As more than a million New York City public school students returned to class yesterday, Maria A. Aviles, the principal of Junior High School 45 in East Harlem, greeted children and reassured parents — a familiar opening-day ritual for a year that promises broad changes for the nation’s largest school system and its principals.
To make principals more accountable for their schools, the Bloomberg administration is giving them more money and unprecedented authority over an array of decisions — from curriculum to spending to teacher training — that can make or break a school. In exchange for that freedom, principals risk being removed for failure.
“We’ve tried a lot of different things,” said Mrs. Aviles, whose school’s mix of poor minority students, including many who do not speak English, represents the challenges facing the system. “There have been a lot of things that have worked, and there have been a lot of things that haven’t,” she said.
Still, she said, “I feel very optimistic that we’ve already started to change, and that this is going to be a year of transformation.”
At schools throughout the city, change was evident even amid the familiar scenes of kindergartners clinging to their mothers and high schoolers comparing back-to-school outfits.
The troubled Lafayette High School in Brooklyn, set to be closed despite a roster of prominent alumni, for the first time accepted no freshman class. It is sharing its building with three small schools that will eventually replace it.
At Jamaica High School, students arrived to find that the state had designated their school as “persistently dangerous” and that their principal, Jay A. Dickler, had been abruptly removed.
But the most closely watched hotspot was one of the city’s smallest schools, Khalil Gibran International Academy, a new school in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, devoted to Arabic language and culture. As the school’s 55 sixth graders filed in, about 70 supporters gathered with a banner welcoming them and nearly as many reporters, some from other countries, arrived to document the opening.
About two dozen opponents, meanwhile, took to the steps of City Hall, charging that the academy would indoctrinate students with radical Islamic beliefs and again demanding that it be shut down.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein arrived at Public School 53 in the Morrisania section of the Bronx yesterday morning flanked by Gov. Eliot Spitzer and City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn as well as Randi Weingarten, the president of the city’s teachers’ union, and Ernest A. Logan, the president of the principals’ union.
It was a carefully choreographed display of unity for one day at least among leaders who have sparred intensely in the recent past.
“In the new school year, we are ready to take student success to the next level, because while our schools are getting better, we need to do even more,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “There will be even greater accountability,” he said, citing as a prime example new report cards in which schools will be given letter grades of A through F.
Mr. Spitzer used the occasion to note the additional $700 million in state aid that the city schools will receive this year, the first influx of billions more dollars the state has promised as a result of a 14-year court battle over school financing. Still, the governor emphasized that the city would have to meet several state requirements to receive a portion of the money.
“Writing a check is easy,” Mr. Spitzer said. “Ensuring that there is accountability, ensuring that we then get the result that we care about is the much more difficult task.”
Mr. Klein went on to visit schools in the four other boroughs.
As television cameras awaited the mayor, Beatrice Dones used her video camera to capture her son Mark, 5, as he headed off to the first grade, a Power Rangers backpack on his shoulders.
Asked what he was most excited about, Mark exclaimed: “Homework!”
But outside Public School-Intermediate School 194 in the Bronx, Hannah Beauchampe, 5, her hair pulled back in two tight pigtails, sobbed to her mother that she was not ready to start kindergarten. “Mommy, please don’t make me,” she pleaded.
At one of the city’s temporary registration centers, also at P.S.-I.S. 194, parents whose children were not placed in schools or were seeking transfers waited, sometimes for hours.
“People talk about No Child Left Behind, but believe me, there are children being left behind today,” said Hancel Brooks, whose daughter was trying to transfer to a high school closer to the family’s Bronx home.
At Khalil Gibran, where the founding principal resigned before school began after trying to defend the word intifada on a T-shirt, the school’s supporters held a banner reading “New Yorkers Support the Khalil Gibran School,” and set up a table loaded with hummus, pitas and apple juice.
“The school is a vision of tolerance,” said Rabbi Michael Feinberg of the Greater New York Labor-Religion Coalition.
After dismissal, Adnane Rhoulam, 12, said he and other students had learned to count to three in Arabic and to say “hello” three different ways. Adnane, whose mother is from Morocco, said he hoped to “understand more about what my mom’s talking about.”
Mr. Klein, speaking to reporters, described the outcry against the school as “tragic,” saying, “I think most New Yorkers understand the importance of dual language education. The school is going to open up and do well.”
But the school’s opponents continued their campaign against it. “I’m heartsick to see that our good mayor and our good chancellor are part of a program to destroy the American public school system,” said Rabbi Aryeh Spero, who said he is president of a group called Caucus for America.
At Jamaica High School, a sign on the school’s front lawn still proclaimed Mr. Dickler to be the principal, and students and parents debated how dangerous the school really was and who bore the blame.
Terrence Stith, 16, a sophomore, said he met the school’s new interim acting principal during football practice last week.
“He said he was going to stop all the violence,” Terrence said. “The way he was talking it seemed like it could be a good thing. But with Principal Dickler there wasn’t that much violence. They’re taking it too far.”
Sharlene Joseph, 15, said she occasionally felt unsafe at school, particularly when fights would break out in the hallways. Still, she said of Mr. Dickler, “I think he was doing a pretty good job.”
Mr. Dickler, reached yesterday evening, declined to comment.
At Lafayette, Juan M. Camilo, a math teacher, mourned the decision to close the school and said it had left him questioning his own effectiveness.
Mr. Camilo said he was optimistic that this year would be better than last, when teachers sparred bitterly with the school’s former principal. But he noted, “You always feel good on the first day.”
