To The Editor:

I attend I.S. 89. We stayed at the O. Henry Learning Center for about 4 1/2 months. I’d say that there were ups and downs to our stay there. (Most or all of the downs were outside of the O. Henry building, sometimes involving other schools in that area).

In the Metro section of the New York Times there was an article that I found disturbing, and untrue. It starts off like a normal article, but then it starts to get into talking about our stay at I.S. 70 (O. Henry). The last time I checked, that kind of article is supposed to be based on fact. When it says in the article "I.S. 89 students, on the other hand, were squeezed into the O. Henry Learning Center on 17th Street in Chelsea." Now, when I first read that, I thought, "Yea. Well we were pretty squished," but then it was pointed out to me that there are some schools that have classes in the hallways, and gyms and auditoriums are chopped up into classrooms. That got me thinking, we weren’t squished. We not only at first each got our own classrooms, but after a few weeks each teacher got their own class so that we could go from class to class like at 201 Warren St. Maybe this author was right in a way, but I’d like to know what Yilu Zhao, the author, was comparing the "squishiness" to, a school in Scarsdale?

Another thing that I didn’t find extremely appealing in the letter, is when Zhao basically says that the children that go to Lab and Museum schools are poorer than us. I find that untrue, and completely irrelevant. What is that supposed to mean anyway? That they’re dangerous, or dirty, or stupid if they have less money than us? That’s not all the reason we wanted to go back. We wanted our stuff from our lockers that we hadn’t seen in months, and we wanted our old school where we felt that we belonged, and we wanted the delis, where we knew and made conversation with all of the workers. We didn’t care that I.S. 70 was a "not generally as affluent" school. In fact, Lab was a lot of our first or second choices. If we, the kids at I.S. 89 really cared that much, we’d go to private school.

I’ve lived in Tribeca all of my life, and for at least 4 or 5 of my 12 years, I’ve been around Stuyvesant and BMCC students. I’m not saying that these kids are "bad" or anything, I’m just saying that my parents didn’t really strive to block me from the community, and I think that I can handle my friends from elementary school (P.S. 234, ECC, and Park Preschool which are all in Tribeca) who now go to Lab, and are suddenly labeled as "not generally as affluent."

Now, I could be making a huge deal of this, and the author really meant no harm of it. If that is the case, then Yilu Zhao, I am truly sorry.

TYLER BEN-AMOTZ

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