School Chess Team Wins a Big Battle

How about some good news to start this Monday morning?

Last week, The Daily News wrote about the plight of the chess team at Intermediate School 318 Eugenio Maria De Hostos in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Because of budget cuts, the school was having a difficult time scraping together the $100,000 it needs for its chess program, which has produced 28 national championships, The News reported. This year it came up nearly $60,000 short.

This weekend, The News reported that the Brooklyn Navy Yard Cogeneration Plant donated $25,000 to the school to keep the team going.

“We thought, ‘Three weeks before Christmas, what perfect timing,’ ” said company official Sean Lane. “It just seemed to us how could we not support this school.”

Lane said the company regularly donates their time to the school and when they saw the school needed cash, the decision was a no-brainer.

“We rely on New York to be successful so that we can be successful and that starts with the kids in our own community,” said Lane. “It’s a way for us to give back to the community we work in every day.”

The students still have $15,000 to raise through candy and bake sales — unless there is another white knight out there? — said the assistant principal who runs the team and spearheaded the fund-raising effort, John Galvin. But meanwhile, last week the team paid a visit to Google to compete with the brainiacs over there, and left with a 45-9 win.

“It just reinforced our belief that our kids are the intellectual equals of anyone,” said Galvin. “They’re proud of what they’ve accomplished and they’re proud to show it off.”

In a more disturbing report, an investigative reporter, Lucy Komisar, wrote in the Sunday Review section of The New York Times that food management companies hired by school districts to run school lunch programs are making millions of dollars in management fees.

But that is not all. The "middle men" between the federal financing for the lunches and what winds up on trays in school cafeterias often take perfectly natural and healthy foods — foods that are part of a national effort to improve nutrition and reduce obesity in children — and turn them over to companies that process them into less-healthy meals.

Here is one way it works, she wrote.

The Agriculture Department pays about $1 billion a year for commodities like fresh apples and sweet potatoes, chickens and turkeys. Schools get the food free; some cook it on site, but more and more pay processors to turn these healthy ingredients into fried chicken nuggets, fruit pastries, pizza and the like. Some $445 million worth of commodities are sent for processing each year, a nearly 50 percent increase since 2006.

Her report is worth reading, if you can stomach it.

For other articles from this weekend that are worth reading, Gotham Schools has a more complete roundup in its Rise and Shine posts every morning and its Remainders posts at the end of the day.

Looking ahead this week, there is still a bit of space at the first SchoolBook community forum on Thursday at 6 p.m., at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Tickets are free, but you must be ticketed. Information can be found here.

Brian Lehrer will be interviewing Chancellor Dennis M. Walcott, followed by a panel of some SchoolBook writers and other educators and advocates. Come, submit questions, listen — and meet the editors and contributors to SchoolBook.

On Monday, Prof. Cornel West will be addressing and speaking at Wadleigh Secondary School for the Performing and Visual Arts from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the auditorium. The community is invited. Wadleigh received a D on its latest school report card — dropping from an A in 2009 — and is in danger of being closed.