Text size:

Nurtured at school

By Jamshid Mousavinezhad | amNY.com

New York City public schools have in many ways been a shelter for Tahara Miah, Sadyia Khalique and Yasmine Harris.

"I identified myself as a Muslim from a young age," Sadyia says, but "I wasn't open about it until I came to high school, because I felt more safe accepting my religion."

All three girls graduated in June from Baruch College Campus High School in Manhattan, and Yasmine says she's going to miss the "comfortable feeling" she had there.

Alicia Perez-Katz, the principal at Baruch, says the school is highly diverse, with 25 languages spoken among its 400 students. And the small and cramped school nevertheless created a space in its office where Muslim staff and students can pray.

It's part of a deliberate effort to recognize and value the backgrounds of its students and staff. It helps that the school is organized around an 'advisory' system, where students are in groups of roughly 20 that have one class period together every day for four years with the same teacher.

"Every kid is known, and has a place," Peretz-Katz says. "Intolerance is not tolerated here."

"If this school were a model of America," Sadyia says, "it'd be a better place."