A visit to Dickinson High School By Patrick Samway, S.J.

Schools are back in session and academic routines have set in. But what are students learning today, I often asked myself. Mostly out of curiosity, I decided, at age 60, it was about time to go back to high school and see what typical urban Jersey teenagers were learning, or not, as the case may be.

At the invitation of Robert Donato, the principal of Dickinson High School in Jersey City, whom I had met informally on a number of occasions, I visited before the end of the last term over a dozen classes at Dickinson and talked with a handful of faculty and staff members, as well as a number of students.

It’s hard not to be impressed by Dickinson. Resembling an Austrian Schloss designed in the Beaux-Arts style of architecture, it dominates the eastern limits of the Palisades, allowing for a spectacular view of the New York skyline. During the Revolutionary War, George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette used this hilltop as lookout point. Opened in 1906 as the Jersey City High School, Dickinson now boasts, after an addition was added in 1932, 125 classrooms, a 2,000-seat, horseshoe-shaped, two-tiered auditorium that unfortunately cannot quite accommodate the entire student body, 172 full-time faculty, a newly renovated gym, a pool and a well-staffed Adolescent Health Center that offers clinical and counseling services.

Yet as a professor of American literature, I knew that I could not judge this particular book by its cover. What would I encounter? Surely gangs roaming the deepest circles of hell? Xenophobic, stressed-out faculty playing Muzak to pacify students unwilling to learn anything? Administrators keeping their eyes and hearts shut tight to avoid further intimidation? I saw none of this. Rather, I was transported back to an environment not unlike the public urban high school I attended in the mid-1950s.

At Dickinson, well prepared, dedicated teachers (at least the ones I observed) daily engage their students in subjects that will help prepare them to be educated, productive members of society. Sounds corny and unbelievable? To some it might, because they readily accept commonly held beliefs about secondary education in a city whose mobile ethnic groups have the apparent stability of whirlwinds.

Demographics

About two thirds of the Dickinson student body were not born in the United States and many speak at home one or more of 37 different languages. In spite of a lack of previous English-based education, a large proportion of Dickinson students are being introduced to a range of academic subjects, which, if they choose, will allow them to open and walk through a series of doors leading them to further challenges.

Dickinson’s racial makeup has changed considerably in the past 30 years. Today, the ethnic composition of the student body reflects a fairly consistent proportion of blacks and Hispanics (about 17 percent and 47 percent respectively). The most noticeable variation since the 1980s has been the decline in the white student population (from 25 percent to 11 percent) and an increase in the Asian population (from 20 percent to 24 percent). The majority of students (63 percent) enter in the ninth grade and graduate four years later – though such a statistic can be deceiving, as Mr. Donato explained to me, because a significant number of students move each year either into the district or to other districts without leaving word of their new addresses.

In an editorial in the Jan. 21 issue of the school newspaper, The Dickinsonian, Mriga Rao called attention to the size and racial diversity of the school: “Every time you walk down the hall at DHS, there’s one thing you always see – new faces. I find it interesting as a junior to meet other juniors and seniors whom I have never even seen before, let alone spoken to. Even for the more sociable among us, it is nearly impossible to know everyone in a school our size.” Her conclusion? “Though it is human nature to associate with only certain types of people, talk to the person sitting next to you in that health class – you might be surprised!”

For biology teacher Michael Karsnak, a 34-year veteran at Dickinson, such a diversified student body – and he is not alone in holding this opinion – often lacks a sense of school loyalty that had been so much in evidence for generations. Since being taken over by the State of New Jersey in 1990, Dickinson – like other public schools in Jersey City, Paterson and Newark – has faced a number of internal and external pressures. Some teaches applaud the standardized testing (the High School Proficiency Tests) mandated by the state in order for students to receive diplomas; others feel that freedom to develop new, creative curricula suffers because of the constant tether of preparing for exams. Once 85 percent of Dickinson students began passing the HSPT in junior year (and each year they come close to accomplishing this), the state will revert control to the local school board. In 1975, an English-as-a-Second-Language program and a bi-lingual program for Spanish-speaking students were introduced to encourage those students with diverse cultural backgrounds to assimilate faster into American society. Three years later, programs in English, social studies, mathematics, languages, science and art were established to provide for students with exceptional abilities.

Dickinson’s Applied Technology Magnet Program, which draws students from outside its district, won first and second place in 1998 in the “Program Excellence Award” from the International Technology Education Association, which is co-sponsored by the National Association of Secondary School Principals. Seven other “magnet” programs, including science and informational technology, help give Dickinson its distinctive character.

Paying off

Standardized testing in Jersey City’s public elementary schools clearly seems to be paying off. Last year’s ninth-grade class at Dickinson is the best that many faculty and administrators can remember for 25 years.

Because the school day is divided into four 80-minute periods, students spend less time in the hallways and have, as guidance counselor Louise Stiloski is fond of saying, “more time for the task.” With such extended periods, teachers have learned to rethink a traditional pedagogy by dividing class time into formal instruction, discussion, in-class writing assignments and review.

One technique used by dynamic Hazel Santana-Rogers proved quite effective. On the day I visited, she divided her Spanish I class into two sections, asked each student to describe in written Spanish another student in the class, and then had students chosen at random to read these descriptions and guess the identities of the students being described. Thus, Mrs. Santana-Rogers’ students were writing and speaking a modern foreign language and interacting with one another at the same time. She sometimes would query how a certain description could be improved. “Usar mas colores” or “Cambiar los verbos” were the spontaneous replies.

In much the same way, Gertruda Wisse had her 19 Algebra I students absorbed in the task as hand: factoring denominators – something that to this day seems terribly thorny to me. As a mediator between her blackboard and her students, Miss Wise encouraged and corrected her students in a forthright and honest Jersey Cityese that almost totally masked her native Dutch accent.

As I exited the classroom, she came over and, after wiping the chalk dust off her hands, thanked me for coming. “I’m a tough disciplinarian, and the students know it,” she said. “They always tell me, ‘You sounded strict at the beginning, but you really are very nice.’ Sorry about the dust. It’s an occupational hazard.”

I sat in on two of Thomas Lee’s classes: geometry and computer science, both solid courses. Computer science has revolutionized more than just primary, secondary and higher education; it is the one domain in contemporary society where the majority of children, it seems to me, definitely know more than their parents. As I intermingled with students learning to program line statements – that is, draw their initials on a computer screen not with an electronic stylus but by using a series of mathematical equations – I was pleased to see the ease with which senior Bhabin Joshi, who has been in the States for two years, mentored Aekta Doshi, here for only one year, in their native language of Gujarati.

I have only praise for Keith Cerruti’s no-nonsense contemporary law class, Mary Beth Healy’s probing English I class focusing that day on James Thurber’s Walter Mitty, Frank Skowronski’s and Jaime Morales’ marvelous hands-on technology class and the others I visited. And I, too, would have voted for Orlando Negron as this year’s “Outstanding Teacher” at Dickinson.

It seemed to me that William Gordon, whose students write either a persuasive or a narrative essay each week, is right on target in his choice of literary texts for his English III course, which include Macbeth, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, and The Glass Menagerie, in addition to a variety of short stories and poems. With 25 years experience at Dickinson, Gordon brings to his classes an awareness of what specific literary works a student should read and discuss in order to understand the genius of English and American literature. He encourages his more talented students to publish their creative works in Aries, a 32-page publication that appears twice a year under the direction of George Davis.

My favorite class – and I wish I could have stayed for the entire semester – was Barbara Petrick’s Advanced Placement U.S. History course.

Dr. Petrick, who wrote her Ph.D dissertation at Rutgers University on the history of Jersey City, radiated a grandmother’s concern for her students as they sat in a semicircle about her. She slowly unpacked the notion of democracy in 19th century America – the availability of tremendous amounts of land after the Louisiana Purchase, differences in owning land in Europe and the United States, the rise of the banking system, the fear of entrusting control to someone else, regional voting patterns, etc., etc. One student, Radislaw Pieslak, seemed to weigh each and every one of his teacher’s insights, perhaps testing them against what he had recently experienced in his native Poland. No one seemed left out of the discussion. Hands were waived enthusiastically, observations were made intelligently, notes were taken carefully.

To insure the smoothing running of the school, Principal Donato – a man of warmth and exuberance – has assigned specific tasks to his six vice-principals, from school maintenance, to budget preparation, to class scheduling. This leaves him free to meet with faculty, students and outside administrators, as well as to observe 80 classes a year. “I do a lot of walking to see what is happening,” he said. Normally in the building from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., he sets aside two hours in the evening to catch up on paperwork.

Security

Mr. Donato knows the value of creating the right environment for learning, especially for students who are no strangers to violence both at home and in the streets. In addition to an in-house security staff of 13, two unformed members of the Jersey City Police Force regularly make their presence felt in a matter-of-fact way, much like neighborhood police walking the beat. During an informal luncheon gathering of faculty, students and staff, Officer Phil Chidichimo told me that there are occasional fights and locker thefts, but for the most part the school is quite calm and orderly. Though groups of students were noisy moving from one class to another, I felt that they basically respected one another. More than one teacher, in fact, highlighted in class the need for mutual respect among students, and their efforts seemed to have the palpable results.

Dickinson has a reasonable dress code, which, with few exceptions, was honored on the warm day I visited (a few of the young women were wearing tank tops). Imagine my surprise when the two or three young men I saw wearing baseball caps gallantly took them off as I passed by! I’m still in shock.

The school day, as athletes, band members, yearbook editors and countless others know so well, does not end at 3 p.m. That evening I attended “The Black Tie Jazz Bash” presented by the Visual and Performing Arts Department of the Jersey City Public Schools. The families of the participants basked in the musical achievements of their sons and daughters, swaying to renditions of Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” and “Night and Day.” And there was impromptu dancing in the aisles as Dickinson’s Reina Reynoso, Nohelia Castro, Angelica Singh and Pierre Harris sang a lively medley of songs in English and Spanish.

I thought at the outset I might be too old to go back to high school, but that proved not to be the case. I came away from Dickinson feeling that the faculty there were constantly discerning how best to educate the students who come to them, and that, in turn, the students were giving the faculty an ongoing education that had not quite expected.

Astronomy teacher Harold Merschitina expressed it best that day what I’m sure his colleagues were likewise thinking: “The students make me change. I have to grow constantly. I don’t have a magic formula, but good things do happen.”