A pass failed me

For this aspiring doctor, attending one of Mayor de Blasio’s Renewal schools was the wrong prescription.

Hidekel Reyes Lopez, 18, decided to attend the HS for Health Careers and Sciences because it was convenient to her home in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood — and then a knee injury inspired her to pursue a career in orthopedics.

But despite its name, the school offered no specialized courses on health or medical professions, she said, and little in the way of science beyond the “very basic” classes required to graduate.

Even worse, the lackluster instruction left her unprepared when she got her high-school diploma last June and applied to CUNY’s Borough of Manhattan Community College — where she promptly failed the mathassessment test for incoming freshmen.

“I think they actually shouldn’t have graduated me,” she said of the city Department of Education. “The next step after high school should be college, and if I wasn’t ready for college, I shouldn’t have been let go.”

The vivacious, athletic teen wound up spending two months last summer in CUNY Start, an intensive, 25-hour-a-week, remedial program where she learned the “four years of math that I didn’t get in high school.”

Grateful for the challenge, Lopez wound up getting a perfect score of 100 on her final math exam, she said.

Despite de Blasio’s vow that his School Renewal Program would “transform” the 94 lowperforming schools targeted, Lopez noticed little impact at her high school after Hizzoner unveiled the plan in late 2014.

“For the most part it was the same. It didn’t really feel like a big change,” she said.

The most obvious differences, Lopez said, were an increase in the number of after-school clubs and a new health clinic.

And while she credited English teacher Lisa Brown with sparking a love of reading by introducing her to classic literature such as “The Catcher in the Rye,” Lopez said most of her classes were “very dull, very plain.”

Lopez also said her other instructors “just teach so students can pass the Regents” exams required for graduation, using old tests to guide the curriculum.

“They’re not really teaching so the students can learn, explore and go deep,” Lopez said. “I wanted to go deeper.”

While Lopez joined 70 percent of her classmates at Health Careers who graduated in four years, DOE statistics show a mere 10 percent scored high enough on standardized exams to enroll at CUNY without first taking remedial courses.

“Students are going into college unprepared,” Lopez said. ‘They don’t have a level of thinking that allows them to succeed.”