Beginning next year, MS 80, the Norwood-area middle school that is closing and re-opening as a new school with a mostly new staff next year, will be known as the Norwood Academy for Communal Excellence at the Isobel Rooney Campus.

As part of the city’s “turnaround” program, MS 80 and 23 other city schools (10 in the Bronx) needed to be re-named. The DOE said they would come up with the name based on input from school leadership teams.

During an April hearing at MS 80, officially known as “Junior High School 80, The Mosholu Parkway School,” several community members asked the DOE to retain the number 80 and to continue to use the name Isobel Rooney, which is written above the entrance to the school. Toward the end of the hearing, Deputy Chancellor Dorita Gibson said the DOE heard their wishes “loud and clear.” That appears to be the case as Isobel Rooney, a former school board member who took a special interest in MS 80, is included in the new name.

Now, as this article on SchoolBook points out, whether people actually use the new names is another story. Unofficially, JHS 80, The Mosholu Parkway School, has been known as “MS 80, The Isobel Rooney School,” for years.

Many of the other re-named “new” schools also incorporated pieces of the schools’ current names. (See list at the bottom of this post.)

Aside from re-naming the turnaround schools, the DOE is planning to lay off all of each schools’ teachers and replace them with new ones. Teachers at each school can re-apply to the schools, but turnaround guidelines require that only 50 percent of those teachers can be re-hired at the new schools.

Hiring teams, consistently of a school’s principal, two DOE representatives and two teachers union representatives, were supposed to start the hiring/re-hiring process in the near future.

But the teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), filed a lawsuit claiming the DOE is circumventing stipulations in its contract with the UFT. The DOE says their contract grants them permission to lay off staff at schools that they have closed. But the UFT says the schools aren’t really closing. They’re just being re-opened under new names and the schools will be in the same location with the same kids.

In court, the DOE to hold off on the hiring process until a judge makes a decision on the lawsuit, which isn’t expected until June.

Below is the list of Bronx turnaround schools and their new names (courtesy of SchoolBook, a collaboration between the New York Times and WNYC):

Alfred E. Smith Career and Technical Education High School — Bronx Institute for Automotive Technology

Herbert H. Lehman High School — Throggs Neck High School at the Lehman Campus

Banana Kelly High School — Collegiate Preparatory Academy at Longwood

Junior High School 22 Jordan L. Mott — The College Avenue Academy

Intermediate School 339 — Bronx Middle School of Academic and Career Technology

Bronx High School of Business — Business Enterprise High School

Junior High School 80 Mosholu Parkway — Norwood Academy of Communal Excellence at the Isobel Rooney Campus

Middle School 391 Angelo Patri — Innovative School of Excellence at the Angelo Patri Campus

Fordham Leadership Academy for Business and Technology — East Fordham College and Career Preparatory High School

Middle School 142 John Philip Sousa — North Bronx Academy

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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.