Transcription:
Glyn Caddell
All right, so I’m here with Christine Zapata of PS. 29. She’s agreed to answer some questions about herself and about the school so you have a better idea of what she stands for and we could expect when you decide to send your kids here.
Christine Zapata
Absolutely. Nice. For the opportunity, of course.
Glyn Caddell
So we’re going to start with some some hard hitting questions. Christine, what’s your spirit animal?
Christine Zapata
I would say a unicorn.
Glyn Caddell
A unicorn? Okay.
Christine Zapata
Absolutely. Because they could be terrifying. Right. Because no one knows if they’re real or not. And at the same time, they offer a lot of joy to people. So I think that has a lot to do with the role of a principal, where kids are often terrified of you. Parents are still terrified of you because of their last experiences, and then they get to know you and they realize that you’re really there to make sure that they’re safe and happy.
Glyn Caddell
Cool. So actually, I was going to ask you this question later, but it makes more sense to ask it now. How do you think your students would describe you?
Christine Zapata
So I would say it depends on the grade of student. So kindergarten and PreK would say that I’m pretty, because they tell me all the time. Makes me laugh. And as you get older and the kids really get to know you, I would say they would say I’m kind and fair. Okay. Those awesome characteristics, the little one stroke pictures, and they always are pretty. And I’m like, of all the things that you could say pretty.
Glyn Caddell
What were you likes as a student in elementary school?
Christine Zapata
I had the distinct pleasure of going to this exact elementary school. The office that we’re sitting in was my kindergarten class many, many years ago.
Glyn Caddell
Does that bring back memories?
Christine Zapata
It does. It’s a much different vantage point. So when I was here, I thought the walls were fully tiled. Now that I’m a full sized adult and I walk down the hallways, I know that there’s paint on top and there’s pictures and stuff. So that was the first thing that literally struck me, because I was like, oh, and the hot lunchroom is where I lost my tooth, and I had to dig through the garbage to find it, and it was corn day.
Glyn Caddell
Oh, my gosh.
Christine Zapata
Yeah. So those are the type of all the good memories that bring back. Yeah. I was a smart kid. I did not do great in school because I didn’t have a lot of motivation to do so. I’m the oldest of four kids. There’s five of us in four years. I mean, four of us in five years. So my parents were really busy and young. I kind of slid by, so I wasn’t the greatest student, but I could hold my own.
Glyn Caddell
Did it change when you went to high school or college?
Christine Zapata
When I got involved with sports in high school, I started playing sports. When I got to high school, it kind of changed. It shifted. So it was understanding priorities and really becoming more independent and adult like that shifted my behaviors and moved me forward as a student because I knew I wanted to go to college, and that motivation moved me to a different level.
Glyn Caddell
Did you play sports in college?
Christine Zapata
I tore my ACL when I was a senior in high school, so I played club level sports in college. I played soccer and basketball. I wish I played sports in college.
Glyn Caddell
But it helped with the shift in education and focus and everything else.
Christine Zapata
Absolutely awesome.
Glyn Caddell
I always recommend sports. I think sports, any type of athletics or being on a team is a big part of the picture of, like, education in total.
Christine Zapata
Correct. So this is the first year here that we’re doing a fifth 5th grade basketball team for boys and girls. And it is for kids who really don’t play CYO, so they don’t get the opportunity to play outside of school, to give them something else different like that I didn’t have when I was a kid and some other people may not have had when they were a kid. Opportunity. They practiced during the lunch periods. They love it. It’s definitely given them a different viewpoint.
Glyn Caddell
Do they get to start at a younger age with practice at least? Or is it fifth grade?
Christine Zapata
Year for basketball, so we only have fifth grade because the other public schools in the area have fifth grade teams as well. We do have two gym teachers here, which is awesome because that’s luxury. It’s important to have the kids up and moving around and able to do the physical part of life. Our teachers are really good about incorporating physical activity into the day, but the gym teachers themselves, our physical education teachers themselves, they’re awesome. They really regiment the kids and get them to increase their heart rate. They do yoga starting with the three K. It’s great. I’m lucky enough that I could figure out a way to have two full time gym teachers throughout the school year. Giving kids more periods of gym per week.
Glyn Caddell
That’s really awesome. So how often does a kid get a gym class?
Christine Zapata
So it’s based on minutes, right? So, most of the classes in our school have two to three periods of gym per week, but we’re also something called a move to improve school, which means that our teachers are trained in how to incorporate physical activity into the daily schedules of what the kids are doing. So the extra minutes are made up in the class. There is no gym phys ed requirement in elementary school. It’s a minute number. So that, you know, some schools, the kids don’t have gym at all. We just put a priority on gym and arts here.
Glyn Caddell
That’s important. Who was your favorite teacher? Was it your gym teacher? Was it a different teacher?
Christine Zapata
My favorite teacher was my high school AP Physics teacher.
Glyn Caddell
Get out of here.
Christine Zapata
Funny enough, yeah. His name was Mr. Gormley, and his daughter was also in our class. We were friendly. We weren’t friends. He was a retired New York City police detective turned teacher turned vice principal who also taught our AP Physics class. And he was just super dynamic, very motivating. I never pictured myself doing well in a class like AP Physics. He said I could do it, and I did.
Glyn Caddell
He probably had a different perspective than most teachers, I guess.
Speaker 4
Yeah.
Glyn Caddell
Since he didn’t go from college to teaching, he took a, like, indirect route, had different life experience.
Christine Zapata
Yeah.
Christine Zapata
If I remember correctly, he was a Vietnam veteran, too. So he was a veteran and then a New York City police officer detective teacher. That’s a pretty principal.
Glyn Caddell
Just kept on going.
Glyn Caddell
Did you always want to be a principal?
Glyn Caddell
No.
Glyn Caddell
Okay.
Glyn Caddell
What did you want to do?
Christine Zapata
So when I was a young kid, I wanted to be a plumber because that’s what my dad did, and I helped him plum all the time.
Glyn Caddell
So he used to the oldest child. Helping with the chores and house.
Christine Zapata
Right.
Christine Zapata
He used to joke around and say that I was going to be the first female union plumber in the city of New York, which I wasn’t. Then I wanted to be a pediatrician. Then when I got to college, I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. I took a class in college just to try something different, and it was like an Intro to Education class, and you had to do hours in a local middle school. And I absolutely loved it. And that’s how I am where I am.
Glyn Caddell
Actually, I was an engineer, and when I was laid off in 2008, I tried different things, and I was actually tutoring just on the side. And that’s how I ended up deciding that realizing I love this.
Christine Zapata
Yeah.
Christine Zapata
Because it’s a different relationship that you have with children. Right. So if you don’t make the right connections with people at your job that you thought you were intended for, and then you do something else and you feel differently, you know that that’s something that you were meant to do. Not everybody gets to do what they love, right?
Glyn Caddell
Yeah.
Glyn Caddell
It’s good to try different things then.
Christine Zapata
Yeah.
Glyn Caddell
You don’t have to know what you want to do when you’re in high school. Big misconception.
Christine Zapata
They don’t even know what they want to do in college. My son is graduating in college this year, and he just really decided that he was actually going to go to physical therapy school.
Glyn Caddell
Wow.
Christine Zapata
So, you know, four years in, he was he’s three years, 3.5 years in because this semester is just ending. And he was just accepted and said, yeah, I guess I really do want to do it. But he’s been working volunteering at a physical therapy place with athletes and then a rehab center and a clinic. Now he realizes he really does like it.
Glyn Caddell
Okay.
Glyn Caddell
So he has experience. Like, he knows for sure. I definitely love this now.
Christine Zapata
Yeah.
Christine Zapata
We try to get him to immerse himself into whatever it is that he wanted to possibly do, because it’s hard to change once you’re a full fledged adult at a college. Right. Once you’re out, it’s hard to go back.
Glyn Caddell
Yeah.
Glyn Caddell
You can make a change. It definitely is way more difficult, and it’s definitely better to get that experience, like volunteering or interning or something like that, rather than finding out when you’re in the career for sure.
Christine Zapata
So we had him apply first, do the volunteer stuff, put it on your application with it if you get in. Great. He’s a great student, so we figured he would get in. But to make the decision to actually commit to do is great.
Glyn Caddell
Yeah. Awesome.
Glyn Caddell
Happy for him.
Christine Zapata
Yeah, me too.
Glyn Caddell
You had, I guess, not a traditional path to becoming a principal. Right. Can you tell me a little bit about the path?
Christine Zapata
It’s kind of boring to me.
Glyn Caddell
A quick summary, then bullet points.
Christine Zapata
You never know what you’re going to really like and do until you get in and do it. I started out in a Catholic school in I’m sorry. I started out in a public school in Pennsylvania because that’s where I went to college. And I was teaching a public middle school is grades seven, eight, nine.
Glyn Caddell
Okay.
Christine Zapata
9Th grade. So I was teaching in a middle school, middle school in Pennsylvania. And the high school called me and asked me if I could do the 10th grade. It wasn’t a regular 10th grade. It was a 10th grade for kids who were in big trouble. I taught there for like a half a year, and then I moved back to Staten Island. I worked in a private school, middle school, Catholic school for a year, and then I applied to work in a New York City public school. I ended up at Port Richmond High School.
Glyn Caddell
Were these all teaching positions?
Christine Zapata
All teaching.
Glyn Caddell
Okay.
Christine Zapata
But like the Gamut, I did an in school suspension site.
Christine Zapata
I did basically, like, a rehab facility site. When I worked at Port Richmond, I bought 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade, but I also coached basketball and soccer. I left Port Richmond. I went to Wagner High School. I became the AP at Wagner. Then I worked at the superintendent’s office. After the superintendent’s office, I’m here, and that’s how I got to where I am.
Glyn Caddell
Did work in the superintendent’s office give you any insight into yeah. Experience as an AP, but did it give you any insight into, I guess, your role as a principal?
Christine Zapata
It does.
Christine Zapata
So it’s like a bird’s eye view, right? Because you work with all 70 schools in Staten Island, as opposed to us in a single place where you’re worried about just the kids and families in your community.
Glyn Caddell
Was most of the contact with the principals when you’re in that role?
Christine Zapata
A lot of the contact was with principals. I did a lot of teacher trainings as well, and I helped to run some of the student groups throughout the district itself. So the biggest contact is principals because that’s always your first point of contact when you work for the superintendent’s office, and then it filters through the other groups as well.
Glyn Caddell
More specifically about PS. 29, what are some special programs or resources or activities that you’re really proud of or you think that students enjoy the most?
Christine Zapata
So PS. 29, being a community school, means that we pulled, just from our neighborhood, our very small community. We don’t have a big zone.
Glyn Caddell
Right.
Christine Zapata
So our school is about 600 kids. They all live basically within, like, two to 3 miles of the school or less.
Glyn Caddell
Right.
Christine Zapata
Many of our families walk to school every day. The majority of our families actually walk to school every day. Yes. It’s awesome because they’re right here. So you’re familiar with them, and you see their faces. I wait outside in the morning when they’re coming in, and we see them in the afternoon when they’re picking up. We’re very community oriented, so we know every kid, literally every kid, and we try to know every family who’s coming in who already graduated. We keep the networks alive. I’m really proud of the fact that our school is able to offer our students a very enriching arts program on top of the athletics that we do.
Glyn Caddell
Right.
Christine Zapata
So, yeah, we have gym, and the kids have a great time in gym and phys ed, and we have these after school programs that the kids have fun with. But in school, we also immerse them in a lot of really great arts programs. We have two licensed visual arts teachers and the licensed music teacher. Between the three arts professionals that we have, our kids make the most beautiful art chorus band. We have fourth grade band, fifth grade bands. We have 50 kid chorus. We have visual arts. We have a comic book club. We have everything that you could imagine yeah.
Christine Zapata
They make their own books by hand.
Glyn Caddell
Or are these by hand?
Christine Zapata
Everything by hand. So most of our arts are not digital. We do have an after school stop motion animation club on Mondays that meets, and it’s special ed. And generally they can put anything because that takes a lot of hours to. They are they’re in the middle of so they storyboard first with Ms. Sudo, our arts teacher. They storyboard first and then they actually are creating and putting together they built the sets to do stop motion, and now they’re upstairs making it using, I think, Adobe Express.
Glyn Caddell
Wow.
Christine Zapata
Yeah.
Glyn Caddell
It’s a pretty intense program. I know a lot of people that do other type of video editing. They use Adobe. They learn that in college. That’s pretty awesome.
Christine Zapata
We try to give them we don’t really sugar coat a lot, so we give them what they can handle. And then we really try to build them and make it more robust at producing whatever it is that they’re producing right away. Like our visual arts kids, the fifth graders are finishing self portraits upstairs. So the little ones did self portraits, which are adorable.
Glyn Caddell
Hanging is it a crayon paint? What are they doing?
Christine Zapata
So we use all recycled products. So they actually create stamps and molds using cardboard cutouts and foam that we get from all of the deliveries that we get in school and from home. And the teachers bring their stuff in constantly and they build layer. They start with making their own culture, almost. It’s like a 3D sculpture. Yeah. It starts out very two dimensional, and then it becomes three dimensional and they add all their personalized elements to it.
Glyn Caddell
It takes a lot of planning and visualizing to complete that.
Christine Zapata
Yeah.
Christine Zapata
And our arts teachers work really closely with our regular teachers on the grade level. So our fifth graders are doing those self portraits, but in their classes, they were learning about identity and cultures and respect for all. And then they read we have a Book of the Month that celebrate all of those things that go along with it, too. So it becomes a part of our culture as a school.
Glyn Caddell
Right. Everything kind of works together. What you said, gym, you said art, you said culture. Everything is kind of touching each other.
Christine Zapata
We kind of mesh it in exactly.
Glyn Caddell
Right.
Christine Zapata
Because if it’s separate from your daily living activities, then it’s not as important as it should be.
Glyn Caddell
Right.
Christine Zapata
It’s like a little standalone piece that you’re going to go back to at some point. But if it’s embedded into what you’r doing, it’s part of your day.
Glyn Caddell
Yeah.
Christine Zapata
And it becomes a part of your person.
Glyn Caddell
Right.
Glyn Caddell
That makes a lot of sense now. A little bit different. Going back. Schools were closed because of COVID There was a necessity to move quickly with getting kids online. Pretty much a weekend – you had notice, right.
Christine Zapata
Yeah.
Glyn Caddell
I know a lot of schools struggled because the decision was really quick. What do you think is necessary for remote learning to be successful? Like, now that you could look back at it and then you see what work didn’t work, what is important for it to be successful?
Christine Zapata
I think that we were very successful during COVID, in getting our kids devices that they needed to get on right away.
Glyn Caddell
Right.
Christine Zapata
So they really didn’t miss much, the teachers believing that it’s important for them to be with those kids. And our teachers definitely felt that it was so important for them to be on every day and for the kids to be involved and to make it fun and to make it interesting and.o try to black out the rest of what was going on in the world so that they could learn the sounds of letters or they could learn how to do long division, which is difficult when you’re sitting in person, face to face, let alone yeah. I think that made the biggest difference. So every para professional that we had, our school aides, our assistant principal, secretaries, everyone went out and delivered devices to kids when we knew that this was starting.
Glyn Caddell
So devices, obviously, but then it seems like buy-in from the teachers.
Christine Zapata
oh, definitely. Is the biggest thing. Yeah, we see.
Glyn Caddell
Do you think regardless of well, I guess to a lesser extent, it doesn’t really matter how it’s presented, but more so that the teachers believe in it and they’re pushing it and they’re there to support the students. Is that the biggest part?
Christine Zapata
Yeah, and being prepared.
Glyn Caddell
Right.
Christine Zapata
So we spent a lot of time before, thank goodness, before being closed for in person learning on technology and being able to implement it in our classrooms. So it was something that was important to us as a school beforehand. So we had Google classrooms set up and we had our own domain already set up. Kids all had their logins before they left, so it was a little bit different for us than it was in some other cases. Kids could more easily get on it. Definitely. It made the transition back and forth a little bit easier. And then when we came back, we were like hybrid. It made that even easier.
Glyn Caddell
That makes a lot of sense. Even before COVID there was a push towards technology. Like you mentioned, you already had Google Classroom up and running in your own domain. At one point, people were talking about flipped classrooms or people the students would go home and and watch the lessons at home, then they come in and do the work rather than learning at school and doing a homework at home.
Christine Zapata
Right.
Glyn Caddell
I don’t necessarily think that that’s the the best option, but there was a push for it at the time. Is there something that you think in the future you would either want to see or that we will see?
Christine Zapata
So I think that the flipped classroom has a purpose. I just don’t know if we utilized it properly because we were just thrown.
Glyn Caddell
Not even about COVID just in education in general.
Christine Zapata
Technology.
Glyn Caddell
Yeah.
Christine Zapata
It’s super important. Even, like, the communication with families.
Glyn Caddell
Right.
Christine Zapata
That is a technology piece that people took for granted before.
Glyn Caddell
Right.
Christine Zapata
So being able to immediately see your kids grades, knowing if they’re present not in an elementary school, but again in a high school.
Glyn Caddell
Right.
Christine Zapata
In a middle school, if the kid is right, but they have more freedom. Yeah.
Glyn Caddell
Right.
Christine Zapata
The whole being able to translate objects into every different language that you need almost immediately, that opens the doors for so many of our kids that come in. So, for example, our school had 37 LS last year, 37 kids who were classified as non English speakers before they came to school. Outside of the school building this year, we had 100 plus.
Glyn Caddell
Wow.
Christine Zapata
Right.
Christine Zapata
So do I have someone who speaks every one of those kids languages and their family’s languages? I don’t, but I have my ESL teachers, and we have technology that allows us to translate immediately. And we have a website that translates it to, like, 140 different languages, so they set it on their phone or their laptop, and anything that they need is going to translate for them. So that type of technology is, I think, essential because it keeps the lines of communications with families open and in an elementary setting in particular, that’s so important.
Glyn Caddell
So that makes a lot of sense. Communicating with the parents, let me know what’s going on.
Christine Zapata
Knowing their kids are safe.
Glyn Caddell
Right.
Christine Zapata
Knowing what the kids are learning. So for us, it’s important that a parent comes home and says, what did you learn today? And the kid be able to tell them, I worked on a long vowel sound. I worked on multiplying three digit numbers, or whatever it is, because then you could talk to them about it and see that they’re excited about it, and it’s important to you, maybe more important to kids who don’t express to their parents what they’re doing. The parents could look it up and see.
Glyn Caddell
Yeah.
Christine Zapata
So my kids, I could ask them at any given my 15 year old, for example, how was school today? I get a one word answer good. So we blocked out the word good. She’s no longer allowed to say good. So now she says, excellent. Awesome. Fantastic. And I’m like, really, Daniel?
Glyn Caddell
Thanks for amusing me.
Christine Zapata
Right. Thanks a lot. But her grades, I can see immediately if she’s 1 minute late for school. I know.
Glyn Caddell
That’s awesome.
Christine Zapata
Keeps them honest.
Glyn Caddell
They have to be.
Christine Zapata
They don’t have to be. Yeah, they need to be.
Glyn Caddell
They need to be.
Christine Zapata
That’s right.
Glyn Caddell
I guess we’ll end with one last question, because obviously you’re a role model to the students here, but if you got to think back to yourself, like, what advice would you give yourself if you were a ten year old, it’s obviously not going to be the same advice you give an 18 year old. It’s a little bit more difficult.
Christine Zapata
Yeah.
Christine Zapata
I mean, like, as a 40 whatever. My 46 year old woman now, looking back as a ten year old, I would actually say there was a lot of stress, like, unwarranted, like not realizing as a kid that that’s what it was. Stress that that blocked me from doing my best in school. I think I would go back and just say, focus here and not here.
Glyn Caddell
Right. Focus on what’s important.
Christine Zapata
Right.
Christine Zapata
Focus on school. And don’t focus as much on the other things that were prohibiting my ten year old brain from doing better in school.
Glyn Caddell
That’s really good advice. I don’t know what I would say.
Christine Zapata
That’s one of the things. The other things I can’t really say on this podcast.
Glyn Caddell
No, I know.
Christine Zapata
Yeah.
Christine Zapata
But thank you. Thank you so much for your time and appreciate all right. Thank you so much.
Christine Zapata
You got it.
