everyone," Kraft says. "I trust Woody." The question is whether Johnson can convince skeptical New Yorkers to place their faith in him as well.

By Amy Barrett in New York