Lower East Side Teen Murdered for Parka
Last Friday night, 16-year-old Raphael Ward, a resident of the Lower East Side’s Baruch Houses, was shot and killed at the corner of Rivington and Columbia streets. According to several news accounts, the boy was wearing a pricey Marmot winter parka, and a group of teens had approached him earlier in the evening, trying to take his coat. He refused to give it up, and a short time later, at around 9 p.m., one of the would-be thieves returned with a gun and shot Ward, fatally, in the chest. He lived long enough to make his way, bleeding, into a nearby bodega and tell the shop owner that he was killed for his jacket.

The New York Post reports that the gunman, who is still being sought by police, was described by witnesses as 5-foot-6,- 120 to 140 pounds, wearing a dark wool hat and a ski mask.
State Sen. Dan Squadron and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver both released statements over the weekend expressing condolences to Ward’s family (he lived with his mother and younger brother) and friends and calling for tougher safety and gun control measures.

“We must continue to work together as a community to fight the scourge of gun violence and make our homes and our streets safer for our families,” Squadron said. “From stronger gun laws to improved safety at NYCHA developments, we are reminded far too often that the time to act is now.”

“As a father and a grandfather, it pains me greatly to see someone taken from us so young. My neighbors on the Lower East Side have suffered far too much from the scourge of gun violence,” Silver said. “We will continue to fight for tougher measures to keep guns out of the wrong hands and to make our neighborhood, particularly our public housing complexes, safer.”

Downtown to See Better Parking Signs
New York City drivers will soon hopefully have one less thing to distract and confuse them. The Department of Transportation, along with City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and East Side Council Member Dan Garodnick, announced the roll-out of 6,300 new parking signs, completely redesigned to reduce visual clutter and make parking rules more clear and understandable.

“You shouldn’t need a Ph.D. in parking signage to understand where you are allowed to leave your car in New York,” said Garodnick, who first proposed overhauling the signs in 2011 and has been a strong proponent of increased clarity. “The days of puzzled parkers trying to make sense of our Midtown signs are over.”

The simplified signs, which will be installed in Manhattan’s paid commercial parking areas, will soon be found in the area from 60th Street downtown to 14th Street and from Second to Ninth avenues, with additional areas in the Upper East Side, Lower Manhattan and the Financial District. The improved signs have reduced the number of characters from 250 to about 140 (they’re Tweet-able!), come in only two colors to delineate between commercial and regular parking, and all use the same fonts and layouts.

Mandell School to Open Downtown Preschool
The Mandell School, which had previously planned to open a preschool to serve Lower Manhattan families on Broad Street, announced this week that they’ve selected a new location and are on track to open downtown in September 2013.

The private school, which emphasizes experiential learning models, will open its newest location in the Archive, a historic landmark building on Greenwich Street between Barrow and Christopher streets in the West Village. The move comes after the Broad Street location was compromised by damage from Hurricane Sandy, and the new location will enable the school to stick to its timeline to open this fall.

“For New York City families, applying to schools is an uphill battle,” said Gabriella Rowe, head of the Mandell School, in a statement explaining the school’s expansion. “The number of independent school seats remains almost entirely stagnant and admission rates have hit record lows, even as the population of young children in our city increases.”

The Mandell School was founded on the Upper West Side in 1939 and currently operates a school from preschool through eighth grade.

This fall, nearly 70 years after The Mandell School opened its doors to pre-schoolers, the West 94th Street school took in its first class of elementary students. Known as one of the city’s “Baby Ivies,” the Mandell School has been led by three generations of the same family since Romanian immigrant Max Mandell founded it in 1939.
“My hope is to provide a home first of all for families where they don’t feel like they have to jump on board with the competitive insanity of New York,” said Mandell’s granddaughter Gabriella Rowe, who became head of the school in May 2008. “But more than anything, our hope is to provide a school where children can figure out who they are and who they want to be. Much of that process we’ve only started in our preschool years, but there’s only so far we can carry it.”
In response to the huge demand for spots in private elementary schools in New York City, The Mandell School will add another grade level each year until the school has toddlers through 8th graders. Students in preschool at Mandell are guaranteed a place in the elementary school, although Rowe said she would still help preschool students get into other private schools if they didn’t want to stay. Children who did not attend preschool at Mandell are welcome to apply and in fact make up the majority of the kindergarten class this year.
Rowe said her grandfather believed that “If you give a child safety and security and love and academic stimulation, they’re capable of anything.” Mandell was famous for standing outside the school nearly every morning until he died in 1999 to give children a hug on their way in.
The school’s philosophy is founded on “Good Citizenship,” which means encouraging children to cooperate and compromise in the classroom and ensuring that everyone fully participates in classroom activities.
In the elementary school, Rowe explained, the emphasis on being a good citizen will continue with a community service program. Every class from kindergarten to 8th grade will design and implement its own project. This year’s kindergarteners will help water and maintain the trees on 96th Street between Columbus and Amsterdam avenues and will create artwork to decorate the tree guards.
“It is absolutely fundamental to who we are that our children leave us with a sense of empowerment and a concrete notion of how to go out there and make the world a better place,” Rowe said.
Elementary school students will also take music, drama, fine arts, gym and wellness classes, according to Rowe, and they will start learning American Sign Language in kindergarten. The school chose to start with sign language—rather than auditory language—because it’s visual and kinesthetic, so it fits kindergarteners’ developmental stage. But learning sign language also teaches the basic skills that children need to learn any other language. In 1st grade, children will be able to choose between French and Spanish, and in 5th grade everyone will take Mandarin.
Rowe grew up living above The Mandell School, as her mother did, and went to the school herself. She spent her evenings sweeping floors and helping clean up, and her summers painting walls and substitute teaching.
Rowe worked as a management consultant and an investment banker for 12 years before she realized she wasn’t satisfied with her job the way her mother and grandfather had been. And when she had kids herself, she wanted to be able to spend more time with them. Finally, when her grandfather became sick in 1999, Rowe decided to come back to the school. She became director nine years ago.
At first, Rowe said, she thought her focus as head of the school would be in putting her business expertise to use. But, “I realized very quickly where the real substance and the real joy was—in the teaching and in supporting parents.”
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The Mandell School
128 W. 95th St.
New York, N.Y. 10025
212-222-2925
www.mandellschool.org
Gabriella Rowe, Head of School
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