By Tony Richards
Editor-in-Chief

Residents who happened to be near the corner of Merriam Avenue and W. 170th Street on the night of October 17 witnessed a likely-unexpected sight: A procession of roughly 50 local activists, young and old, carrying candles and chanting.

After a community forum at CES 11 earlier that evening, education advocates, religious leaders, parents, and students marched from the school to High Bridge park to demand a new middle school be built in this community. To hear the participants tell it, this was only the beginning.

“You now have a movement,” Jim Fairbanks, chief of staff for councilmember Helen Diane Foster, told the crowd of roughly 100 people at the forum. “And without a movement, sometimes you can’t get things done.”

This sentiment was echoed by Moisés Pérez, executive director of Alianza Dominicana Inc., a non-profit organization that provides a variety of services to tens of thousands of New Yorkers. “You’re not gonna get what you want unless you fight,” Pérez. said. “You’re not gonna get it because you need it.”

While many of the speakers at the October 17 forum argued the need for a middle school in Highbridge has existed for decades, it has only been recently that the fight for a school has picked up steam. Leading the charge has been United Parents of Highbridge (UPOH), a collective of local parent advocates who presented the case for a new middle school to Community Board 4 in April. In the several months since then, UPOH has been flyering and conducting surveys to evaluate the level of community support for the idea.

Local elected officials, including Councilmembers Maria del Carmen Arroyo and Helen Diane Foster, as well as Assemblymember Aurelia Green, have thrown their support behind the proposal; Arroyo and Green both spoke at the October 17 forum, while Foster—who was unable to attend personally—sent Fairbanks to represent her and also wrote letters of support to both UPOH and education chancellor Joel Klein.

“The lack of a Highbridge middle school is an historic injustice of many decades,” Foster wrote in an October 13 letter to Klein, “and represents a serious security concern for the children.”

Indeed, the safety issues posed by middle-school-aged children in Highbridge being bussed to schools outside of the neighborhood was a chief concern expressed by residents during the community forum. “Any middle school is two buses away in every direction,” said Earlene Wilkerson, a UPOH activist who raised seven children in Highbridge. “Let’s imagine our ten-year-olds riding two city buses to school.”
Frances Tejada, also a UPOH member, has lived in Highbridge for 43 of her 45 years, and said the lack of a middle school in the community has been a defining issue for both her and her children.

“I carry the scars on my face of the bus trips,” Tejada said, adding that she felt society was even less safe now than it was when she was a child. Several residents who spoke expressed specific anxiety that their children were vulnerable to sexual predators when they traveled unaccompanied to school.

Assemblymember Green was one of several speakers to contrast the prolonged absence of a middle school in Highbridge with the very speedy construction of new housing units in the neighborhood. “Last year I visited two building openings right here in Highbridge,” Green said. “And when I saw the number of families, I said ‘We need a middle school, a high school, and a new elementary school.’ It is criminal for the city to allow those children to ride public transportation at the age of nine years old.”

Green and Fairbanks urged residents to embrace the challenge of pressuring their city government until their demand for a new school is met. Fairbanks reminded the audience that, when CES 11 became overcrowded in the 1970s, Highbridge residents shut down Ogden Avenue to demand a new school, moving desks into the street and opening “freedom schools” in the area. Eventually, he told the crowd, Mayor John Lindsay agreed to the demand, and PS 126 was built on Ogden Avenue.

At the end of the forum, members of the Mosque of Islam, on 1475 Jesup Avenue, joined in the march to High Bridge Park, where residents held a candlelight vigil; Abrahim Ndure spoke at the vigil on behalf of the mosque.

Chauncy Young a member of UPOH and the Community Collaborative to Improve Bronx Schools (CCB) and a driving force behind the middle school campaign, said High Bridge park was chosen as the location for the vigil in part because of its symbolic importance; last November, the city announced that the High Bridge would reopen after decades of closure. “That’s a park this neighborhood has been wanting for 40 years,” Young said.

Young and other local activists are hoping for a similar reversal of fortune in the form of a new middle school.