DON’T LET NYC SCHOOLS FAIL YOUR KIDS

SCHOOLS Chancellor Carmen Fariña says that she can turn failing schools into great ones if she changes the principal, gives students an extra hour of class and throws in lots of extra money.

As a former publicschool student and parent, I’ve heard these types of promises before. And they’ve never done any good.

We’re in the midst of an education crisis, and none of Fariña’s fixes will stop these schools from failing this generation of students the way they failed the last generation.

Think we don’t have an education crisis? Take a walk in my shoes.

I grew up in Spanish Harlem — El Barrio. I wanted to be an actor, because I loved being someone else. It was hard growing up — acting was a way out.

I was blessed to have a good teacher in elementary school who made me want to learn. But things got rough in middle school.

It was a performingarts school, and I was a drama major. At most drama schools, you can’t perform in shows if your grades are bad, but at JHS 117 it didn’t matter.

The teachers didn’t care about me, or any of the students. They didn’t put forward much effort in teaching lessons, and it didn’t matter to them if we did our work or not.

My attitude was that if they didn’t care, neither did I. I wish someone had told me to pay attention because my future depended on it. But no one did.

When 8thgrade graduation came, I marched with the rest of my class, but I didn’t get a diploma — just an empty booklet. After the ceremony, my principal told my mother I wouldn’t amount to anything.

Still, somehow, I kept being promoted from grade to grade, from a failing middle school — which was closed in 2010 — to a failing high school, Seward Park.

The school was far from my home, there were constant altercations between kids from different ethnic groups and different neighborhoods. The atmosphere was not conducive to learning.

After a year, I transferred, but my new school was like junior high all over again. Expectations were low. No one cared about me or how I did.

I fell through the cracks. I stopped going to class, and no one — not my parents or the school — seemed to notice. Finally, three weeks into my senior year, I dropped out.

I was 17, with no highschool diploma, to tally unprepared for life. I worked for a while. It was a hustle. I tried to go back to school, but they told me I was too old. I didn’t think college was for me to begin with, and that was the last nail in the coffin.

But I’m a fighter. I got my GED. I got my commercial driver’s license. I got married.

And I now have two beautiful boys, Joziah, 6, and Jeremiah, 2.

As a father, I couldn’t let the same thing happen to my sons. But in our Bronx neighborhood, all the schools around us are failing. At our zoned school, only 1 in 10 kids passes the state test.

Joziah went to district schools for preK and kindergarten, and the work wasn’t challenging. There was no system for him to start learning to read. Class was too easy for him, so he got bored and started acting out.

I saw 17yearold me in my son’s future. I’ve never felt worse.

Fortunately, Joziah got into a charter school for first grade. Now, instead of me reading to Joziah, Joziah reads to me. As a dad, it means the world to me.

I failed in school; that’s why I struggle to this day. But my sons will go to college and not only finish, but graduate with honors.

That’s an amazing thing for a dad who grew up in El Barrio to be able to say. When you’re a male from an urban environment, people look for you to fail. You know what it is to be treated like nobody cares.

Right now, there are 800,000 kids across New York, many from urban neighborhoods, whose schools are failing them and don’t care. I was one of them. Joziah was briefly one of them. Jeremiah won’t be.

But all over the city and state, families with the same problems are finding they have no options. They want better for their kids, but the school system says no.

Don’t think there’s an education crisis? Don’t think our schools are failing?

You be a parent who can’t get answers from a teacher about their kid. You be a parent who sees their kid bored in school and getting on the wrong path because the system doesn’t care. You be a parent who knows that the school has no expectations for your child, that thinks failure is all your kid is capable of.

Would you accept that for your child? Why should we?