New community school in Yonkers named after Judge Sonia Sotomayor
A view of the new Justice Sonia Sotomayor Community School in southwest Yonkers, August 26, 2024.
The city of Yonkers has long been forced to spend $30 million to $50 million a year to maintain and repair some of the oldest school buildings in the country, including some buildings that are more than 100 years old. For more than a decade, city and school district officials have been working to secure funding to build new schools that could showcase a new future.
That future begins on September 5 with the opening of the Justice Sonia Sotomayor Community School in southwest Yonkers.
The brand new preschool-to-8th grade school — gleaming, amenity-packed, and as green as a school can be — is designed to serve as a true gathering place for children and parents in its densely populated, predominantly Hispanic neighborhood. The school will offer a medical clinic that also includes mental health services, dental and vision care, nutrition and clothing programs, adult education, and more.
Part of the school, including the clinic, cafeteria and gym/multipurpose room, will be open to the public after school and on weekends.
“This school is about the whole child, the whole family and the whole community,” said Aníbal Soler Jr., Yonkers’ new principal, as he introduced the school. “Our job is to make this school the center of their lives.”
New schools are a priority for Spano
Yonkers Mayor Mike Spano has made it a goal during his long tenure to oversee the opening of new schools – a difficult undertaking because the state’s complex funding formulas would not grant Yonkers the 95% reimbursement that Rochester and Buffalo received to build costly new schools. In the end, Yonkers will receive 74% of the state reimbursement for the Sotomayor School, which cost nearly $85 million to build.
Spano will take it.
“This school is just what the doctor ordered,” he said. “A lot of kids who live near the school were forced to go to schools outside of town. People said, ‘I just want my kids to go to school here.’ Now they have a bright, shiny new school, a real community school. It’s a really good situation.”
By the end of his fourth term in 2027, Spano hopes to have work started on a new elementary school on Ashburton Avenue and plans in place to completely renovate Gorton High School or demolish it and build a new school.
“We really fought to build three new schools,” Spano said. “We had to because our schools were just so old.”
Two schools near Sotomayor School, Thomas Cornell Academy and the more than 100-year-old School 9, have closed. Many of their former students will now attend Sotomayor School.
Except for Sotomayor School and a second new school in a leased building, Yonkers’ 37 other public schools average about 75 years old, so daily maintenance and renovation will remain a difficult and costly challenge each year.
“We will continue to fight for funds to repair our schools,” Spano said.
The Sotomayor School is “what the kids want”
The Sotomayor School, decorated in blue, green, gray and a touch of yellow and flooded with natural light, will be Yonkers’ only bilingual school, meaning most students will learn English one day and Spanish the next. The goal is for students to be not only bilingual but also multicultural.
“We want to create a welcoming environment for students so that they enjoy being here,” said Elda Perez-Mejia, the Sotomayor School’s first principal, who previously led the city’s Eugenio Maria de Hostos MicroSociety School. “We want the staff to be really sensitive to human needs.”
The school’s highlights include:
- The medical unit, expected to open in late fall, will be operated in partnership with St. Joseph’s Medical Center. There are offices for mental health counselors and a school nurse, as well as an exam room and dentist office. Officials hope these services will reduce student absenteeism. “We want parents to know that we care about their children when they bring them here,” Soler said.
- The school’s community wing, accessible from the street, will eventually house a Saturday academy for students, a parent academy, events and programs run jointly with community agencies, and more.
- A music room has acoustic panels on the walls for first-class sound and soundproof classrooms.
- In a sensory room, the windows are fitted with sun blinds to reduce glare for students who are sensitive to bright light.
- A technical lab next to the library features 3D printers and a STEAM room.
- On the fourth floor, where the middle school students study, there is a cozy lounge near the lockers.
- The teacher desks are on casters so they can be moved to any desired location, and the student chairs are flexible enough to allow students to rock a little.
- The Sotomayor School lacks a typical school building: the boiler room. The school uses electric heat pumps that draw in outside air. Energy is supplied by solar energy, dozens of solar panels on the roof.
“This is a big improvement over what we had before,” said Madelaine Quezada, a fourth-grade bilingual teacher. “We can dim the lights for the students who are sensitive. The furniture is modern and convenient for the teachers. We can move things around depending on our needs. That’s what the kids want. It’s comfortable. It’s fun.”
First Hispanic Supreme Court Justice chosen as namesake
The new school’s namesake, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic and Latina to serve on the Supreme Court, was invited to the school’s grand opening on September 16. Sotomayor, now 70, is from the Bronx.
The student body of Yonkers Public Schools has become increasingly Hispanic over a long period of time. According to state data, in 2022-23, 62% of students were Hispanic or Latino, 16% were Black and 14% were white, and 13% were English language learners.
More than three-quarters of Yonkers students (77%) were classified by the state as economically disadvantaged.
The dense neighborhood around Sotomayor School is full of weathered apartment buildings and large, old houses that have been converted into apartments. The streets around the school have been repaved for the new school year.
Second new Yonkers school opens in rented building
Yonkers will have a second new school in the fall, but in a leased school building. The Robert Halmi Sr. Academy of Film and Television will open in a building formerly used by Rising Ground, a nonprofit social service organization. The new school, which focuses on film and television production, was developed in partnership with Great Point Studios in Yonkers and will begin with grades 6 and 9 in the fall before expanding to a full-fledged middle/high school for grades 6 through 12.
Rising Ground, long known as Leake and Watts Services, sold a 28-acre campus in Yonkers and Bronx where the school is located to a real estate development company, Natural Resources, in 2022.
Yonkers Public Schools leases the school building for $3 million per year. Natural Resources is covering most of the renovation costs and the city is contributing $1 million.
Spano also has a connection to the school building, built in 1994. When he was a young member of the State Assembly, he and his brother Nick, an influential state senator, sponsored a bill to fund the new school building for Leake and Watts, a well-known social service agency that served the children of Yonkers. It was not a project the state would normally have funded, but then-Governor Mario Cuomo got behind it and made it possible.
“He called me and said he knew how important this was,” Spano said. “He said, ‘I’m going to sign this bill.'”
