The History of It Is Time – Classroom Connections

I grew up in a lily-white Long Island community where I was taught that the USA is all about justice and liberty for everybody, and that whenever our military goes to war it is to stop the bad guys!  I LOVED that idea and was a very proud American!  In fact at my high school graduation the speech I made was entitled "Let's Become Great Citizens of this Great Country!"

I moved into NYC to go to college, spent many hours going all over the city and talking to lots of interesting people, including many people of color, and soon learned – for real this time – that the USA is NOT about “liberty and justice for all” - and I came to believe that our military was (and is) not always used in virtuous, or even ethical, ways!  Had I been invited back to speak at my high school when I was nineteen years old my topic would have been very different!

I have been trying to make the world a better place ever since.  In July of 1967 I started doing social work with the New York Urban League in Harlem.  That November the Urban League moved three of us into a brand new program – a collaboration with the New York City Board of Education – at Hughes High School, down on W. 18^th St.  (Central Harlem had no public high schools back then, and Hughes was one of the high schools that Harlem kids had to trek down to every school day.)  We spent the school days inside the building, working as ‘student advisors’ and also as liasons with the faculty and administration.  When school and after school activities ended we went back up to Harlem and worked till usually 10 or 11 pm on the streets and/or in one of the Urban League’s Street Academies - with the Hughes students and other neighborhood youth.

I was very passionate about my work and was ‘always’ talking about it.  Sometimes some of my white friends would respond with comments about Black people which were less than complimentary, and which I knew to be untrue.  I would tell them what I had seen and heard, but of course it seldom changed their opinions.  It was very frustrating because I have always wanted to live in a world where people get along with (and ideally celebrate) those from other ‘worlds’ or cultures.

In almost all cases these friends were honest, hard-working, good-hearted, and generally open-minded people.  So what was missing?!  How could these good people be thinking and feeling some of these things?!

One day it occurred to me how I had come to believe as I did.  It wasn’t from somebody telling me what to think - it was from me meeting people and seeing it for myself!  So I got an idea. 

I needed to find a way to bring Black and White kids together, to give them the opportunity to really get to know each other instead of having opinions that were/are based mostly on hearsay.

My now longtime friend Ed Deitch was a teacher at Hughes but had recently taught in a suburban (very White) New Jersey high school. So Deitch and I decided to bring together a group of students from that school and students from Hughes (Harlem).  The results were quite encouraging.

Late in 1968 I decided to leave the Urban League, leave the city, and go back home to Long Island and work the project there.  With a lot of help from Darryl Stromberg, who was both a friend and a local teacher, we regularly brought students from six or seven different high schools together.  We called the program SIHR, the Street Institute of Human Relations.  SIHR gatherings lasted anywhere from two hours to four days.  Though we found the students in various ‘Black’ and ‘White’ high schools, the program ran after school, on weekends, or during school vacations. 

SIHR was effective, sometimes extremely effective, but it was reaching too small a number of people! 

After a couple of years I went back to the city and, while working fulltime as a teacher and/or counselor, and continuing to bring groups of kids together once or twice a year, I kept racking my brain trying to figure out how this program could reach a lot more people.  Racism is a systemic problem, and thus any possible solution must be a systemic one!

Finally, in 1997 (twenty nine effing years later!), I got it!  Or so I thought.  Work the program right within the schools!  Have a teacher and class from one school partner with a teacher and class from a ‘different’ school, and make the program part of the curriculum!  Classroom work, homework assignments, discussions, trips, etc., could be geared around ‘the project.’  Kids would be learning incredible things, working together on projects of their own design, disintegrating negative stereotypical opinions of each other, and making the world a better place!  And (again quite naively) the learning will be so inspiring and so important that the project will spread like wildfire throughout our schools!  Soon there will be three teachers from a particular school doing it, then five and then ten, and before long every student in every school in the country will wonder every September ‘Who will we be partnering with this year?’

When I got this new idea I changed the name from SIHR to It Is Time – coming from the first sentence in our program description: It Is Time to create a world where people from different cultures and backgrounds will get along with each other!

The 1997 It Is Time pilot project brought together mostly White and affluent students from the Horace Mann School in Riverdale and working class or poor students of color from Grant Houses in Harlem and Borough Academy in the Bronx.  Though our time was very limited for this initial partnership, it was nonetheless quite a success!

Then reality reared its head – again!  There was far too much rigidity in the thinking and the methodologies and operations of both private and public schools.  While with the pilot program we were able to use the powerful and vitally important topic of police brutality, both the public and private schools were now saying we had to work the project around their already existing curriculums.  With topics which were nowhere near as powerful nor as critical or relevant as a topic like police brutality!

Between 1997 and 2005 more partnerships did take place, and surely each of these was worthwhile; but in my opinion the rigid thinking made them significantly less effective than they could have been; and there definitely wasn’t any wildfire spreading!

Two years before I retired from the NYC school system I met Lorenzo Krakowsky, currently the Upper School Director at the Calhoun School but at that time the Dean of Students at The Fieldston School.  Lorenzo and I thought a lot alike and enjoyed working together, so when I retired in 2005 he invited me to come to Fieldston and work my project out of his office.  He would collaborate with me on it.

The move to Fieldston brought yet another name change.  I had already been thinking of additional ways to use the It Is Time phrase, including (1) It Is Time to transform the education system! and (2) It Is Time for the regular, everyday people of the world to come together and find solutions to our problems!  So we now called the partnership program ‘It Is Time – Classroom Connections’ or the shortened Classroom Connections.

Lorenzo knew which teachers at Fieldston would likely be interested, and both of us looked for nearby public schools with which to partner the Fieldston teachers and classes.  Turns out most of the seven partnerships were with University Heights HS and two small schools in John F. Kennedy HS.  

Along with Lillian Martinez, a skilled and caring counselor at University Heights, Lorenzo and I tried to figure out which teachers would work best with each other.  Obviously, as you can gather by this New York Times article, with Fieldston’s Nancy Banks and the Heights’ Lisa Greenbaum we hit the jackpot!  Lisa and Nancy have continued to administer and improve the program ever since – nine years now!