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Best in Class | IN THE SOUTH BRONX, A PRINCIPAL BUILDS A NEW KIND OF SCHOOL

THE STUDENTS IN REBECCA Silberman's sixth-grade language arts class sit on the floor of a makeshift library in the back of her classroom at M.S. 223 in the South Bronx, the girls trying not to get dirt on their navy blue uniform skirts, one of the boys bouncing on an old couch.When Silberman asks them what they noticed about the brochures on recycling and nutrition that she's just passed around, hands shoots up. "They're all about problems and how you can fix them?" guesses a girl.

On the couch, principal Ramon Gonzalez '94 nods.He knows something about fixing problems. As the founder and driving force behind M.S. 223--also called the Laboratory School of Finance and Technology-- the thirty-two-year-old is working with a team of young teachers to meet the community's most basic need: a school that teaches kids to care about education.

The South Bronx has long been all but synonymous with urban blight, and its public schools lag behind the rest of New York. "Before we came in, this building housed the worst school in the entire city," says Gonzalez. "There were fifteen or twenty security officers in the building all the time, because the kids were out of control." In 2003, the Board of Education decided to shut down that school, I.S. 149, and start over. Gonzalez, then an assistant principal at nearby I.S. 162, had already earned a reputation as an energetic administrator with big ideas about community- based education, and that June he was offered a chance to put those ideas into action at a laboratory school for sixth, seventh, and eighth graders, scheduled to open that fall.

Gonzalez had been thinking about new approaches to inner-city education since his days as a government and Africana studies major at Cornell, when he worked with visiting professor Cathy Schneider on an HIV prevention project in Brooklyn that put him in contact with young gang members. At grad school at Columbia, he stayed in touch with that community. "I was amazed by the financial skills that these kids had," says Gonzalez. "They were using them in the underground economy, selling drugs and mix tapes, but they knew how to make money. I wanted to see if we could take that sense of entrepreneurship and channel it into the legitimate business world." So he conceived a curriculum that would give middle-schoolers a taste of how staying in class could pay off. "Technology skills could make the difference for these kids," Gonzalez says. "Especially if they don't go on to college, the only jobs that will be available to them and pay them enough money to raise a family are going to require a knowledge of computers."

At M.S. 223, computer classes are required at every grade level, and students can apply to join the MOUSE Squad, a team that spends its Saturdays learning how to repair computers. The job pays in "school bucks," redeemable at the school store or for computer-game time after school. The financial lessons continue in math class, as students learn to calculate sales tax and double-check change. Other parts of the curriculum are integrated with the overall mission of making school relevant. "If no one in your neighborhood has gone to college, it's hard to imagine that possibility for yourself," says Bill Ohls '01, sixth-grade math teacher and vice principal. "We have to find other ways to motivate these students to do well."

Building a new educational culture in the South Bronx was a daunting humanresources challenge. "When we were starting the school, I had teachers flat-out tell me they would not work in the Bronx," Gonzalez says. "They thought that it was too dangerous." So he turned to the federal Teach for America program. Seven of nine teachers that first year were brand-new recruits, and Gonzalez gave them administrative responsibilities as well as full teaching schedules. "We were all learning how to teach at the same time that we were in charge of setting up so many aspects of the school," says Silberman, a 2003 University of Pennsylvania graduate and, with one year of teaching under her belt, director of the school's language arts program. "We wrote the curriculum and the discipline code, planned all the afterschool and Saturday activities, interviewed new teachers for this year.We were starting from scratch."

At M.S. 223, students can participate in programs in literature, architecture, video production, musical theater, and law; teachers are now developing a virtual job-shadowing program that will allow students to watch professionals at work via webcams. Everywhere you look, though, you can see ambition straining against lack of resources. The school fills the third floor of a gritty building at 360 East 145th Street--enough space for its first year, with only sixth-graders attending, but next year it will house all three middle-school grades. The shiny iMacs are so in demand that teachers can't use them as much as they would like. And beyond the chainlink fence around the busted-up concrete playground, the Bronx is still a tough place to grow up. "I see the students pulling off their uniform shirts as soon as they walk out the door," Gonzalez says. "This is one world, and the rest of the neighborhood is another.We're not kidding ourselves about what we're competing against for these kids' attention."

While the school could use a few deeppocketed friends, it has enthusiastic support among parents."My training had led me to expect that I'd have to work to get parents invested in the goals of the school, but it's been the other way around," Silberman says. "I've got a mother who set up a blackboard in their homeless shelter so she could work on her son's math with him."

And the word is spreading--over 500 prospective sixth graders applied for 150 spots in next fall's entering class. "Kids in the New York City schools have been shortchanged for a long time," says Ohls. "Our goal isn't to create the best school in the whole country. We want parents to have the opportunity to send their kids to a good school in their own community. Everybody deserves that."

-- C.A. Carlson '93, MFA '96

Six Feet Under | DETECTIVE AUTHORS BOOK ON SEARCHING FOR REMAINS

THE OLD SAW ABOUT NOT JUDGING a book by its cover was never so true. The photo atop Edward Killam's new volume--tall trees, verdant ferns, bushy shrubs, a patch of rich dirt--brings to mind a forestry text, or maybe an Adirondack hiking guide.

But then there's the title: The Detection of Human Remains. Inside is a primer, nearly 300 pages long, on searching for and processing the sites where murderers have hidden their victims.

Killam, who earned a wildlife biology degree from the Ag college in 1971, is a veteran police officer and private investigator. His book, the second edition of a text first published in 1990, evolved from the master's thesis in forensic anthropology he wrote at Colorado State University in 1988. As law enforcement was forging a new understanding of criminal behavior and investigative techniques in the wake of several highly publicized serial murder cases (including the crimes of Ted Bundy, who hunted women in Colorado), Killam drew together a wide variety of information to help police locate victims--and track down their killers. "There were a couple of particular things about homicide cases that most police investigators did not do very well," says Killam, speaking from his investigation agency's office in Boulder. "In trying to reconstruct criminal behavior, they often overlooked some of the physical and psychological limitations of human beings. They also weren't particularly good at processing three-dimensional crime scenes."

Buried remains, he notes, are much more similar to archaeological digs than to most other types of crime scenes, which are comparatively two-dimensional and generally no more than a few hours old. "What is on top came later," he says of an exhumation site. "If there's a pop can, obviously it had to find its way there some time after the body was buried. So you can go down through the layers and recreate a time sequence, just as they do in archaeology." The two fields are similar, he adds, in their emphasis on recordkeeping, and the recognition of the importance of the tiniest details. "You're not just concerned about a large knife and the body itself. You're also concerned about trace remains, hair, fibers, a button, a shoelace, a cigarette butt, the marks left by the blade of a shovel--the minute stuff, which years ago was largely overlooked."

Killam's interest in law enforcement began almost by accident, when the Long Island native starting working graveyard shifts for the Colorado State University police department to establish residency for graduate studies in zoology. "I liked the fact that every day was different," he says of the job, "that you weren't confined, you had the autonomy to work on your own and use your best judgment." Soon realizing that he couldn't juggle both work and school, he took a leave of absence from his master's program and became a full-time officer. He eventually transferred to the Aspen police department, where he rose to the rank of detective sergeant before opening his own agency; a chance meeting with a former professor prompted him to go back to school.

In his private legal investigation practice, Alliance Services, Killam has had a number of celebrity clients. (Though he won't name names, he was often photographed escorting basketball star Kobe Bryant to court during his Colorado rape case.) When he's not working, Killam is an avid outdoorsman--camping, fishing, and hunting both birds and big game. He is married with two children; daughter Erica is a freshman in the Hotel school. Once a month, he volunteers with NecroSearch, a group of experts in fields ranging from psychiatry to botany to nursing that consults with law enforcement on difficult cases.

The Detection of Human Remains, intended for use in both the field and the classroom, covers everything from how to spot possible burial sites based on changes in vegetation to the use of scent dogs and aerial photography. Killam even discusses parapsychological methods such as the use of psychics and dowsing--not because he endorses them, but because in highprofile cases police will inevitably have to deal with such issues, often at the behest of the victim's family.

While much of Killam's book is highly technical, including chapters on geophysical prospecting devices such as metal detectors and ground-penetrating radar, it also offers observations on criminal psychology that any "Law & Order" or "C.S.I." fan would find interesting. In a chapter on deciding where to search for remains, for instance, Killam notes that murderers tend to be relatively predictable in disposing of their victims. "If you've committed a homicide, the longer you spend with the body, the greater your fear of apprehension, so you want to get rid of it as quickly as possible," he says. "Because you want it to be a secret, you're going to go someplace where you're not likely to be seen. Chances are, you will go to someplace you're familiar with. If you have to carry or drag a body, chances are you'll go downhill rather than uphill. And chances are, because you had to use a vehicle to transport it, the disposal site is going to be within fifty yards of a road. If you look at those things, you start to be able to reconstruct a pattern of behavior."

Such observations aren't just limited to homicides, he adds, but to lesser crimes as well. Criminals, like the rest of us, are creatures of habit. For one thing, he says, they're very fond of their wheels. "In our culture, most criminals are reluctant to get very far from their automobiles, so most crimes tend to occur within a block or two of vehicles. One of the principles of crime prevention is that if you can prevent vehicles from approaching a house, you significantly reduce burglary. Crooks feel uncomfortable getting too far from their cars."

-- Beth Saulnier

Out on Wall Street | BUSINESS CONFERENCE FOCUSES ON GAY MBAS

STUDENTS IN THE JOHNSON Graduate School of Management are used to getting top grades, and so is their school; JGSM regularly makes Business Week's top ten and came in at number fourteen in U.S. News & World Report's 2005 index. So when San Francisco- based Aplomb Consulting gave the school a D for gay-friendliness--ranked at a lowly nineteen out of twenty in an April 2003 report on the nation's top business schools--the news didn't go over well. (Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton topped the list.)

JGSM already had an anti-discrimination policy that protects sexual minorities and provided benefits for domestic partners of students and faculty--but so did peer institutions. In winter 2003, as Aplomb finished its research, students formed Out For Business, a club to provide support, networking, and recruiting opportunities for their classmates. Last year, then first-year students Mark Mitchell and Justine Suh decided to take the effort a step further by organizing "Out for Undergraduate Business," the first diversity conference in the country targeted at gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender undergraduates considering careers in consulting and investment banking.

The two-day event, held in early October, was hosted by the Johnson School and sponsored by McKinsey & Company, Citigroup, Monitor Group, Credit Suisse, Lehman Brothers, and Goldman Sachs. Although it was originally planned for only thirty participants, actual attendance included twenty-five professionals and seventy-six students from more than twenty schools. "As an undergraduate at Columbia, I wasn't sure whether being gay would hurt my chances on Wall Street," says Mitchell, a twenty-six-year-old who worked for two years in investment banking before starting his MBA. "I wanted to help other gay undergraduates understand that coming out in banking and consulting will not kill your career."

Throughout the weekend, recruiters expanded on the notion that high-powered companies in management consulting and investment banking need gay and lesbian employees. "We're an international firm and we work with people of all kinds, so we want our firm to reflect that," says Jonathan Buck '98, MEng '99, one of six Monitor consultants who described careers in their field in a panel discussion. "Also, diversity in general--having different kinds of experiences--helps employees understand clients of different backgrounds.We really value as broad a representation as possible in our workforce."

In back-to-back sessions, bankers and consultants described their day-to-day work lives, discussed the pros and cons of coming out in the interview process and on the job, and gave students a feel for the cultures at their respective companies. On Saturday morning, McKinsey partner David Maue offered six tips for success based on his own climb up the corporate ladder. "Don't sacrifice your family life," he said, pointing out that straight executives use family commitments to protect their time away from work, and gay professionals can do the same. "Define your own family unit and figure out what it means to you." Later in the day, the Monitor reps had students tackle an acquisition case study and JGSM professor Alan Biloski gave a lecture on valuation. After a career fair and dinner at the Johnson Museum, participants gathered at Willard Straight Hall for a "Homo- Coming Dance Party."

"Something like this would never have happened when I was an undergraduate," says Buck, who heads Monitor's LGBT recruiting efforts. "I got several e-mails from students saying, ‘Thanks for sponsoring and attending the conference. It answered a lot of questions we had about going from the academic community to the corporate community.' They were really grateful." For Garrett Hall, a junior at the University of North Carolina's Kenan- Flagler Business School, the conference provided necessary role models. "You don't see successful ‘out' professionals in the media," he says. "You see ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.' " Already, Hall has followed up with the consultants and recruiters he met at the conference for help on his résumé. He also used the weekend as an impetus to improve the environment for gay students at Kenan- Flagler, the only top business school lower than Cornell in the Aplomb ratings.

Mitchell and Suh raised $46,000 to fund the event, which they organized as part of JGSM's Park Fellow program, a tuition-free leadership skills curriculum with a required service component. Other Park Fellows have developed a business plan for Ithaca's State Theatre, launched a fair-trade chocolate company, and conducted a strategic marketing assessment for a local vocational training service. "I wanted to do something to benefit the gay community," says Mitchell, a founding member of Lehman Brothers' gay and lesbian employee network. "How many gay CEOs do you know about? Careers in investment banking and consulting are the fast track to business success. This is a way to support professional development of gay people beyond the stereotypical roles of hairdressers and interior designers."

-- Sharon Tregaskis

A Dream Realized | McENEANEY POEMS PUBLISHED

Eamon McEneaney '77 was a celebrated athlete who led the Big Red lacrosse team to two national championships and was named NCAA Division I Player of the Year in 1977. He was also a poet. On September 11, 2001, McEneaney was at work in the Cantor Fitzgerald offices on the 105th floor of the World Trade Center when the terrorists attacked. Although his death was not confirmed for some time, his wife, Bonnie Mac- Donald McEneaney '78, knew he was gone. "I felt him brush by me in the wind," she said.

Since his death, McEneaney has been honored with a number of tributes, including the founding of the Eamon McEneaney Memorial Reading Series, which brings an Irish author to Cornell each year. But one task remained--one that had special meaning for Bonnie McEneaney and Eamon's good friend John Gilbert '78. Thanks to their efforts, the Cornell University Library has published A Bend in the Road, a collection of nearly 100 of McEneaney's poems about life, love, and nature. The book has a foreword by Kenneth McClane '73, MFA '76, the W.E.B. DuBois Professor of Literature at Cornell. "These poems are bighearted," writes McClane. "They are maps of a big spirit, a wondrous, probing, luminescent soul." A Bend in the Road is available from the Book Clearing House: 800-431-1579 or http://book-clearinghouse. com.

Subterranean Homestead Blues | A VILLAGE, ONCE LOST, IS FOUND

THE EARTH IS SLOW TO GIVE UP its secrets. On a grass field next to a parking lot, thirty-one students are digging, sifting, sieving, and pawing through the muddy past, patiently exhuming the traces of a buried village. Sometimes, a piece of it emerges--a scrap of rusty iron, a shard of milky glass, a bone, a nail. They ponder it briefly, stuff it into a plastic bag, and dig on.

This is Field Methods in Urban Archaeology 261, a hands-on, dirt-underthe- fingernails class in applied archaeology that, over the course of four autumns, has transformed a parcel of scrubby forest in Ithaca's Robert H. Treman State Park into a window on the nineteenth century. This site was once a hamlet called Enfield Falls, a modest collection of homes and businesses--a general store, a post office, even a small tourist hotel--that grew up around a gristmill in the mid-1800s. Tompkins County banker Robert Treman, whose family once owned the mill, began to buy up the little town's properties in the early 1900s. He donated the land to New York in 1920 to be incorporated into a state park, with nearby Lucifer Falls and its scenic gorge as the centerpiece. Over the next decade, Enfield Falls disappeared, its families dispersed and their homes bulldozed. In 1935, federal Civilian Conservation Corps workers moved in to transform the site into the upper portion of the state park. The mill and a neighboring miller's cottage still stand, but only the foundations of the town's other buildings remain, buried beneath a foot or more of earth and overgrowth.

In 1998, the Friends of Robert H. Treman State Park and park staff approached Cornell archaeology professor Sherene Baugher with a proposal to excavate the lost village. Baugher, who served as the first city archaeologist for New York City during the 1980s and had previously led a dig at Buttermilk Falls State Park, was intrigued by the idea. Rural archaeology is a long-neglected side of the field, and the Enfield Falls site offered a unique opportunity-- a complete nineteenth-century hamlet. "This was exciting, to look at a whole rural village," she says. "And for students, it's a wonderful opportunity for a real field experience."

Using rough property maps, photographs, census records, newspaper clippings, and interviews with the handful of surviving Enfield Falls residents, Baugher and her class of student archaeologists estimated the relative locations of various buildings and started work. This year, after previous digs at a private home and a general store, they're deep into the basement of the town blacksmith, Charles Budd. The site is a mosaic of square grids staked out with string, each neatly excavated. While some students poke around the foundation stones with spades, others sieve bucketfuls of dirt through mesh screens. "Every speck gets sieved," says grad student Heather Briggs, one of the four TAs for the course. Students keep careful field journals noting the location of their finds; a spring-semester laboratory course analyzes the specimens unearthed in the fall.

Digging through the foot or so of earth that entombs the fieldstone foundation of the Budd house is, as Baugher says, "a jump back through time." After the town was razed, a campground stood on the site, so the upper soil layers are full of tent stakes, pop-tops from aluminum cans, and children's toys--plastic army men on top, marbles on the bottom. As the students dig deeper, the clock goes backwards. A circa-1910 Pepsi bottle has been found, along with many shards of dishware and glass. Before the days of municipal garbage collection, household trash was buried in backyard pits; for archaeologists, those dumps can be treasure troves. Baugher, whose scholarly expertise is in nineteenth-century glass and ceramics, the quality of the artifacts her students have unearthed reveals that even residents of a fairly remote rural outpost coveted the finer things in life. "From their material possessions, these people were aspiring to the same middle-class lifestyle as their peers in the city," Baugher says. Her team has found pieces of good china, silverware, and slate roofing tiles-- all signs of a solidly prosperous household. "I didn't expect to find so much, so well preserved."

But mysteries still abound in the lost village. For one thing, they can't find Enfield Falls's most prominent structure, its hotel. It burned down in 1926, and Baugher believes that the foundation is hidden somewhere on a gentle slope over the parking lot--a telltale stand of trees growing in straight parallel lines marks off what may have been the hotel's entrance drive. But a shovel test--a series of small sample holes--came up empty. Baugher hopes to borrow a ground-penetrating radar apparatus from the geology department to probe further. Other plans involve placing descriptive tourist markers in and around the excavations, turning the ongoing project into a permanent outdoor museum to "bring archaeology to the public," Baugher says.

But first, back to work: there's digging to be done before winter buries Enfield Falls anew. A student, caked in dirt, rushes up to Baugher. "We found something!" he exclaims, all but dragging her by the sleeve. Archaeology is a patient discipline-- if something intriguing pokes though the soil, you don't just pull it out. You carefully and deliberately excavate the entire square plot, layer by layer, until it is slowly revealed. It's not going anywhere. So the professor finishes her thought, unhurried, and tramps off to see what the earth has been hiding all these years.

--David Dudley

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