This morning OSFO, Hepcat and I toured Edward R. Murrow High School, a school for 4,000 students in the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Murrow is high school on steriods. There’s an LED sign at the entrance with info and words of welcome, four floors in a building that takes up 2 city blocks, 9 gymnasiums, a black box theater, a huge auditorium, music and art studios, chemistry labs and on and on. You need an iPhone App just to learn your way around. It might also help with their unusual scheduling system – not days or periods but “bands.”

The kids, however, seem to have no trouble negotiating their way around this large and ambitious public high school. Beth Siegel-Graf, an assistant principal who led the tour, did an incredibly good  job of explaining the school’s non-traditional culture (i.e. the kids get up to two optional periods a day, called OPTAs, in which they are free to study, do homework,  get tutored, socialize or eat).

During the lecture portion of the tour, Siegel-Graf was able to dispel rumors that the kids have too much freedom at the school because of those OPTA periods. Students are required to stay in the school building and freshmen through juniors are required to be in a space where there are teachers. When they become seniors they are allowed to sit on the floor in the school’s hallways during OPTAs — a special Murrow-style privilege.

Siegel-Graf also addressed the school’s less than impressive 70% 4-year graduation rate  by saying that not every kid is able to graduate in four years, especially ESL kids and those with special needs.

She was also able to communicate—with great enthusiasm and energy—the intensity, the unconventionality and the multiplicity of the place

The kids I saw seem engaged in what they were doing whether it was classwork, costume design, guitar (we saw a class of 30 kids studying guitar. Hepcat wondered if it was a Brian Eno project.) or studying in OPTA study labs.

While the school is fairly inclusive in terms of students, it is very competitive and they seem to get a high level of student there. Here’s how the admission math works: 16% of the freshman class grades in the top 2% of the 7th grade ELA test (the measure of every child’s future in public school NYC).

68% is pulled from a lottery system made up of kids with high reading scores (in public school lingo: high 2s and 3s). And another 16% are low reading level, ESL, special needs, hearing impaired or other. So there’s a range of abilities there and that’s very much part of the school’s philosophy.

Indeed, it was the size and the magnitude of the school’s offerings that impressed me. They do have 3 special screened program that kids must audition for in music, drama and fine art. However, every student has the opportunity to avail themselves of the amazing music, drama and fine art classes the school has to offer, including playwriting, costume design, instrumental music, choral groups of all kinds, filmmaking, photography, graphic design and more.

Murrow also has a special M-Star science research program for 60 kids that you can’t  “audition” for prior to admission but once you get in you have to apply for with a middle school science teacher’s recommendation and good middle school science grades.

Murrow has its own way of doing things. There are no bells, no number grades (instead a unique letter grading system),  a quarterly cycle of classes, “mirror classes,” which mirror the audition classes but are for everybody, and most of all a healthy sense of  inclusivity.

It’s not a one size fits all kind of place and every kid has his/her own education program. That said, even if you’re not a “drama” kid you can take drama and that goes for art and music and a lot of the electives at the school. This strikes me as a good idea since people change so much during that 4 year high school period they should be allowed to discover things as they go.

Touring Murrow was like entering a small city called high school with its own language and rules. The citizens were teenagers who seemed to know their way around and weren’t regulated by bells or teachers. They seemed to be negotiating their own path through a bounty of educational, artistic and scientific offerings.

Not for every kid, Murrow is definitely an interesting place.