Located in a bright, new red building with 24 surveillance cameras and a rooftop playground, Bronx Lighthouse Charter School emphasizes the arts and uses a phonics-based approach to teaching reading. In a kindergarten class we visited, students shaped colored dough to create letters, and later they practiced sounding words by singing "Dina, the dancing dinosaur" and saying the "d" sound while marching around the room. To infuse arts into the curriculum, two instructors from a not-for-profit arts education group work inside the classrooms twice a week. In a 2nd grade classroom hung displays of student watercolor paintings of hearts, triangles, and other shapes, the result of a lesson that had taught about symmetry as well as art. Students receive Spanish instruction as early as kindergarten. Lessons are taught three times a week, and foreign language instruction continues through the 12th grade. Students take music and art three times a week.

Character development, taught with a different theme every month, is another aspect of the curriculum. Every time a teacher notices the monthly character trait in a student, the child receives a point. When we visited, students were learning about "perseverance." They wrote paragraphs explaining the word and what it meant to them.

Every class has a two-hour block of instruction in reading and writing. Kids are often split into two separate groups with two different teachers to address the specific needs of individuals. In a 2nd grade class we saw, eight students who were more advanced than their classmates met with a teacher each day for a more challenging curriculum. This also created a smaller class for the other group of students.

Opened in 2004 with a kindergarten and 1st grade, Bronx Lighthouse served grades K-4 in the 2006-07 school year and will grow by a grade per year until it becomes a full K-12 program.

Instead of a PTA, the school functions with a board of directors and two of the posts are filled by parents. Parent input is important, said Principal Jeffery Tsang. There is a large suggestion box in the school's entrance, and about three parents volunteer at the school each day.

Student discipline is handled through a technique known as the "responsive classroom," which seeks to teach students the consequences of their actions. For example, when a student tore a part his notebook, he was required to tape the pages back together. Teachers use a rhythmic clap to grab students' attention rather than raising their voices.

It struck us that some rules might be too stringent. Students who had one leg out while sitting on the rug, for example, were told to cross both legs. And in some classes, the preferred methods might have been ineffective: we saw several cases where the teacher's clapping did not grab the students' attention.

In a 3rd grade class, some kids were busy chatting rather than working on their assignment, and their posted essays indicated that learning time was being wasted. Some students in the class had difficulty writing within the lines and failed to use proper punctuation or sufficient detail. That was not the case in all classes, however; the written work in a 4th grade class we saw was longer and filled with detail.

The principal said that the curriculum the school uses places less of an emphasis on writing than on reading and phonics. To address the problem, the school plans to add the Teachers College writing workshop approach, which revolves around having children write multiple drafts of works in different genres.

After school: The school provides arts education every school day until 6 p.m. Students who want a longer after-school program may attend a Beacon center program, which operates until 8 p.m. (Vanessa Witenko, January 2007)

Admissions: A lottery is held in April.  Priority is given to District 12 residents.