Good morning. It’s Wednesday. We’ll find out about a new building for an unusual charter school in the Bronx. We’ll also get details on the resignation of the schools chancellor, David Banks.
Angel Cruz will finally get to meet the Knicks legend Earl Monroe today.
Angel enrolled in 2021 at a charter high school in the Bronx that carries Monroe’s name. The school takes an unusual approach, pointing students to career paths in what its executive director calls “the ecosystem of basketball” — but not necessarily on the court.
Angel, 17, said his mother had convinced him that the school was an opportunity. “She did all the research for me,” he told me when I asked if he had chosen the school, the Earl Monroe New Renaissance Basketball School, because he was a basketball fan. Angel said he had seen Monroe “from a distance” around the school from time to time, though he couldn’t have seen him play: Monroe, who was known as Earl the Pearl, retired from the Knicks 27 years before he was born.
Now, after four years in subleased quarters in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx, the school is beginning construction on a building of its own. It will hold a groundbreaking ceremony this morning for the $35 million building on Elton Avenue in the South Bronx. Monroe is expected to be on hand for the ceremony, and Angel, a senior, will get to say hello.
The school’s executive director, Brandon Corley, said the new building would let the faculty “accelerate some of the things we have been wanting to do” since the school opened in a former Roman Catholic elementary school in 2021. The building, designed by ESKW/Architects and IMC Architecture, will have spaces to teach physical therapy and rehabilitation training, as well as a broadcast studio.
“We won’t be playing school,” he said. “It won’t be talking about what you would do — ‘If I was the broadcaster at Madison Square Garden, this is how I would handle the game.’ No, you are going to be the broadcaster on Friday night. It’s not Madison Square Garden, it’s Earl Monroe Square Garden.”
Basketball is offered at the school. But its founders and administrators say that the school was not created to be another pipeline for basketball stars. “There are basketball schools all over the country, but they’re all factories for athletes, getting them ready to play in college, play in the N.B.A. or W.N.B.A.,” Corley said. “It would be great if we could have those athletes one day, but it is not what we are in business to do.”
Instead, it concentrates on everything else about the game, and on using elements of basketball to help students with academic subjects.
The school quickly learned to teach the basics after half of its first class of ninth graders tested at or below fourth-grade level in reading. The school spent nearly $600,000 to hire specialized reading teachers. The effort paid off: By the end of that year, only 14 percent of the students were still reading at that level, and the proportion of students reading at ninth-grade level had tripled.
By the end of its second year, the school had 17 members of the National Honor Society.
The school was the brainchild of the publicist and filmmaker Dan Klores, who had met Monroe while working on documentaries like “Black Magic” and “Basketball: A Love Story.”
“I said basketball is the city’s game,” he said. “It owes its life to New York City, so why don’t we have a school to teach children the professions off the court that have to do with basketball? Want to be in broadcast journalism, physical rehabilitation, analytics, marketing, finance? That was the idea.”
He said he believed when he started that there was “a 5 percent chance of getting this done.”
Now the school is one of 281 charter schools in the city, according to the New York City Charter School Center, an advocacy and advisory group that says that 15 percent of all public school students in New York attend charter schools. And Angel is looking to get into a trade school after he graduates.
“Electrician or carpentry,” he said.
“Even though the school is predominantly basketball,” he said, “they use basketball to relate to real-world jobs behind the scenes. You need an electrician to wire the lights. You need a camera guy. You need a microphone guy. Any real-world jobs, they can tie back to basketball.”
Weather
Expect a cloudy day with a chance of showers and temperatures in the high 60s. Tonight will remain cloudy, with the chance of showers remaining and temperatures in the mid-60s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Oct. 3 (Rosh Hashana).
The latest Metro news
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Mosquito-borne illness threat: Gov. Kathy Hochul declared the mosquito-borne illness Eastern equine encephalitis a public health threat after the death of an Ulster County resident who contracted the virus. The case was the first in New York State since 2015.
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Police commissioner under federal scrutiny: Thomas Donlon’s first week as New York City’s interim police commissioner closed with federal agents seizing classified documents from his homes. Donlon is the third police commissioner appointed by Mayor Eric Adams.
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A shooting rattles a community: The police in Fort Lee, N.J., fatally shot a Korean American woman who was experiencing a mental health crisis. Some Asian American residents said the killing had shattered their sense of security and damaged their trust in the police.
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New Jersey State Police “weaponized” disciplinary investigations: The state’s attorney general ordered an overhaul of the agency’s internal affairs unit after two reports detailed systemic flaws in its ability to police itself and bias in its promotional policies.
Schools chancellor resigns
David Banks, above, had said since the mid-1990s that being the schools chancellor in New York City was the job he wanted most in life. He got it in 2022. His appointment was announced hours after Eric Adams was sworn in as mayor.
On Tuesday, Banks announced his resignation.
That he would announce plans to leave Adams’s administration — and in the middle of the school year — points to the depth of the crisis gripping City Hall. City government has been hobbled by corruption investigations. The police commissioner and the city’s top lawyer have left in the last two weeks, and the health commissioner said on Monday that he would step down by the end of the year.
Banks has been one of the mayor’s closest allies and friends. He was one of four high-ranking officials whose phones were seized in raids by federal agents on Sept. 4, just before the first day of school, as part of an investigation that is focused at least in part on a consulting firm run by his youngest brother. Agents also seized the phone of another brother, Philip Banks III, the deputy mayor for public safety, as well as the phone of Sheena Wright, the first deputy mayor, who is David Banks’s fiancée.
It was not immediately clear who would replace Banks as chancellor.
Banks had attempted to project stability as he gave his annual “State of Our Schools” address last week. He focused on business as usual, though he hinted the swirling scandals. “When life presents its greatest challenges to you,” he said, “always go within yourself, and remember who you are, and stand strong.”
People with direct knowledge of Banks’s thinking since the raids said that he had become frustrated by the chaos, specifically as it related to Wright, and had been questioning the value of staying on.
METROPOLITAN diary
Envious
Dear Diary:
I was waiting for the 5 train at Union Square on a sweltering August afternoon. About a car length down the platform from me, a girl in chunky boots, a neon crop top and a pleated skirt was standing with a friend and holding an enormous, juicy hunk of watermelon.
The watermelon was unwrapped, and the girl was taking bites of it as if it were an apple. A watermelon lover myself, I boarded the train when it arrived with a feeling of envy about the girl’s snack and a question in my mind: No napkins?
I rode the train to my stop, Borough Hall. As I got off, I saw the girls again. The watermelon had been eaten down to the rind. I climbed the stairs behind them and watched as they broke the rind in half so they could each savor a last bit of fruit.
I didn’t see a single drop of juice on their hands. And not a napkin in sight.
— Catherine Danaher
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Francis Mateo, Makaelah Walters and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post A School for the Basketball World appeared first on New York Times.
