Sports and Integration in Brooklyn

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Matt Katz: It's the Brian Lehrer Show and WNYC. Welcome back, everybody. I'm Matt Katz from the WNYC Newsroom filling in for Brian. On this day off for students in New York City public schools, let's go now to a new podcast series about some of the structural inequalities inside a co-located High School and how through sports, students and staff attempted to mitigate those issues. The series is set in a school building in Park Slope, the John Jay Educational Campus, a complex home to four different schools, the Cyber Art Studio Academy, the John Jay School for Law, Millennium Brooklyn, and Park Slope Collegiate.

This school year, for the first time ever, all of the schools are playing together in one athletic program and they're all called The Jaguars. WNYC was there courtside to follow along as the girl's varsity volleyball team played together in this experiment in integration. The new series is called Keeping Score. It launched today in WNYC's United States of Anxiety podcast feeds. It was co-reported by student journalists with The Bell, that's a nonprofit student journalism group, and reporters from WNYC Studios. Joining me now is Renika Jack, the student journalist with The Bell's Miseducation podcast and an alum of the Cyber Art Studio Academy. Renika, welcome to WNYC.

Renika Jack: Hi, thank you.

Matt Katz: My colleague Alana Casanova-Burgess is the host of this mini-series. You might remember her from WNYC's Studio's fantastic La Brega podcast or from her work on the media. Hey there, Alana.

Alana Casanova-Burgess: Hi, Matt. Good morning.

Matt Katz: Good morning. Renika, by way of introduction, I want to play a cut of tape from episode one. Listeners, you may also recognize the other voice here. It's WNYC's education reporter Jessica Gould.

Renika Jack: I had came into the country on a Saturday and I started school on a Tuesday I think.

Jessica Gould: Renika Jack moved to the US from Guyana and she started school at CASA just a couple of days later. Growing up, she had ideas about what life at an American high school would be like.

Renika Jack: Because we had cable, so it'd be like High School Musical and stuff like that, so I came here expecting big football field, homecoming dances.

Jessica Gould: But she was surprised when she arrived at that big brick building in Park Slope.

Renika Jack: It wasn't your usual, typical, bright high school with kids out on the lawn and stuff like that. It was just dull and it was scary.

Jessica Gould: No popular kids or slackers gathered in groups on the grass. There wasn't any grass at all, just concrete and inside, metal detectors with lots of students filing through.

Renika Jack: I saw the white kids. I was like, "Oh, this is American high school. Yes, of course, it's going to have white kids," because I've never been to a school with white people. I was like, "Okay, this is cool." Then, when I finished with the front office and they showed me to my class, I was like, "Where are the white kids?" There's no white kids here. Literally none. It was just Black and all the minorities.

Jessica Gould: Her school on the first floor is 93% students of color.

Renika Jack: I've always wondered why, especially CASA, don't really have white people. We just have Blacks and we have the Hispanics and everything. That question has always sat at the back of my mind.

Matt Katz: Renika, take us into the John Jay building. I know you graduated this year. Congratulations. That's great. What was it like going to school in this building?

Renika Jack: Thank you. Going to school in the John Jay building was just like a day of going just to be by yourself basically. We have this big school with three different schools inside or four different schools inside where all of these kids and you only know a small percentage of these kids. You walk into the building, the first thing you're greeted with is metal detectors and then security guards, you're being pat-down. Then, you just bolt straight onto your floor. When you go to school in the morning, you go on the second floor, and then my class was on the first floor and I just came straight from security straight down to my school. There was no interaction. There was no telling the other kids good morning.

You just walk straight into your own world.

Matt Katz: Wow. Alana, can you put a little context to this for us? What was so compelling to you about the John Jay building?

Alana Casanova-Burgess: Yes. I think we're all familiar with the fact that there are a lot of co-located schools in New York City, but this is a building where you can really see the New York City public school system in miniature. By some measures, listeners probably have heard that New York's system is the most segregated in the country. You can really see that in a building like John Jay where Renika goes to school at CASA, the Cyber Art Studio Academy, where as we heard, it's over 90% students of color, and so is the John Jay School for Law in the building and also Park Slope Collegiate. The building also houses Millennium Brooklyn, which is a selective high school, and that means that you have to apply to get in.

The student body there is much more white and Asian. One of the stats that really jumped out at me in reporting this series, which came from our colleague Jessica Gould, is that 15% of the student body is white in the city. That's one, five. At Millennium Brooklyn that number is 45%. What's interesting here in this building is that you have these two very different kinds of schools under one roof and so students can compare each other, compare their experiences.

Matt Katz: Right. As I mentioned in the introduction, this is the first year that they can compare their experiences in the gym because there's one team for all of these schools. Why is that? What happened?

Alana Casanova-Burgess: Well, when Millennium Brooklyn came into the building a decade ago, they actually joined a team with their sister school in Manhattan. They were playing as the Phoenixes. All these students were coming into the building from Manhattan even to play in the gym. The other three schools were playing separately as the Jayhawks. For years this had been a really contentious issue because the Phoenixes also had more sports. They had more access to sports. The PSAL had granted them more teams. At one point, they had 17 teams and the Jayhawks nine. When I say teams, I mean access to a particular sport that they can play.

That's actually a pretty widespread problem in after-school athletics in the city. I don't know if listeners who are tuning in can relate to that. Students of color have less access to sports than white students do, and the PSAL actually just settled a lawsuit about that not long ago. That's also happening in the backdrop of this building.

Matt Katz: Is all that the reason why this team merger happened? Why did it happen now?

Alana Casanova-Burgess: As I mentioned, this has been bubbling up for a few years, but during the pandemic, suddenly there was this opportunity, and this was also brought about by the racial reckoning that the entire country was going through. I've heard about these Zoom meetings that took place where parents and administrators could hear students really pushing for this. I've actually brought a clip of tape of a former Millennium Brooklyn student, he graduated in 2017. His name is Michael Williams. He really set up what it felt like to learn what it was like for other students in the building, similar to what Renika is saying that it's so separate.

You'll hear Michael Williams here, and then you'll hear a former principal from the building named Jill Bloomberg.

Michael Williams: We just held space several times for people to just come in and just be for real. This has been a treatment that we have been receiving straight up at the hands of your school, Millennium. This is what we think should be done. Primarily amongst those demands were not just the integration of sports teams, but access to all clubs for all people.

Jill Bloomberg: The sports teams, it was a very visible and very tangible manifestation of segregation of the ways the separate and equal is not equal. It was very separate and unequal.

Jessica Gould: Former PSC Principal Jill Bloomberg.

Jill Bloomberg: I think just this idea of why can't kids play together? Really, why is this so hard to do?

Alana Casanova-Burgess: You can hear there why this really mattered to people in the building. Last spring, administrators announced that there would be this merger, this integration.

Matt Katz: Renika, you were there when the sports merger was announced. What did you think at first? Were you excited? Were you optimistic? Did you think it'd be this wonderful experiment and that everybody would come together for the first time?

Renika Jack: My first question when I heard that this was going to happen was how is it going to work? Because I was thinking of how many kids there are and how Millennium had their separate sports team and they already had their coaches, so how are the other coaches going to be able to be with the kids that they know already? That was my first question. Then, it got really interesting because it was like this is going to be the first time that everyone on the campus is actually going to be together or join together to do something or create something great. At first, I thought it wasn't going to work, but then after I started getting into it, I was like, this is really something amazing.

Matt Katz: Why amazing?

Renika Jack: Well, for me, I was on the track team when I was in school, and it helped me to create bonds with kids from all the other schools, which is something I had always wanted. From the first day I got there, I felt like everyone was separated and I wanted friends from the other schools, but honestly, I didn't really know how to do it.

Matt Katz: Sure.

Renika Jack: I felt this created something that I could have used to make friends.

Matt Katz: You did it, it worked, you made friends from different backgrounds?

Renika Jack: Yes. It indeed worked.

Matt Katz: Listeners, we can take your calls for Renika Jack, student journalist with The Bell's Miseducation podcast and an alum of the Cyber Arts Studio Academy, or Alana Casanova-Burgess, host of Keeping Score a new podcast series about an experiment in integration at a co-located high school campus in Brooklyn. What's your experience in those school buildings where there's more than one school? If you went to school on a campus like this, give us a call. How did you connect to students in the other schools on-site, if you did it all? And, because students have the day off today, I wonder if there's anybody listening who just graduated from a school in the John Jay building in Park Slope.

If so, definitely give us a call. Tell us about your experience. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or you can tweet @BrianLehrer. Alana, you've spent the fall with the girl's varsity volleyball team, so you were with a specific team. Why were they the conduits you chose for telling the story?

Alana Casanova-Burgess: Well, I mentioned that there had been these two teams in the buildings, the Jayhawks and the Phoenixes, and they were actually in the same division and competed against each other in some sports. For the girl's varsity volleyball team, they actually used to be rivals. Students had to face off against each other across this net. The other thing is that all these players and the coaches have pointed out that in general, volleyball is a sport that few players of color participate in. It's a very white-dominated sport.

There are a lot of interesting dynamics on the team. Also thinking about volleyball, if you picture how the game is played even, it's really all about connecting with your teammates.

When you're sitting on the bleachers, you're basically seeing these two teams standing across from each other, playing across from each other, meshing, and it's different from say, like soccer or football where you're running around your bodies are coming into contact with your opponent's team. It's really about how you mesh with the people on your team. If we think about meshing, integration, it just seemed like a poetic space to examine that.

Matt Katz: Yes. That's so interesting. I hadn't thought of it that way. Can you give a sense of journalistically how much time you spent in the gym with these students and were you also outside the school with them or was it all inside the school?

Alana Casanova-Burgess: I went to practice, I have to say that the coaches were incredibly generous with inviting me to practice and to come to games. I was there, I don't want to give too much away about how they did in the season, but I was there in some pretty competitive high-stakes games that they were in across the city. Also, through Monika and her peers, Mariah Morgan and Lauren [unintelligible 00:14:16], they're also student journalists with The Bell, and they were also on the team. Between all of us, I think we really got a lot of different perspectives about what it was like. Actually, I mentioned the coaches. Coach Mike Salak, he has a lot of professional volleyball experience.

He's actually played competitively in Europe. He also teaches economics at Park Slope Collegiate. I have a little piece of tape of how he was thinking about this integration. Yes, he pretty much speaks for himself.

Matt Katz: Let's hear it.

Mike Salk: Yesterday I put a picture on the wall of them during our first scrimmage with all of them sitting on the bleachers and it was all the John Jay girls next to each other, then it was all the millennium girls. It was like, we're not mixed yet. This is kind of a symbol of where we need to go. The integration is the part, it's not that another school has been added in. That's not a big difference, but the fact that most of the students we get from that school are white and Asian, that's a big difference.

Matt Katz: Just like hearing the word integration in New York City in 2022 is so fascinating because I hear the word and my mind goes to the civil rights era, it goes to the '60s, and you got to witness integration happening or trying to happen in real-time. It's so fascinating.

Alana Casanova-Burgess: Yes. I think to kick this to Renika or maybe bump it to Renika if we're going to use some volleyball parlance.

Matt Katz: [chuckles] Very nice.

Alana Casanova-Burgess: I think, Renika, do you want to talk about how that comparison felt to you historically?

Renika Jack: Yes. To witness this integration, at first, I thought back to the civil rights movement and everything. I was just like, "Is this what integration felt like the first time they integrated schools?" I felt like I was living history. I was reliving history of now joining together with everyone, and it was kind of crazy. I was like, "In 2022, how is this now happening?" It should have already been set. Everything should have been smooth, but I guess it's now happening.

Matt Katz: Yes. We actually have a call from someone who says he coached at one of the co-located schools there. John in the Bronx. Hey, John.

John: Hi. How are you?

Matt Katz: Doing great. Thanks for calling. You were a coach at [crosstalk]--

John: Well, I coached at John Jay High School before it broke up when it was John Jay high school, and then when it broke up and when Millennium moved in, I was already at a different school coaching there on a co-located campus. The difference was there wasn't a covenant to say that one school could be a separate entity. The school I worked at, we shared athletes, we shared the location, and it worked quite well. It actually worked well inside the school too because we got to know students throughout the school.

There's a real tension in these co-located schools where do they collaborate, do they cooperate, or do they compete, and a large part of how they operate is based on the visions of the principles and how the principles interact with one another when they do their building councils and talk about these shared spaces and shared students.

Matt Katz: Interesting.

John: There's a lot of tension from above. The administration of how these schools were formed and why they were formed led to a deepening of segregation, hence now we're talking about integration of schools as if it's something new, but it's actually very old. We were unified school buildings, and we realized that the small schools' movement is really not sustainable. There was a time when it was well funded, but it's no longer well funded.

Matt Katz: It's interesting. Alana, feel free to jump in if you have any questions for John here, but it seems that sports is a effective way of bringing students together at these co-located schools. Right?

Alana Casanova-Burgess: Well, actually I wanted to ask John, what year were you coaching there at John Jay?

John: Oh, I started in 1978 and I left in May 2001.

Alana Casanova-Burgess: Yes. That's interesting. Just picking up on what you said about small schools, we have that in the series, that John Jay used to be a very large high school. It was a school that I think at one point was number one in terms of robberies and assaults. It was a really troubled school. Under the Bloomberg administration, many listeners will remember, the small schools' movement really took off and schools like John Jay were split into these different smaller schools. As one person pointed out to me, it's really hard to fill a team with a school that only has like 200 kids. It's hard to fill AP classes. It's hard to put on a theater production.

There are all these elements of high school life that becomes super fragmented when you have these smaller schools. In a lot of places and in a lot of these buildings around the city, you do have these merged teams where everybody comes together and plays together and tries to solve for that problem. What's different as we've discussed in John Jay up until this past year is that they had not actually totally done that.

Matt Katz: We have another caller, Jordan in Brooklyn. Hey, Jordan. I understand that you went to one of the schools at John Jay.

Jordan: Hi. Yes. I actually went to Millennium Brooklyn. I graduated from there two years ago. The merger had happened a bit afterwards, but I remember hearing about it and I have friends that still go there. When I heard this or my mom called me over, she was like, "Oh, my God. They're talking about your school." I was like, "Oh. What? Really?" [chuckles] Pretty much that's why I'm here. That's why I called at least. [chuckles]

Matt Katz: Alana, got any questions for this alum here?

Alana Casanova-Burgess: Or maybe Renika does, Renika, do you [crosstalk]--

Matt Katz: Or, Renika, yes. Renika.

Renika Jack: Were you on any sports team?

Jordan: Yes, I was on the track team actually and cross country team.

Renika Jack: Hey. [laughs] That's good.

Matt Katz: Track team reunion here. That's great. What was your experience? There were just students from your school on the track team, right?

Jordan: Yes. I would say throughout my entire high school career, definitely everything was very separated and segregated. Actually, I remember in my early years there, there would be people who were trying to advocate for integrating the programs because funding and things like that. We never really understood it, believe it or not. Honestly, I didn't really know what to think about it, but until I heard about the merger, and then realizing why they did it and also just learning a lot about Black history and just every segregation that happens, especially in New York City, I was like, "Oh, this makes a lot of sense. This actually makes a lot of sense." [laughs]

Matt Katz: Jordan, you're definitely going to want to be listening to this new podcast. Keeping Score is right up your alley. I think it's going to shed some more light and context on your experience in high school. Thank you very much for calling in. Really appreciate it.

Jordan: Yes, of course.

Matt Katz: Alana, I don't want to spoil the end of the series here of course, but you follow the quest for the championship. Just give a little sense of some of the challenges that the Jaguars had to overcome during the season?

Alana Casanova-Burgess: Well, Renika foreshadowed this earlier, but when you have two teams merging, you still have the same number of spots on the court or on a given team. This year, the volleyball team was extra big. It had 23 players on it. In volleyball, you can only have six players on the court at a given time. Immediately, there was this issue of who gets to play. As Jordan the caller was mentioning, there are all these ways that privilege and race come up in school buildings. Here again, you're going to hear how the privilege that some players have off the court was showing up in that dilemma of who gets to play. I have a piece of tape here.

We're going to hear Mariah Morgan who was on the volleyball team this season. She also is a student reporter from The Bell. She helped us report out this story. She's been documenting her experience, and so she sent us a voice memo from the very first day of practice when the team was split up into skill level and she noticed a problem just right away.

Mariah Morgan: Three-fourths of the room was Black and Latinx while there was only three white girls in that room. Then, I went back downstairs. As soon as I walked back into the gym that I was just in, it hit me like something is wrong because it was significantly whiter than the one upstairs. It was like my stomach started to hurt. That's when I knew I probably have to say something because this does not look right. This does not feel right. This preseason or practices or whatever I feel like now is starting to further the inequities.

Alana Casanova-Burgess: Given all the concerns about this merger, about who would get on the team, about whether it would be fair to all players, it's immediately demoralizing. Mariah who had pushed for the merger who had been so excited about making the team was already feeling like it's not working. She can barely convince herself to show up to practice.

Mariah Morgan: It's especially discouraging at least for me and then I don't even want to play.

Alana Casanova-Burgess: All these students are so attuned to how race shows up in their lives. They're so sophisticated about calling it out and pushing everybody to do better. It's been really inspiring to see.

Matt Katz: Renika, what do you think is left to be done with this unified athletic program on the John Jay campus? What do you hope happens going forward?

Renika Jack: My hopes and my dreams going forward for this athletic, we've already joined together, we're already one team, but now there has to be systems in place so that everything works and everybody gets to play. You can hear Mariah how divided the team was where there was a certain amount of white kids, there were a certain amount of Black and Latinx kids, but it should be equal. I just want everyone to have the same opportunities to play because while I was on the track team, all the teams in the first year that we had the merger, they were dominated by Millennium kids who were mostly white and they were a small percentage of kids from Law, a small percentage of kids from PSC, and CASA.

My hopes is just that there's a system where there has to be an equal amount of numbers of kids from each schools so that everyone has the opportunity to play. I feel like in order for that to happen, that to work, the kids are already advocating for this, but it takes the higher authorities, the administration to listen and actually take what we say into consideration and actually make it work.

Matt Katz: Do you agree with that, Alana, it's going to take focus from the administration, they're going to have to prioritize this in order for it to work?

Alana Casanova-Burgess: Yes. Also, Mariah Morgan who we heard from in that tape, she is also in a student government group that's called Campus Council which is one of the ways that the students have found avenues to all collaborate and work together. It's like a student government group for all the schools. She and the whole Campus Council have been really activated, really advocating for different ways that this team merger could be better. That's also a question I have coming out of reporting this story is whose responsibility it is to really push for this change.

It is going to take a long time, but also, high school's only four years long, so it's great to make things better for future students and to work on things and improve things, but I get the sense, Renika, you can let me know what you think here, but that everybody wants things to be better sooner so that everybody can take advantage of all the opportunities that there are.

Matt Katz: Right.

Renika Jack: Yes. I really want it to happen so that everyone could have this opportunity now. I already graduated. I left. [chuckles] I can't have that opportunity, but for Mariah, for Lauren, for [unintelligible 00:28:25], and all the rest of kids who are still there, who are still playing sports, I think that it should happen really soon so they could have this opportunity to feel what it feels like to all just actually be one and come together and have fun playing games.

Matt Katz: I certainly hope that happens and that serves as some inspiration going forward. I am so excited for this new podcast series. It's called Keeping Score from WNYC Studios. It's available now in the United States of Anxiety feeds. That's right, Alana, you search for United States of Anxiety and you get Keeping Score, wonderful.

Alana Casanova-Burgess: That's right.

Matt Katz: I hope everybody checks it out. Renika Jack is a student journalist with The Bell's Miseducation podcast and an alum of the Cyberarts Studio Academy. Alana Casanova-Burgess is the host of this mini-series. It's called Keeping Score. You can find it right now. Thank you both for talking about it with us today and sharing some of this amazing tape. We really appreciate it.

Alana Casanova-Burgess: Thanks, Matt.

Renika Jack: Thank you.

 

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