The Felisa Rincon de Gautier Institute for Law and Public Policy shares the Soundview Educational Campus with Bronx Arena, a transfer school. The building has no gymnasium or auditorium, but hallways feel spacious, and rooms are bright and clean. Most students come in with very weak academic skills, and the school does a pretty good job getting them to graduate on time.

UnfortunateIy, nearly half of the students responding to the Learning Environment Survey said they don’t feel safe outside the building and one-third said they don’t feel safe in the corridors and bathrooms. Half the teachers say they mistrust the principal and two-thirds say there are problems with order and discipline.

Principal Grismaldy Laboy, who founded the school in 2003, graduated from Adlai Stevenson High School and returned as as teacher there. She modeled her new school after the Law Institute at Stevenson. The ties to Stevenson are still present; Laboy's students are eligible to join that school's athletic teams.

The school has a standard Regents-prep curriculum. Students also take a class in forensics and an introduction to law and public policy.

The school, named for the first female mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, attracts Spanish-speaking new immigrant students, some of whom have had little formal education in their native countries.

Special education: The state education department found that the school violated students' rights by putting unqualified teachers in charge of special education classes. "Administrators brough in a cong line of substittue teachers on 'rotating' one-week stints to teacher special education classes," The New York Times reported. 

Admissions: limited unscreened. (Clara Hemphill, news reports and statistics, August 2012)