Despite community backlash, school for at-risk youth puts down roots in Midwood

Urban Dove, a charter school relocated to a building owned by a historic synagogue, has won over wary neighbors. But a fatal shooting of a student last year reignited persistent opposition.

June 1, 2022 George Joseph, THE CITY

Urban Dove senior Nia Holloway plays volleyball and hopes to become a nurse after going to college. Photo by George Joseph/THE CITY

“Urban kids”

LeShawn White, or “Ms. L,” as everybody calls her at Urban Dove, was excited when she heard that the school had found a new facility in Midwood in late 2019.

At their old site in a church building in Bedford-Stuyvesant, White, a family and community engagement coordinator, didn’t have enough room to do her job the way she wanted to.

She couldn’t host food and clothing drives for parents because they didn’t have enough pantry space to store donations. And when White tried to organize Mother’s Day brunches for the school’s families, she ran into restrictions about the music she could play and had to navigate around the church’s schedule.

“I just was really glad that we have our own place,” she said.

But the transition to the new building did not go according to plan.

After word got out about the new school, rumors started to spread that Urban Dove was going to flood the neighborhood with dangerous kids into drugs and gangs, recalls Sally Hipscher, a East Midwood Jewish Center board member who lives on the same street as the school site.

“I think there were people who just drummed up fear and misinformation,” she said.

The concerns reached a fever pitch one November evening when the synagogue hosted an informational meeting about Urban Dove. Hundreds of residents, including some members of the synagogue, packed into a large ballroom with many interrupting and jeering Nanda as he tried to explain the transfer school’s model.

Some were furious with the leaders of the synagogue for their choice to lease the school to Urban Dove, rather than a Jewish day school in keeping with the site’s history. Others focused on the incoming students. (Alyssa Katz, a deputy editor with The City, is a trustee of the East Midwood Jewish Center. She recused herself from editing this article.)

“My main concern is the security of my children, of my block,” one woman at the forum declared. “The minute your children walk out of the building, what security do I have?”

“They’re urban kids who know how to fight,” another attendee shouted.

The uproar, which was reported on extensively in the local media, made some Urban Dove parents concerned about the planned move. Some had memories of growing up and feeling unsure about whether they could venture into white ethnic neighborhoods in South Brooklyn, White said.

“Would someone just see a student and call the cops on them?” she recalled, describing one of the parents’ concerns.

Holloway, the student, says she was nervous about the move to Midwood too, but decided to stick with Urban Dove.

At her previous public school in Park Slope, constant fights and police interventions had prompted the young woman to cut class. At Urban Dove, she felt like the small community — less than three hundred students in all — was safer and more welcoming. Whatever attitudes their new neighbors may have, she thought, this was her best shot.

“I felt like, ‘Well, I’m not here for them. I’m here for myself to graduate,’” she said.

The Urban Dove Charter School in Midwood, Brooklyn, May 27, 2022.
George Joseph/THE CITY

A softening, then tragedy

When Holloway first started coming to the new campus in Midwood, she noticed that some white residents were suspicious, acting hesitant around her in stores or crossing to the other side of the street when they saw her, even when they were in groups.

“It will make me feel a way,” she said, her voice getting softer. “Because I’m just walking.”

But after a few months, students and staff say residents started to get more used to them. The school launched a community garden for students and neighbors to weed and plant together, and organized coat and food drives for families and residents. At the same time, the neighborhood was still in the midst of one of the worst stretches of the pandemic.

“It was life and death for folks,” said Nanda. “And no one had the time to worry about, you know, the Urban Dove kids going to school.”

But that fledgling rapport was tested the following year.

On an April afternoon as classes were letting out, Devonte Lewis, a new student at Urban Dove, was shot outside just as he was exiting the school building. Prosecutors allege that two teenagers, neither from Urban Dove, came to the school and fired at Lewis, who had just gotten a maintenance job with the New York City Housing Authority and was trying to turn his life around. The New York Times reported the shooting stemmed from a rivalry between two neighborhood crews in Sheepshead Bay and Flatbush.

Lewis fled back into the school building, but the wounds to his torso and hand proved to be too much for the 17-year-old, who died after being rushed to Kings County Hospital.

On social media and in the press, some of the school’s detractors pounced.

Hours after the shooting, Kalman Yeger, a city councilmember who represents part of Midwood, tweeted, “In 70 years since East Midwood Jewish Center built its school building, no student was ever shot there. Until today.”

Less than a week later, The Jewish Press, a Brooklyn-based weekly, published an editorial declaring that the tragedy proved that “the opposition to the school” was “not racist, but was rather a practical assessment of the probability of what was in store for the neighborhood.”

Hipscher, the synagogue board member who lives right by the school, remembers her neighbors standing outside chatting as the police cordoned off the scene.

“‘You see, we told you, you know, gang violence is right here in our neighborhood,’” she recalls some saying.

“Roses can just keep going”

After the shooting, White was shaken. She had tried to help Lewis as he stumbled back into the school. She had recruited the young man to Urban Dove, and now, all of a sudden, he was gone.

The family coordinator took a few days off, but came back quickly, knowing that she had to reassure everybody else.

In the days that followed, classes were held online, but White came to the school in person and started planting flowers out front, tons of them, dandelions, marigolds, whatever she could get her hands on, for several days in a row. Each day, a few of the school’s supporters, some from the synagogue or progressive groups in the neighborhood, would come by to help her with the beds.

Their presence, so soon after the shooting, encouraged students and staff who happened to stop by the school. Some joined in. People from the area saw what they were doing too, and stopped to chat, asking about what was being grown and prompting tours of the blossoming garden.

Hipscher bought another addition for the garden, a rose bush already in bloom.

“I didn’t want to bring a bouquet of flowers,” she recalled. “I wanted to bring something that was living and that would offer beauty and that would live because roses can just keep going on and on and on.”

The next week, Hipscher and White, carrying a cup of coffee in hand, went door to door to the houses on the street by the school. The two women, one White and one Black, talked to the neighbors about how they were feeling and what they could do to make everyone feel safe.

Some residents were standoffish, but most appreciated the visit, and a few even invited them in, the two recall.

White made clear that this was the first time that she had ever experienced something like this, and that, Hipscher said, made some of the neighbors realize that a tragedy like this was not something they could just brush off for the students and families at the school.

“Maybe my neighbors hadn’t thought about, like, ‘Well, you know, yeah, these are people too. And yes, they want to be in a safe place too. And yeah, they’re being affected. They have to live with the loss, and they have to pick up the pieces and deal with it,’” she said.

Those efforts may have made a small difference.

Today, Holloway, the Urban Dove senior, says residents are a little bit kinder to her.

“When I’m in the store, like, they won’t move any type of away,” she said. “They’ll say, ‘Thank you,’ if I’m holding the door for them.”

Still, the residents who sued Urban Dove back in 2020 have not given up. To this day, they are hoping that a court will invalidate the school’s lease.

But Hipscher bets they’re too late. Some things, like a rose bush, live on.