Open Call: Pitch Reels

Thug School Pitch:

“Who in here doesn’t live in the projects?” Thirty-two ninth graders stay put. Only the teacher, who is white, raises her hand. “That’s what I thought,” says the boy who asked the question, staring out the window of H.S. 460, formerly John Jay High School, a.k.a. Thug School. This isn’t a particularly unusual scene except for its location. John Jay is in the heart of Park Slope, Brooklyn, home to multi-million-dollar brownstones, stroller brigades, and bleeding-heart, peacenik liberals. Two streets away is P.S. 321--one of the finest elementary schools in New York City--its classrooms packed with smart, primarily white kids with near-perfect reading and math scores. Fifty-three years after Brown vs. Board of Education, John Jay High’s students are primarily black and poor. Police and metal detectors surround the doors. Bussed in from projects in the Bedford-Stuyvesant, Red Hook, Sunset Park, and Brownsville sections of Brooklyn, few students graduate, fewer make it to college. I’d like to give one bright student a camera for one week. The assignment would be: shoot whatever stands out about the experience of being one of the few hopefuls in a failing school that, in 2008, remains an insular, almost all-black island, midst in a wealthy, nearly all-white neighborhood.

“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.” —Ralph Ellison