If there was one big change in the odd new public school for immigrants by the end of the first year, it was that time no longer stood still.

The clocks had been stuck at high noon from the very first day of class way back in September when the students, dressed in shirts and ties, pleated skirts and neat blouses, listened respectfully to their teachers’ speeches welcoming them to the school, to Washington Heights, to New York and to America.

It was still high noon a couple of weeks later when Ms. Ortiz drilled her students on the one word in English they all knew.

“Immigration,” they all said.

“Otra vez,” she commanded.

“Immigration,” the class said again.

“Con fuerza.”

“IMMIGRATION,” they said more loudly.

It was high noon when the students were asked the similarities and differences between their new neighborhood and their old country (which, for most of them, was the Dominican Republic).

“I have seen people drop dead in front of my face; that would never have happened in my country,” Samuel Del Rosario answered, speaking, as everybody did, in Spanish. “I have seen drugs. I have seen discrimination.”

“The food is better here,” Wendy Gonzalez said, having discovered McDonald’s. “But there are too many lights.”

“The difference is that in my country they speak Spanish,” Jose Tavarez said. “And here they speak bilingual.”

It was also high noon weeks later when Kilsi de los Santos got into a spirited argument with her classmate Yany Gavala over the purpose of bilingual education and what it means to be an American.

“We’re intruders,” Gavala said. “It’s our obligation to adapt.”

“No, we’re not intruders,” de los Santos snapped back indignantly. “My language and my culture, I won’t change them for anything.”

It remained high noon at the Gregorio Luperon Preparatory School all day, every day for the first eight months of the year; because of a faulty central computer, both hands pointed straight up as if in surrender.

Squeezed incognito between two discount department stores called Ray’s and Jack’s on 181st Street, the Gregorio Luperon school was named after a hero of the Dominican Republic whose first language (because of his British-born mother) was English. It opened last fall with a narrow focus and a highly selective student body: a one-year program to ease the transition to high school (and to English) of a few dozen newly arrived immigrants who spoke only Spanish, were 14 years old only and were entering ninth grade.

This was a concept the school system itself seemed to have trouble grasping.

“What part of this do you not understand?” Myrna Cubilette, the principal of the school, was yelling at a bureaucrat over the telephone as two sad-looking teenagers sat in the office next to a woman wearing a babushka and grabbing a stroller – a family from Bosnia. “This is a bilingual school for Spanish-speaking ninth-graders only,” Cubilette said.

The Board of Education’s office of admissions had sent the Bosnian family 160 blocks north to enroll their two sons. It had previously sent a Pakistani and several 10thand 11th-graders.

The confusion was not limited to the selection of the students. The school opened almost two years behind schedule, with nearly the entire staff of two dozen hired and on full salary for a full year before the first student arrived. Then, for months after it did open, workers still were completing the eight classrooms. The school library was crowded with books and supplies still packed in boxes; the gym was just a large classroom with no lockers, no windows and no ventilation system.

The school had no school bells; the teachers guessed when each period was over.

The new, polished kitchen was shut down. It didn’t meet some standard or other, so every day the students were being served ham and cheese sandwiches. The assistant principal eventually appropriated the microwave meant for the teachers so the students could have “their first hot lunch” – meaning, instead of ham and cheese, ham and melted cheese. When they had student elections, one of the students, Juan Garcia, ran for class president on a platform of getting the school to serve hot food.

By the last day of classes Wednesday, Jack’s Discount next door had been burnt out, and there were still no bells, no lockers and no hot lunches. But the clocks had been fixed. And time had moved forward in other, more important, ways.

“I learned English here,” Garcia, the student who had run for president, said simply, and deeply, in English.

The student body had grown to 270, and that body was typically freed of ties and draped in the latest hip-hop shirts reaching toward the knees of dungarees – T-shirts honoring Kurt Cobain or Snoop Doggy Dog or Nike. When students lined up in the cafeteria on Wednesday, it was not to get their diplomas but to get baseball caps confiscated during the semester.

“In a school of 270 students, we had 168 parents show up on open school night,” said Juan Villar, the assistant principal. “We had 10 to 15 students take the Regents exam.” No students had dropped out, he said, and only 14 had transferred out

Giuseppe Gonzalez came to the United States from Santiago shortly before entering the school. His first words in English, he remembers, were “please,” “now” and “excuse me.” He still has some way to go in English – the latest word he learned was “built” – but he received no grade lower than a 98, except in a class called Latin Dance.

Kilsi de los Santos, the one who argued heatedly with Yany Gavala about maintaining her culture, had gotten a certificate of high honors in Spanish. She had also learned English – if not as much as she would have liked, she said (in English), “I speak better than Yany does.”

And Sam Delrosario (as he now wrote it) told his tale again of watching someone getting shot to death the first week of his arrival in New York. This time, though, he could tell it in English.

Delrosario will not be going to high school in New York. “I’m going to school in the Dominican Republic,” he said, explaining that his parents, who are staying in New York, are sending him there. “After I finish high school, I’ll be back.”



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