After Violence, a High School Tries to Regain Its Balance

NEW ROCHELLE, N.Y. — Just before 3 p.m. on a recent Tuesday, a line of cars pulled up in front of New Rochelle High School and waited for its students to pour out into the afternoon sun. There was an old Honda Odyssey and a black Cadillac Escalade. A dingy Toyota Camry idled near a sparkling Audi A5 and a row of short yellow school buses.

There was also a newly regular presence parked across the street: a police car.

In January, a spate of violence shook the school. Two students were stabbed in the course of nine days and a third was attacked by a group of schoolmates. One of the students was stabbed inside a classroom during a first period Spanish class. Another, Valaree Schwab, 16, was stabbed at Dunkin’ Donuts near school and died of her injuries.

Two months have passed, and while the school appears to have largely settled back into its regular rhythms, a disquieting question still hovers over the community: Are the events of January enough to fundamentally reshape New Rochelle High School — either for better or for worse?

This city of about 80,000 people in Westchester County, just north of New York City, is a 30-minute ride on the Metro-North railroad from midtown Manhattan. It has commuting professionals and new immigrants, public housing and million-dollar homes. It also has just one public high school, which means that children from all walks of life go to school together, which is rare in American schools.

“This is one of the few schools, probably in the country, where the child of a Fortune 500 executive or CEO could be in the same class as a homeless child,” said Reginald Richardson, the school principal. “You can have a person taking college level English literature, either as an AP or dual enrollment, in the same school as a child who doesn’t speak a word of English.”

Last year, 25 percent of students at New Rochelle High School were black, 25 percent were white and 45 percent were Hispanic. Half of its students were poor. Diverse as the school is, however, it is not always an integrated place.

Students say that while some AP classes can be quite mixed, those that students must test into often have large numbers of white pupils. Students are thrown together across racial and economic divides in activities like clubs and sports teams, but white students tend to have lunch in one cafeteria, while another cafeteria is predominantly filled with students of color.

Imperfect as it is, many students said they were proud of the school’s diversity, and some families move to New Rochelle explicitly for it. But this asset also makes the school fragile in a particular way. If people perceive New Rochelle High to be dangerous, will parents with the means to do so send their children to private school? Will families who are thinking of living there move someplace else instead? The school district and the city have been trying hard to prevent this from happening.

After the violence in January, the campus was sealed off during the school day, and students were no longer permitted to come and go. Two police officers are now stationed at the school, and there is an increased police presence along North Avenue, a thoroughfare behind the school. For a couple of days, student bags were searched at random by school security, and a security firm has been hired to audit safety measures at the high school.

But Brian Osborne, the district superintendent, said that members of the New Rochelle community did not want to “police themselves out of this problem,” and were trying to be thoughtful in their response. The district has created a task force on reducing violence in the lives of young people, which will look beyond school to supporting children in other parts of their lives. It might look, for example, at whether mental health counselors are available 24 hours a day for those in crisis.

“All the kids who were involved, they were reflections of where we as a society are deficient in terms of supporting kids and families, where they get to the point where they feel that this is the only way to either resolve an issue or express themselves,” Richardson, the principal, said.

Three students were indicted last week in connection with Schwab’s murder. Prosecutors say she was assaulted on North Avenue by three teenagers who then took her house keys. Schwab followed them to Dunkin’ Donuts to get her keys back, and she was stabbed.

The next incident took place a week later, when a 15-year-old student appears to have been attacked by a group of young people at a pizzeria. The following day, that victim came to school and stabbed a classmate during first period. He ran out of the school, and the authorities are still looking for him. Police say they don’t believe the student who was stabbed in class was involved in the incident at the pizzeria. In the face of intense local media coverage, some of New Rochelle’s neighbors do not seem comforted by the steps the city has taken.

In February, George W. Hewlett High School, in Hewlett, on Long Island, said its students would not participate in a model congress at New Rochelle High School. “The safety of our students and staff is our highest priority, and there is too much uncertainty there at this time,” Jack Lenson, the interim principal of Hewlett High School, said in a letter. Schools from at least four other districts also declined to participate, so the event was canceled. Hewlett officials did not respond to a request for comment.

New Rochelle students made the best of it, Richardson said. They took a bus down to Washington, D.C., and participated in the March for Our Lives against gun violence that weekend instead.

Many students, teachers and parents say that adults have been more nervous than the children who attend the school.

“I think the feeling of fear is mostly coming from people who aren’t here every day,” said Ajani Thomas, 16, a junior at New Rochelle High School. “The feeling in the hallways is not fear.”

Maggie Bangser’s son Amar Rajani-Bangser was sitting in Spanish class with the student who was stabbed — in fact, right next to him. But she considers the event such an outlier that she said she never thought about pulling her son out of school.

“As horrible as those events were, they do not in any way represent fully what New Rochelle is, they just don’t,” Bangser said.

“He came home for a couple of hours right after the incident, but he had a math midterm that afternoon, and at a certain point he said, ‘Well, I’m ready to go back,'” Bangser said.

Ananya Pavuluri, 17, a senior, said that she grew up in the north end of New Rochelle, a wealthy part of town, and that in elementary and middle school, she had little interaction with children from low income families. That changed in high school.

“I tutored a girl who was in 12th grade and didn’t know how to add negative numbers,” she said. “I was so quick to be judgmental. But then I realized that this girl does not have the same advantages in life that I do. If she can’t afford the calculator that I can, or the tutors, then she doesn’t have the same opportunities.”

“Diversity can’t be taught,” added Javier Amezcua, 17, another senior at the school. “I can’t teach you that story.” Schooling in the lower grades in New Rochelle is not nearly as diverse as it is in the high school. The city has six elementary schools and two middle schools, which tend to be more homogeneous, and the track for advanced high school classes, like honors and APs, begins in middle schools or even earlier: certain elementary school students with strong academic records can qualify for the district’s Kaleidoscope program for exceptional students.

While white students at New Rochelle High School had a graduation rate of 92 percent last year, the rate was 79 percent among black students and 71 percent among Latino students. Richardson said that part of why he came to New Rochelle from a high- poverty school in East New York, Brooklyn, was to try to address those disparate outcomes, and the school has made some progress.

Mayor Noam Bramson of New Rochelle said that the city and its schools remain “exceptionally safe” — the city’s crime rate in 2017 was the lowest in 56 years — and that he hoped that the community could take this “extraordinarily difficult experience, and from it, choose to come together.”

“If the process of discussion and consultation that is now unfolding results in better practices and better policies and more robust partnerships, then I think New Rochelle can be a model of how a community responds intelligently to tragedy,” Bramson said.

“I respect that a sense of fear after a shocking event is natural and human,” he said. “One of the things we try to teach our kids is not to be ruled by our fears.”