MS 8 – PS 8’s middle school – was opened five years ago and has grown into a middle school with 269 kids (grades 6 to 8). The school is located on the 5th floor of a school building in Downtown Brooklyn at 105 Johnson Street. They share the building with Westinghouse High School and City Poly High School.
Currently there are 25 to 30 kids in each class. Half of the students are graduates from PS 8, the other half is from various schools in District 13. It has a capacity of 360 students – 4 sections per grade.
Principal Seth Phillips and his team have developed a project-based curriculum that focuses on the social-emotional development of the students. The have launched an “exploration program” during which they stop their regular curriculum for 2 weeks and have each student work on an ungraded social-emotional or structural piece. Examples: “Can art change the world?”, “What is courage?” or “What is activism?”. Students produce their own works, take trips, have speakers come in, and present a product/case at the end of the two weeks.
The school is an Urban Advantage school which is a standards-based science partnership program to improve students’ understanding of scientific inquiry through collaborations between middle schools and science cultural institutions such as zoos, botanical gardens, museums, and science centers (free admissions to all museums, zoos etc). The partnerships give students opportunities to conduct hands-on investigations that engage them in science as a way of thinking and investigating rather than simply as a body of knowledge. All MS 8 8th graders will also be taking the Living Environment and Algebra Regents exams starting this school year.
MS 8 also offers a full immersion Spanish program for 7th and 8th graders with 4 periods per week. 90% of students pass the test to skip the first year of High School Spanish.
The school is a “limited unscreened school” that currently gives (1.) preference to PS 8 students and (2.) preference to families who attend an open house.
The school plans to open the science lab with adjacent visual arts studio in January 2017. They have a small gym on their floor. Students use the big gym on the ground floor for recess after lunch where they can play basketball, soccer and more. Each grade eats lunch in the school cafeteria alone, there is no interaction with high school students during lunch or recess. Lunch and recess are 45 minutes long (weather permitting they utilize MetroTech Commons). School starts at 8.30 am and ends at 2.50 pm. The free after school program is offered until 5.45 pm.
More information about the school here.
