On a recent rainy Saturday morning, seventh-grader Mehrina Tabassum sat quietly at the front of a classroom inside MS 80 on Mosholu Parkway, listening as a tutor instructed the small group of students to tackle a math problem.

“What is the greatest common factor of 105 and 126?” he asked, as students quickly grabbed their pencils.

Mehrina was there for extra weekend tutoring sessions in math and reading that she hopes will help her gain admission to Stuyvesant High School, a prestigious school in lower Manhattan.

“I think Stuyvesant will be kind of challenging, but I think it’s going to be fun,” said Mehrina, who wants to be a pediatrician.

History, however, is not on Mehrina’s side. School administrators said not a single student from MS 80 last year was accepted to Stuyvesant or any of the city’s seven other elite public high schools that selectively admit eighth-grade applicants based on their scores on the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT).

According to the Bronx borough president’s office, barely six percent of Bronx students last year were among the nearly 6,000 students across the city accepted into any of these specialized high schools, including the Bronx High School of Science in nearby Bedford Park.

That’s why Mehrina was among the few dozen students gathered inside MS 80 on Oct. 29 for the start of the Science Schools Initiative, a Washington Heights-based tutoring service that provides free preparation for the SHSAT to low-income students. The founders said the program at MS 80, which is the first of its kind in a Bronx school, will help level the playing field for families who can’t afford pricey test preparation programs.

“The Bronx has the least number of students getting into specialized high schools,” said Mike Mascetti, 27, co-founder of the Science Schools Initiative and a graduate of Stuyvesant High School. “That’s why we’re here. We want kids from this community to go to those schools.”

Although the Department of Education does not make student address data available, local educators said that less than a fifth of the students from the Bronx High School of Science are from the borough.

Mascetti, a Queens native, along with fellow Stuyvesant graduate Darren Guez, started the program in 2007 after realizing that many low-income students could not afford enrolling in private test preparation programs, which can cost hundreds of dollars.

“We were thinking maybe we should tutor people who are a little more like us, from low-income or middle-income backgrounds, who can’t afford test preparation,” said Mascetti, adding that the tutors in the programs are mainly young college students who are graduates of the specialized high schools. “Going to Stuyvesant was a transformative experience for me. There isn’t any question you are going to graduate, unlike at the other schools.”

Mascetti said that they were looking to expand the program to other parts of the city earlier this year when a frustrated Bronx resident, Adaline Walker-Santiago, came knocking on their doors, angered by the fact that Bronx students had a poor showing among the city’s most elite schools.

“The schools are rated the worst in the Bronx,” said Walker-Santiago, the newly-elected vice-chair of Community Board 7. “These kids are just as smart as any kid in the city, but they are just not given the same opportunity for a good preparatory class.”

After finding out about the initiative online, Walker-Santiago arranged a meeting with Mascetti and several middle school principals in the Bronx. They decided to make MS 80, a school that recently received a federal grant to turn around its poor performance, the pilot site for the program. MS 80 was rated a “D” on performance in its last overall report card, with a little more than a quarter of the students achieving a passing grade on its math scores.

“We’re very excited,” said MS 80 Principal Lovey Mazique-Rivera. “The parents love it. They are really appreciative the school is offering this service to them.”

About 60 sixth and seventh grade students at MS 80 were selected for the program based on their eligibility for free school lunch, and their performance on a mock selective exam that Mascetti and his team administered at the end of June. Both Mascetti and school administrators hope that 50 percent of them will eventually gain entrance to one of the city’s specialized high schools.

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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.