City Knoll Middle School

City Knoll is a tiny middle school that offers trips and hands-on projects. 

Students visit the American Museum of Natural History, the Museum of Modern Art and the Bronx Zoo, among other locations. Some work is hands-on, for example, students created drawings of “monsters” to measure trait probability in their offspring as part of a science lesson. They designed life-size sarcophagi on big brown paper as part of a study of Ancient Egypt. [see photos from the school Twitter account]

The school faces challenges. Most incoming students have already fallen behind in elementary school. Many children miss a month or more of school, which interrupts the continuity of lessons. 

Since it opened in 2014, the school has been in three different locations. It opened with 6th grade inside PS 51 on West 44th Street and moved to West 33rd Street, a building that housed an all-girls Catholic School connected to the Church of St. Michael for more than a century, and for a time housed the Clinton School for Writers and Artists. In 2019, it moved again to share a building with PS 111.

City Knoll, which is unscreened and serves serves mostly low-income families, is evidence of the fact that there are pockets of poverty even in a high-income district like District 2, and demonstrates that the system of “screens” can lead to segregation of children by income level as well as race, according to a report by the Center for New York City Affairs. City Knoll is “an unscreened school in a sea of screened schools,” one parent leader said.

Principal Kaye Kerr took the helm in 2017, replacing founding principal Victoria Armas who served for four years. 

Admissions: District 2 preference. (Lydie Raschka, web reports, March 2019, updated to show new address 2020)