The media loves great stories, and 20/20 Vision for School has been a great story since launching as a grassroots awareness campaign in 2008. The vision that local schools would someday educate New York City’s most vulnerable students equitably across economic, racial, and geographic lines inspires great stories everyday as community stakeholders partner with school in creative, sustainable ways.

Below is a partial list of media coverage of various 20/20-related stories in the last year. Additional stories have been indexed here.

Op-Ed: “The Constitution is for everyone. Education should be too.” by NYC Councilman Fernando Cabrera and Jeremy Del Rio (Journey through New York City Religions, 3/4/12)

Forty percent of New York City high school students drop out before graduation. Of those that do graduate, fewer than twenty-five percent of them are ready for college without remediation courses, and only thirteen percent of the Black and Latino graduates.

Full article.

“NYC public school ban on church services” (CNN, 2/12/12)

Op-Ed: “The Sting of Eviction Day” by Rev. Richard Del Rio and Jeremy Del Rio (NY Daily News, 2/12/12)

We invite Bloomberg and Walcott to elevate this conversation from a debate about space to a long-term strategy that engages and mobilizes congregations for the leverage we alone can provide for sustainable reform. … Transformational change requires us to see beyond parochial interests and forge partnerships on behalf of 1.1 million students. Let’s show them how neighbors of all faiths and no faith at all can co-create a more just New York.

Full article.

NY1: Inside City Hall (2/8/12)

Jeremy Del Rio debates New York Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Donna Lieberman, Esq., hosted by Errol Louis.

Watch the video here. (Embed not available.)

Glen Beck: On the Record, GBTV.com (2/10/12)

Jeremy Del Rio joins guests NYC Councilman Fernando Cabrera and Rev. Richard Del Rio to discuss Mayor Bloomberg’s decision to evict 60+ congregations from holding weekend services at public schools.

CNN: Pastors Protest School Rule (1/15/12)

Jeremy Del Rio discusses civil disobedience by 40+ clergy and others who got arrested protesting Mayor Bloomberg’s eviction of congregations from schools.

DOE Celebrates the PS 102 Mural (10/1/11)

For the month of October, the NYC Department of Education has featured the PS 102 mural on its homepage. Watch the report on the DOE website here.

“Picturing Diversity,” Brooklyn Family magazine, Sept 2011

The September issue of Brooklyn Family magazine tells the story of the PS 102 mural. Here’s an excerpt.

“PS 102 Principal Theresa Dovi welcomed the concept wholeheartedly introducing the idea of the public art mural to the school’s families early in the year, and invited them to answer the question: ‘How does your family welcome guests into your home?’ … The kind, simple gesture sets the picture in motion, guiding the eye through a vibrant celebration of respect, acceptance, sharing and love. That sentiment is echoed in words of greeting, spelled out in 43 different languages on the wall, some written on the sidewalk in chalk, others on building marquees and walls, and still others waving from colorful banners.”

Full article here.

“Leading Education Reform Where You Are: One Church’s Story,” Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit, August 2011

In September of 2008, Pastor Paul Curtis’ relationship with the public school system fit the profile of many New York City pastors. That is, he didn’t have one.

Full story here.

“Mural Says Welcome to Many Cultures,” Bay Ridge Eagle, 7/21/11

The Bay Ridge Eagle published a beautiful story on the mural in the July 21 issue. Here’s an excerpt:

“When P.S. 102 Principal Teresa Dovi and her students wanted to find a nice way to greet visitors at their school, they didn’t hang up a “Welcome” sign. They picked up paintbrushes.”

Full story here.

“Closing Bell: New Mural for Bay Ridge School,” Brownstoner.com, 6/7/11

“On Saturday there was an official unveiling of a new mural at PS 102 in Bay Ridge. The work has been produced by hundreds of volunteers over the past six weeks. The mural is called ‘Welcome,’ and it’s meant ‘to promote a message of acceptance of and respect for diversity.’”

Full story here.

The Freedom Academy Drama Club launched at Freedom Academy High School on March 5th under the leadership of Jessica and Daniel Frith, veteran actors and drama instructors. Enjoy Freedom students as they learn by doing through a series of theater games and workshop activities on March 26th. The drama club is preparing to write and produce a spring show in June.

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By Fernando Cabrera and Jeremy Del Rio
[Originally published by A Journey through NYC Religions, 3/4/12]

Church mural on Livonia Street, Brooklyn

Our city has a crisis that goes far beyond where congregations gather on weekends.

Forty percent of New York City high school students drop out before graduation. Of those that do graduate, fewer than twenty-five percent of them are ready for college without remediation courses, and only thirteen percent of the Black and Latino graduate.

Instead of focusing on the crisis at hand and mobilizing all the resources that he can, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is spending his time and the City’s money trying to evict congregations from the schools. He doesn’t seem to perceive in them any value beyond a rent check.

Councilman Fernando Cabrera, D-Bronx

On Sunday, armed with a federal restraining order against religious intolerance, dozens of these congregations that the mayor attempted to evict on February 12 were able to meet for services in the schools. This week the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals rejected another attempt to rush the churches out the door.

The mayor continues to argue that New Yorkers are not smart enough to discern the difference between academic instruction that occurs during schools hours and activities conducted by congregations renting empty buildings during off hours. In the entire United States, Mayor Bloomberg is the only big city mayor and New York’s Department of Education is the only city school district that holds this view.

We invite Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to put an end to seventeen years of wasteful, taxpayer-funded litigation.  He can do it if he will allow legislation on religious freedom to come to a floor vote in the Assembly. State Senate Democrats and Republicans have already voted overwhelmingly (54-7) to reject the mayor’s war on religious freedom three weeks ago.  A large majority of the Assembly have indicated that they are ready to pass the bill. They recognize that the mayor has lost sight of the greater good of the poor communities in New York City in his pursuit of a grudge match against Christian churches and other religious groups.

It is about time that the mayor and speaker start to focus on how to utilize a community resource like the churches to help our schools instead of spending precious time and money to squelch them.

In fact, this is an opportunity for the mayor and the speaker to pivot the conversation from fruitless and divisive attacks on the churches to how New Yorkers of all faiths and non-faith can work together to transform the public schools. We can shift our energies from a landlord-tenant dispute to a long-term strategy that partners public schools with community stakeholders who can invest time and energy into our schools.

The churches need to shift their approach too. What might happen if the congregations under threat of eviction plus the religious people who support them shift their perception of public schools from a place with space to a place of service? Monday through Sunday, not just on Sunday.

Already, churches have provided small and large services to our public schools. Crossroads Christian Church in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn spearheaded the painting of a large mural that celebrates PS 102’s immigrant student diversity.

Jeremy Del Rio, 20/20 Vision for Schools

On Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Abounding Grace Ministries has partnered with PS 34 for eighteen years to provide after school programs, beautification projects, and student and teacher appreciations. In the last three years the church has rented space at the school. This seems like a pretty fair deal: eighteen years of service plus rent for some space on Sunday when school is out.

This year, churches and ministries are giving students at Jamaica High School in Queens, Bread and Roses High School in Harlem, Grand Street Campus and Freedom Academy in Brooklyn for-credit extracurricular classes and clubs on music, drama, leadership, spoken word, sports, and online journalism.

Schools and congregations alike are places of learning, where people come to grow as individuals and in community. We invite the City of New York, the Department of Education, and New York City’s various faith communities to embrace this controversy as a uniquely teachable moment. Let us model for 1.1 million New York City public school students how neighbors can achieve something together more than just conflict.

The congregations offer the Mayor unique leverage in his fight for educational equity. In informal surveys at twenty worship services, 20/20 Vision for Schools has found that up to 90% of the people in the pews are directly or indirectly connected to a school as parents, students, teachers, custodians, administrators, or relatives. They are waiting to be appreciated and mobilized, not disrespected and pushed out of the schools.

Loving neighbors, pursuing justice, educating children – these are universal religious imperatives. When community and spiritual leaders nurture this motivation, exponential change in a city as diverse as New York is much more likely.

Now is the time. Let’s end needless litigation and redirect the city’s energies into partnerships that advance our students’ best interests.

- Councilman Fernando Cabrera (D-BX) has led the effort to overturn Mayor Bloomberg’s policy legislatively. Jeremy Del Rio, Esq. directs 20/20 Vision for Schools, which has partnered community groups and local schools since 2008.

1. Jamaica High School, Queens

Track the progress of “I Am Now,” a performing arts-based student leadership program featuring music, film, and spoken word at Jamaica High School that launched on January 10, 2012.

2. Freedom Academy High School, Brooklyn

Explore 20/20′s efforts to empower students and parents to advocate on behalf of a school threatened with closure in Fall 2011, and follow progress of the drama and journalism clubs that launched on March 5, 2012.

Freedom Academy Press

SOS (Save Our School) Freedom Academy

3. PS 102, Brooklyn

Creative strategies at PS 102 provide two reference websites. The first chronicles the development of an 875-square foot, “Welcome” themed mural executed over six weeks by 450 volunteers from eight organizations plus students, parents, and staff. The website tracks the project from start to finish, and provides a template for everything from soliciting ideas from students, recruiting sponsors and volunteers, and how to empower mostly unskilled volunteers to contribute to a public art project of this scale.

The second tells the ongoing story of the Journalism Stars Club at the school, which was started by three parent volunteers inspired to empower students to both live and tell great stories. The road-map developed at this elementary school is guiding a high school journalism club at Freedom Academy.

Today, Melanie L, a college student from Manhattan’s Lower East Side, begins tutoring students at her junior high school twice a week. She was inspired to reach out to her former student adviser following a Vision Sunday service at her home church, Abounding Grace Ministries three weeks ago. Here’s the email her father sent 20/20 following the service.

Hope all is well. I wanted to share with you a conversation my daughter Melanie and I had walking home from church this past Sunday. She had tutored kids through most of her JHS and HS career and really missed it. She said that hearing your presentation on Sunday re-ignited her desire to help teens get right in school so she contacted her former JHS student adviser and started a conversation about helping to develop a tutoring program in the school. The idea was well received and they are setting up a couple of meetings in the near future to work out the details. And having had good results with that she is also planning to contact her former HS, both of these schools are in the LES. This would probably sound much better coming from her but for some things she is a bit shy so I just want to encourage you to stay the course and I know that God will continue to honor you and bless your efforts in helping to educate our kids.

This past Saturday, newly retired Navy Captain Mark V. reported that following the same Vision Service that inspired Melanie, he applied for a teaching position at a nearby, under-performing high school. He begins on April 5.

Schedule a Vision Sunday today and mobilize your congregation to improve educational achievements in your community.

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Love, love, love the creativity of community groups supporting local schools! Williamsburg Church is hosting the Music & Motion fundraising benefit on February 25th for a nearby high school. All proceeds will go to the purchase of school uniforms and ESL materials for the High School for Enterprise and Business Technology at Grand Street Campus.

By The Rev. Richard Del Rio And Jeremy Del Rio / Originally published by NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, 2/12/12

Today, if Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott have their way, our church — Abounding Grace Ministries, which holds weekly services at PS 34 on Avenue D on Manhattan’s lower East Side — will be one of 60 or more evicted from public schools citywide.

The city, relying on a federal court ruling that the Supreme Court chose to let stand, says it’s within its rights to do this.

What they’re not saying is that neither does the ruling or the Constitution require the city to evict congregations like ours.

Currently, the Department of Education rents vacant school buildings to 10,000 community organizations, only 60 of which are congregations. We pay the same rents and operate under the same terms as every other group.

Excluding congregations alone contradicts a city that from its birth has celebrated freedom and pluralism.

As we contemplate eviction, Mayor Bloomberg’s declaration 17 months ago haunts us. In defending the right of a mosque to build near Ground Zero, he said: “We in New York . . . are Americans, each with an equal right to worship and pray where we choose. There is nowhere in the five boroughs that is off-limits to any religion. By affirming that basic idea, we will honor America’s values, and we will keep New York the most open, diverse, tolerant and free city in the world.”

The mayor’s boasts from another occasion ring equally hollow: “Our doors are open to everyone . . . Of all our precious freedoms, the most important may be the freedom to worship as we wish. And it is a freedom that, even here in a city that is rooted in Dutch tolerance, was hard-won over many years.”

The mayor argues that when the city allows churches to use school buildings for worship services on weekends, it confuses communities and children into believing that there’s an official religion established at a particular school.

The logic is craven. Are we to believe that the same New Yorkers Bloomberg admonished to “do what is right, not what is easy” during the mosque controversy now cannot tell the difference between a mosque, synagogue or church that rents an empty school facility on weekends and the academic instruction that occurs in the same building Monday through Friday?

New Yorkers are smarter than that. Our children are smarter than that, too.

And if on occasion a young, impressionable child cannot tell the difference, the rest of us can surely do the right thing, seize a teachable moment and explain our city’s “most important” freedom to worship.

We hope state legislators succeed in their efforts to nullify the evictions. Despite Speaker Sheldon Silver stalling a floor vote in the Assembly, the state Senate overwhelmingly rejected the mayor’s policy in a bipartisan, 54-7 vote on Monday.

But regardless of the outcome of these efforts, we are committed to serving the school and its children long after today.

It has been our privilege to partner with PS 34 for almost 20 years, even though we have only rented space there for three. PS 34 students primarily come from low-income housing projects along Avenues D and C. It has been gratifying to help those students — our shared students — and families in after-school, sports, mentoring and performing arts programs, and gang interventions; to beautify the school through paint and mural projects; to provide motivational speakers for graduations and assemblies, and to honor the school community through appreciation breakfasts, schoolyard festivals and barbecues. We join PS 34 in celebrating student achievements at the school.

After a decade of reform, the odds that graduates of New York public schools will finish college or be career ready is still only one in four.

We invite Bloomberg and Walcott to elevate this conversation from a debate about space to a long-term strategy that engages and mobilizes congregations for the leverage we alone can provide for sustainable reform.

Loving neighbors, pursuing justice, educating children — these are universal religious imperatives. Regardless of tradition, the vast majority of the faithful are directly or indirectly connected to public schools.

Transformational change requires us to see beyond parochial interests and forge partnerships on behalf of 1.1 million students. Let’s show them how neighbors of all faiths and no faith at all can co-create a more just New York.

Richard Del Rio is the senior pastor of Abounding Grace Ministries on the lower East Side. Jeremy Del Rio, his son, attends Abounding Grace and directs 20/20 Vision for Schools.

On February 2, 2012, Jeremy Del Rio represented 20/20 Vision for Schools as a witness on congregation and school partnerships at the NY City Council Education Committee hearing concerning the Department of Education’s pending eviction of sixty-eight congregations from schools on February 12. Below is his prepared statement in support of Resolution 1155.

_______________

February 2, 2012
Testimony before the NY City Council Education Committee
By Jeremy Del Rio, Esq., Executive Director
20/20 Vision for Schools

Chairman Jackson and honorable education committee members:

I am Jeremy Del Rio from 20/20 Vision for Schools, representing more than 100 organizations that have partnered with local public schools to improve educational outcomes for vulnerable students since 2008. Several of those partners are among the congregations threatened with eviction in ten days. I am also a public school parent.

Others will testify to the discrimination, Constitutionality, and disparate impact of the Mayor’s Unequal Access policy. I am here to speak to a second tragedy it exacerbates.

Last June, Mayor Bloomberg lauded a record graduation rate of 65%. One month later, the City disclosed that only 25% of those students graduated college or career ready.

After a decade of reform, the odds that graduates of New York public schools will finish equipped for life is still only one-in-four. Three out of every four students who believed us when we told them graduation is their ticket out of poverty were betrayed by empty promises. Remediation awaits the lucky ones.

New York City can do better. Indeed, we must do better.

Today I urge the City Council to elevate this conversation from solely a debate about space to a long-term strategy that partners local schools with community stakeholders who can invest in the sustainable reform of our City’s schools.

Rather than evict congregations, mobilize them for the leverage they alone can provide in the fight for educational justice. Loving neighbors, pursuing justice, educating children – these are universal religious imperatives. Regardless of tradition, 70%-90% of the faithful are directly or indirectly connected to schools, positioned for impact.

Transformational change requires us to see beyond parochial interests and forge partnerships on behalf of 1.1 million students. Let’s model for them how neighbors of all faiths can co-create a more just New York. We can begin by passing Resolution 1155.