NY culinary-arts teachers slam cuts in school programs

Nation's Restaurant News, Nov 20, 1995 by Milford Prewitt

NEW YORK - Even as this city's restaurant promoters proudly proclaim New York "the restaurant capital of the world," culinary-arts teachers charge that their programs are being shredded in the public high schools.

Dozens of culinary-arts teachers who attended what was supposed to be a career-enhancement seminar to glean from a panel of foodservice professionals the kinds of skills their students needed to obtain restaurant jobs shocked the operators and chefs with the portrait of a school system that steadily is dismantling their programs.

Meeting at park West High School, home to perhaps the city's premier culinary-arts program, the teachers told tales about themselves or colleagues who have been fired or reassigned as a result of budget pressures and a new shift in educational focus that is placing more emphasis and resources on academics over vocational arts.

Linda Kennedy-Beauvil, a 31-year teacher of home economics and culinary arts, began the new year with a new job, heading up Canarsie High School's in-house suspension program for hard-to-discipline students. Previously, she ran a culinary program whose students repeatedly won first-and and second-place cooking awards in the statewide Star Events competitions sponsored by the Future Homemakers of America.

"I'm bitter," she said. "These programs are being decimated."

Aletha Heggie, a recent Johnson and Wales graduate and a product of the New York City public schools, said she teaches because she wants to inspire students to embark on foodservice careers the way a favorite high-school teacher inspired her. However, she noted that she is teaching special-education students at John Dewey High School, using a stove "built for a studio apartment."

School administrators denied the teachers' claims. They argued that the culinary instructors are "personalizing" policy priorities and budget restraints.

"I can tell you that there is no grand strategy no central policy or position tb eliminate culinary arts," said a spokeswoman for Florence Jackson, director of the school board's office of vocational education. "But it is very expensive to create culinary laboratories, and with the budget restraints we face today and new priorities, everything cannot be funded."

Jackson was unable to return phone calls. "It's not accurate to say that the culinary-arts programs in this city are being eliminated," said Noel Kriftcher, a school superintendent who oversees the curriculum and administration of 22 high schools in Staten Island and Brooklyn.

"In some cases there has been some expansion" he added, in pointing out two new high schools that will be the recipients of state-of-the-art commercial teaching kitchens.

"But it is true that we are in a budget slump, and with the increased expectations for standards and mandates in the academic subjects, culinary arts - like all vocational arts - are in a weaker position these days."

Kriftcher confirmed one of the main arguments of the teachers: that vocational arts like wood work, automotive repairs, bookkeeping and other so-called life skills have become electives while academics have taken center stage.

In order to earn a diploma, virtually all 250,000 public high school students in New York City today - college-bound or not - are required to demonstrate higher proficiency in math, English, science, social studies and a foreign language than in previous years.

The mandatory commitments to the academic subjects mean that students have less time to explore vocational courses, Kriftcher agreed.

"[Culinary-arts] courses are still available, but they are electives. But everybody has to take eight terms of English, for example. Period. End of story. And there's only so much time in a day."

But some teachers and industry operators argue that, unlike the other imperiled vocational courses, foodservice curricula enhance a students, immediate job prospects, especially for those not going to college.

"There's this broad assumption that everybody is going to college after school, that everybody is going to be a doctor or a lawyer when we know that is not the case," said Reesa Levy, a culinaryarts instructor at Brooklyn's John Dewey High School. Its students last year received $110,000 in college scholarships to attend culinary and hospitality management schools, including The Culinary Institute of America.

She said so far she has been been successful in thwarting the budget cutters because "they know I've got a big mouth, so they leave me alone."

The teachers also explained that by reducing the culinary arts and limiting foodservice-type course work to just a few schools, hundreds of young people who might be tempted to explore restaurant careers are not even being exposed to the field.

"Academics won't hurt our young people," said Marie Gillespie, who, as director of the school board's Bureau Human Services, was a staunch supporter of the school system's culinary-education program in high schools, but by cutting out the culinary arts, you are not even giving these kids a chance to awaken an interest in the field.