NY culinary-arts teachers slam cuts in school programs

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

"What we need is some interdisciplinary awareness where we combine math with the culinary arts or science with food preparation. Just imagine how much a student could learn about chemistry in a baking class. But that not where the thinking is right now."

But Gillespie, after 35 years with the school system, retired when her entire department was eliminated.

She said that at its height 20 years ago, the New York City school system had approximately 75 home economics departments with culinary curricula among its 160 high schools any approximately 300 teachers. At the time her department was extinguished last year, she estimated just 20 programs had survived, employing approximately 60 teachers.

Richard Grausman, an internationally recognized chef and cookbook author and a panelist at the teachers, career day, said he was not surprised by the complaints.

"There are only a few major public schools in the country that have anything left," he remarked. Teachers who were committed to the program and who could inspire students to pursue the career in one season can come back the next season to find their jobs gone."

Grausman, who is perhaps best known as the founder and president of the Careers Through Culinary Arts Program, often called C-CAP, a nonprofit organization that promotes foodservice careers to mainly inner-city high-school students in seven cities - including New York - said some school systems are more supportive.

In Philadelphia the C-CAP is working with the school board to create a front-of-the-house curriculum, and in Chicago the public schools have created a separate academy of foodservice and have solicited the C-CAP to play a major role in its kitchen curriculum.

In New York the C-CAP program is working closely with the Manhattan high-school superintendent's School-to-career program, a consortium of industry professionals, teachers and academicians, to improve student training and to find jobs.

One major source of pressure on the culinary-arts programs comes from high-school principals, the teachers charge. In New York principals have substantial power in dictating the kinds of classes that will be taught in their schools.

"I had an African-American principal tell me that it's demeaning to teach African-American students how to cook," said Gerald Gliber, an elected member of a Manhattan community school board and an instructor at the New York Restaurant School.

Grausman said the answer to saving the existing culinary programs lies in building bridges to industry.

But in a letter to the new school chancellor Rudolf Crew, Grausman said that even though the industry is eager to help, we hesitate to do so without [Crew'sl personal backing and a strong commitment from the school administration."