NEW YORK, NY August 06, 2003 — September is still a month away, and with it the start of the new school year. But the biggest changes in 30 years to the city school system are already well underway. The 32 community school districts are now just tiny offices. Instead, the real business of running the school system is now handled by 10 new regional offices with less than half the total number of staffers. We'll be exploring the mayor's overhaul of education over these next few months in our series Reading, Writing and Reform. Today WNYC's Beth Fertig guides us through Bureaucracy 101.

If you want to see what reform looks like, just visit Community School District 11. Housed at Public School 121 in the Bronx, there were once nine classrooms here serving as district offices. But today, the district has just three staffers.

OPIUM: Is that for me? OK. Tim Opium how can I help you?"

Tim Opium is in charge of Parent Support services. He's been fielding calls all summer from parents with the usual kinds of questions.


OPIUM: A lot about where does my child belong, what school, what programs are offered, how do I go about getting free lunch? How do I go about getting school bus transportation?

Opium is working out of the former superintendent's office. It's a long room with wood paneled walls. In September, this room and the other district offices will be converted back to classrooms for this overcrowded elementary school.

OPIUM: This will be a classroom, right here. This used to be the curriculum department and the deputy superintendent's office.

The curriculum, budget, and instructional services for districts 11, 8 and 12 are now managed by another office just south of here in the Bronx. It's a new office with a new bureaucracy.

RODRIGUEZ: My name is Laura Rodriguez I'm the regional superintendent for region 2, east Bronx. And I'm responsible for 116 schools.

Laura Rodriguez is in charge of 96 thousand students in the northeast Bronx. She's what some call a super-superintendent. Rodriguez works in a big, flat industrial building that was once a hat factory. A sign in the waiting area says Welcome to Region 2 Learning Support Center. In the hallway, workers are still polishing the floors and hammering nails.


Creating one new region for 116 schools seems like a daunting challenge. But Rodriguez says it's actually an improvement over the old structure. Before, she says, elementary and middle schools were separated from the high schools and alternative programs.

RODRIGUEZ: You know that structure was very fragmented and I was part of that structure. This is much less fragmented much more focused and the opportunity to be more coherent in a K-12 context and with a great emphasis on literacy and math.

Rodriguez and her colleagues say that's enabling them to learn from each other. Down the hall, principals from a variety of schools within Region 2 held a workshop.

PRINCIPAL: We spoke on curricular level about writing initiative. One of the things some of us had experience in elementary and high school.

Meetings like this did not happen under the old system. There are also new challenges for those who supervise the principals.

Around the corner, teams of educators have been assigned to work out of one, large open office with rows of black computer terminals. It's kind of the like the bullpen Mayor Bloomberg installed in City Hall. Philip Ponarides is a regional supervisor. Like most of the staff, he's seldom here because supervisors spend their days visiting schools.

PONARIDES: Our job is to provide support to those teachers and principals. And we also have responsibilities in regional office too, I help with grants and teacher training.

Every region has about 10 teams of specialists, each managing up to a dozen schools. This structure is supposed to provide teachers and principals with more individual attention. But with that comes a new assortment of acronyms.

RODRIGUEZ: What we are now building is a professional development support team that is led by the LIS, the local instructional superintendent. Each one has a RIS, a RIS who's a content area specialist. And on that team will also be an ISS, special education instructional specialist.

Got that? If you haven't, well don't feel too bad. Many parents are also baffled. Some have attended workshops just to understand the new structure.

PARENT: "LIS Local Instructional Supervisor, so they have the old role of superintendent minus any say so oversight of the budget."

This class was one of several organized by the United Parents Associations. It didn't do much for Joseph Grannum of Brooklyn. He stared at a blackboard on which someone tried to diagram the flowchart.

GRANNUM: I'm, I'm an engineer. That's my background. And efficiency is one of the things. What I'm seeing here is total chaos!

Robin Brown says that reaction isn't unusual. Brown is co-chair of the Chancellor's Parent Advisory Committee, which is an independent body. She believes the Education Department didn't give parents enough information about the sweeping changes. Just one brief letter that went out at the end of June.

BROWN: They knew this thing was coming since January and there should have been clarification, but I'm figuring and hoping by September the kinks would have worked themselves out.

Teachers and principals worry there's not much time. They're mostly concerned with the new math and literacy curriculum. Teachers are now being trained and coaches are being hired to work with them. And everyone wonders if the new structure will make any difference. But Chancellor Klein says it's too soon to judge.

KLEIN: I hear from parents as you know all the time, emails, people are actually using the parent support centers. Getting answers, getting results. Of course there are going to be bumps. Let's be real. There were many more bumps in the old district office situation.

Klein also believes parents and teachers don't really care about the new chain of command, and its titles. Their only concern is what's working.

Venus Belk hopes it will work. At Region 2 in the Bronx, she's trying to enroll her 7th grade son into a middle school. Like many parents, Belk didn't know about the Chancellor's new reforms. She found out where to go when she called parent officer Tim Opium at District 11.

BELK I didn't even know the building was here actually

So far she's pleasantly surprised. Belk says the staff is processing her request to transfer her son.

BELK: Before it was like no and that's it. But now they're like OK we'll see what we can do. So I feel more comfortable now.

Regional Superintendent Laura Rodriguez says in the end, that's all that matters to parents. But of course, the real test will come in September. For WNYC I'm Beth Fertig.