Three years ago, when P.S. 446 opened in a building where two others had failed, it inherited many of the youngest students. Among them was a second-grader who was supposed to be in fourth grade and was reading at a kindergarten level.
The boy was one of a handful of students who had regular violent outbursts — he threw chairs and hit other kids.
“He was coming to school with a lot of stress, and he wasn’t being successful academically, so he was acting out,” said Meghan Dunn, the principal of the Brownsville, Brooklyn, school. “Kids would rather be known as the bad kid than the dumb kid.”
The difference this time around was Dunn was prepared. She knew the building's troubled history when she agreed to open the school in 2012. And she knew she’d be working in a community that desperately needed stability: Brownsville had the second-highest rate of student homelessness in Brooklyn and the highest elementary school student absenteeism in the city — 40 percent of its children missed 20 or more days of school per year.
The neighborhood, the poorest in Brooklyn, had one of the highest rates of psychiatric hospitalizations and incarcerated residents in the city. Two years ago, a man was shot in broad daylight in front of the school. Residents said they’ve seen improvements but the Brownsville police precinct recorded the third highest number of major felonies in Brooklyn last year.
Assuming her students arrived with myriad physical and emotional needs, Dunn said she structured the whole school to handle their issues. So far, the results are promising: the percentage of students reading at grade level climbed to 41 percent last spring, up from 32 percent the previous year, according to a widely used literacy benchmark. The number of disciplinary incidents during the same time period dropped by more than a third.
“When some of the trauma that happens out of living in a shelter or being in poverty causes problems, people say, ‘Oh, I can’t believe this happened,’” said Dunn. “Actually, these are very predictable problems, because we have a lot of information about what happens when you are constantly under stress, as a kid or as a parent.”
The struggling second-grader was immediately matched with a social worker who began seeing him individually and also met with his parents to help connect them to an outside evaluation of the boy’s possible learning issues. To help shift his behavior, the social worker told him to write down every time he walked away from a conflict. After he avoided a fight five times, he got 15 extra minutes of basketball.
Dunn also assigned him 30 minutes a day of one-on-one literacy help, which allowed him to improve his reading.
Still, the boy got in fights daily at recess so the school created an “alternative recess” for him and made him the “assistant gym teacher” for kindergartners. This year, as a fifth-grader, he is one of the school’s “junior coaches” who helps run recess and resolve conflicts between students.
Amir Brann, the school’s social work director, emphasized that the work his staff did with parents was as important as the work with kids, since it was difficult to have an impact on children if their families are in constant crisis.
P.S. 446 gets its extra staff and support from Partnership with Children, a citywide nonprofit that sends social workers into schools. The extra services cost about $200,000 per year, according to the partnership, and are paid for through a combination of private funding and the school’s budget; Dunn forgoes an assistant principal to make it work.
The team of three full-time social workers, plus three social worker interns, meets with about 100 of the 370 students each week, about a third in individual sessions and the rest in groups. Older kids choose a group, like “art” or “school newspaper,” and meet after school. They also get dinner and homework help.
Younger children meet during lunch in playgroups. Also, once a month, the social workers run a morning parents' group and an evening fathers' group.
In addition, the social workers accompany parents to medical appointments and housing court and do home visits. And this year they have added office hours just for teachers.
Partnership with Children social workers are in 32 schools around New York City. The group said not only has safety and attendance improved in its schools but the number of elementary schools students performing at grade level increased by 17 percent on state English exams and by 14 percent on state math tests.
Sometimes the fix is simple. One P.S. 446 student was chronically late to school and a social worker discovered that the shelter where the family was staying didn’t have alarm clocks. The mom’s phone, which they had used as an alarm, had broken. The school purchased an alarm clock, and the tardiness ended.
“We work a lot with kids to be able to ask for what they need,” said Dunn. “So kids know if you need anything, you just have to ask for an adult … if you don’t have a winter coat, we’ll find you one. When kids are acting out, a lot of time it’s because they don’t know how to communicate what they need.”
Parents said they appreciated the extra support. Latoya Watson’s third-grade daughter, Kalian, started at P.S. 446 in kindergarten and Watson has seen a big difference.
Kalian often wouldn’t speak in school when she was younger. After joining the school’s art group and then the environmental group that meets after school, she’s much less timid.
“Now she feels comfortable at school – she knows there’s someone to talk to without feeling like she will get in trouble,” said Watson. “That means a lot to me. I don’t have to worry about her in school.”
Dunn said the assistance of the social workers was indispensable, allowing the teachers to teach instead of constantly managing crises.
“They’re able to do things that we just can’t do,” said Dunn. “There’s only so much schools alone can do.”
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about Education Nation.