Juan Morel Campos Secondary School

Juan Morel Campos Secondary School offers visual art, digital art, instrumental music, theater and dance. The tone is both orderly and relaxed: students wear school T-shirts of different colors by grade level and call teachers by their surnames, yet the school’s artsy identity is evident in the sounds of music, the black box theater, the hallway art and the dyed green and purple hair of some of its students.

Campos Secondary faces challenges: Many children arrive in 6th grade behind in basic skills but the school is proud of the progress they make, just in their 6th grade year alone. Attendance is poor and the graduation rate is below the citywide average, but the school is improving under the guidance of Principal Esther Shali-Ogli, who took the helm in 2016. 

Shali-Ogli sets the warm and structured tone. She sports blue-dyed hair and wears blue jeans and the same T-shirt she requires of her students. A former math teacher with a music background, she has eased out weak teachers and promoted her strongest staff to leadership positions. She sends home appealing newsletters in English and Spanish that celebrate student birthdays and instruct parents in a  non-jargon way. 

Students were alert and paying attention in classes on our visit. There was a nice spirit of peers helping peers: older students are trained to serve as academic tutors in some classrooms and lead advisory groups. The once-high suspension rate has dropped.  The on-time graduation rate is rising. Enrollment is steady. Once the school comes off a list of low-performing schools—which it is on track to do given its progress, Shali-Ogli says—the goal is to expand to 700 or more students in coming years. 

Options for high-achievers include Advanced Placement courses, like an AP Literature class we saw in which students read Hamlet out loud while others followed along. To give all students access to rich literature, some may read a graphic novel version of a text like Romeo and Juliet. 

Teachers encourage class discussions and small group work—Shali-Ogli wants students to be active, independent learners, she stressed—and we saw purposeful small group activity in all types of classes, as well as teens using technology in practical ways. In a science class, students worked on interactive animations on iPads to study the digestive system. Some students used laptops to view a video clip in Spanish in an Earth Science class.

One-third of the school population has disabilities and approximately one-fifth are learning to speak English. Many speak Spanish at home, and most classrooms have instructions in English and Spanish.

The school’s bands perform in the community and there are two big all-school performances per year that showcase all the arts. 

Campos Secondary School has a hub of social services, including access to health care services, after school activities and parent workshops. 

Seniors who are on-track to graduate may go out for lunch. Campos is a community school in partnership with Grand Street Settlement; some students do internships at Grand Street, as well as at local elementary schools.

An experienced college guidance counselor meets with every student. On the day of our visit a representative from Marymount Manhattan College was meeting with students. The year before a student had been accepted to MMC on a full scholarship. 

Special education: Both the middle and high schools have classes to assist English language learners, and children with special needs. There are “integrated co-teaching” (ICT) classes, in which two teachers, one with special education certification, share leadership of a class that mixes students with special needs with general education students. There is a small District 75 program that shares the building and some of those students are included in Campos classrooms. The school also houses a rare bilingual Yiddish program for children with disabilities, a tiny program with about 20 students. The school is wheelchair accessible.

Admissions: Brooklyn-wide for middle school. High school: Preference to
continuing 8th graders. (Lydie Raschka, November 2018)