At PS/IS 217, New Principal’s Principle
Is “Understand Every Single Child”

by Jami Bernard

She hardly looks older than a student herself, and with her carefree brown hair and soulful eyes, she’s certainly a user-friendly improvement over the scowling, ancient school principals of old. Mandana Beckman herself is amazed at her meteoric rise from someone torn between being a doctor or teaching math to becoming the new principal of the Roosevelt Island School.

"It was a fast track," she agrees with a small, self-conscious laugh.

In the hallways, the children greet Beckman, 31, like a lifelong friend. In many ways, she is, because Beckman has been at PS/IS 217 for seven years, most of her professional career, and these kids have grown up alongside her. "Those kids who stay the whole time" – from pre-K through 8th grade – "you get to know them. The ones who will graduate this year? They were my students! I already know the students, who they are and what to do to push them forward," says Beckman, who took over from retiring principal Sherry Gregory in September.

"Prior to Miss Gregory, who was here for eight years, there were a lot of transitions. So that’s the nice thing about me [succeeding Gregory], the teachers already know me, there’s that trust, a shared vision, moving the school together."

Forward momentum seems to be the priority for Beckman; it comes up again and again in her language. She speaks often of "movement" and "direction." One of her goals as principal is to have all 45 or so teachers and staff working together with the students and each other to improve, to motivate, and to keep the children and their parents happy enough with the school that no one will depart for greener pastures at, say, a private school. "Things here have gotten better and better ever since I’ve been here," says Beckman. "It really is a neighborhood school, where these kids see each other in school and out. They have their own relationships with each other outside of school. It offers a consistency."

The Roosevelt Island School is part of the City’s Region 9, District 2, which also encompasses a few schools on the Upper East Side, where Beckman was raised and still resides. She attended PS6 in her day, then Wagner, Bronx Science, and received teaching degrees and licenses at Hunter and Baruch. A proud product of the New York public-school system, Beckman notes that things today are different from when she was a kid – there are computer classes, of course, but also there’s an informality and classroom design that was unheard of years ago. Children often sit on carpeted floors or in groups, because spending an entire day in assigned seats in military-style rows is so, well, Old School.

"I do make it a priority to visit classrooms and visit kids during lunchtime and assemblies, getting to know them," says Beckman. "Once you know your kids, you know the pulse of your school, and then you can make decisions about what needs to be done to move the school in a certain direction."

Her philosophy? "Understand every single child, meet them where they are, and help bring them to the level they need to go. That means addressing the needs of the struggling child and the gifted child, and getting teachers to collaborate with one another."

An announcement comes over the PA system, something to do with Treasure Island tickets, and Beckman looks sheepish, as if caught pulling the cat’s tail. Apparently she’s instituted a reward system in which teachers can randomly bestow a Treasure Island ticket upon a child who has behaved uncommonly well. On Fridays, this ticket can be thrown in the hopper for a chance at a coveted prize – an ice cream. Before parents rush to extract their children from a school that slathers their kids in sweets, let it be known that the chances for actually winning the one ice cream are only slightly better than for winning the Lottery, because there’s a lot of good behavior going down in the four-story building. Nevertheless, hope springs eternal, and the PA helpfully instructs the children not to run while on their way to the Treasure Island drawing.

The Treasure Island initiative is a small part – what Beckman would probably call a "tweak" – of an overall plan to make the assemblies "warmer." There’s a Student of the Month assembly that not only makes the children feel like King/Queen for a Day, but gets their parents involved as well. There are monthly workshops to help parents understand the curriculum – it seems every couple of years there are new ways to teach the new New Math, and the parents need to know, say, that they no longer "carry the one" when adding columns. The parent workshops also help deal with communication difficulties, because many Roosevelt Island parents speak a different language at home and need to know some verbal shortcuts that align with the school’s methods of teaching and encouraging.

Beckman came to Roosevelt Island after student teaching at her alma mater, PS 6. Then, after teaching for a while at PS/IS 217, "I left the classroom to become a math staff developer, and since math was something I did focus on when I was teaching, it wasn’t out of the ordinary."

When several teachers went back to school for administrative licenses, Beckman got hers too, and slipped right into the job of assistant principal when PS/IS 217’s was promoted to principal at another school. "So here I was with the license, and the same thing happened again, when Miss Gregory announced this summer she was retiring."

Beckman was "shocked" when Gregory told her she was ready for ascension to the educational throne. "She was a great mentor in the sense that she was very supportive, and here we’re always planning ahead, so she had let me start certain [administrative] things and take initiatives." As second in command, Beckman had begun a Saturday math program and "tweaked" the assemblies, so she was already making principal-like decisions before switching to the driver’s seat.

"At this school, I could see where I could go next," meaning that she understood what the school needed to retain the students through 8th grade, to involve the parents more in the school’s vision, and to encourage greater communication among teachers of different grades so that the students have continuity as they progress through the grades.

Beckman’s fast track to principal almost got sidelined early on, when she left college and took a job at a bank. At the memory of that, she makes a face as if there was liver in the school lunch. Indeed, a woman whose centerpiece on a conference table is a child’s pop-up rendition of the Central Park zoo, complete with a construction-paper giraffe, and whose walls are decorated in lime green and hot magenta, is not likely to have enjoyed a career in a buttoned-down corporate environment.

How did I end up in banking? I was still babysitting on the side!" says Beckman. "That’s when I realized, I wanted to work with kids. I quit Chase, went to Hunter for my teaching degree, then just started student teaching at PS6."

Because of her love of math, Beckman has instituted Saturday math programs for grades 3, 4, and 6. (The City provides math enrichment for grades 5 and 7.) But she’s as excited about the school building at 645 Main Street as about multiplication tables and proudly points out the gym, the weight room that the PTA helped fund, and the computer labs with new equipment. "Our building is so nice, and the facility lends itself to having all this," she says, ticking off the after-school and special programs, the music classes and band, the diversity of the student body thanks to the many U.N. families on the Island, and the frequent field trips around the Island itself to learn about trees, birds, and rocks. (In one classroom, the students have nestled their rocks in beds of cotton, like beloved pets.)

There’s a knock at the door; a staffer looks in worriedly to see if everything’s okay. "Oh, we never close our doors here," explains Beckman. So she opens it wide, and a gaggle of kids in the anteroom light up when they see their beautiful principal and clamor for her attention. In the old days, a trip to the principal’s office could be an occasion for breaking into a cold sweat, but at PS/IS 217, it’s as much a treat as a Treasure Island ticket.