P.S. 33 Timothy Dwight

PS 33 Timothy Dwight is a neighborhood elementary school that occupies a 120-year-old building next to the elevated subway tracks in the Fordham section of the Bronx.

The school has long grappled with low test scores, although it has seen signs of improvement over the past several years. A reviewer from the Department of Education praised teachers at PS 33 for adapting material to individual students’ levels and providing needed support. The reviewer also was impressed by the school’s strategic use of informational nonfiction to build knowledge, as in a 1st-grade unit on animal diversity and 5th-grade lessons on the scientific method.

While the number of English language learners has declined, PS 33 still has a substantial number of children who, it says, “are struggling with the acquisition and fluency of the English language.” The school has started holding Saturday English and art classes for parents, partly to help them help their children.

Children at PS 33 take visual art. The school provides other arts with the help of non-profits such as Music and The Brain, which teaches keyboard to children in the early grades; Little Kids Rock, which offers guitar classes for students in the upper grades; and The Dream Yard Project, a Bronx organization offering a variety of arts opportunities for children and their teachers.

Attendance at PS 33 is a problem, with more than a third of all students chronically absent. Teachers in a DOE survey cited safety concerns in the building’s common areas and said the school is not orderly.

Although enrollment has declined, PS 33 remains over capacity and classes for younger grades are held in a nearby building that used to be a Social Security office. That problem should be alleviated in 2020 with the opening of a $70 million wing housing 11 classrooms, a library, cafeteria and kitchen and an exercise room.  

SPECIAL EDUCATION: PS 33 has an unusually high percentage of students with disabilities who are in self-contained classes–almost half of all students with individualized education programs (IEPs) are in these classes- although the school also has team teaching classes with a mix of special and general education students.Test scores for students with IEPs are well below city average.

ADMISSIONS: PS 33 is a zoned elementary school. The school says it takes students from beyond its zone but recently the only children admitted from outside the neighborhood were in pre-K or had siblings at PS 33. (Gail Robinson, web reports and news articles, October 2019)