One of the reasons for such changes in direction was money. In its first year, Columbia got about $10,000 per pupil from the city, the systemwide average. The next fall, it received about $6,300, because its students did not qualify for certain money earmarked for low performers. Dr. Maldonado-Rivera said the cut took him by surprise, and that he had to drop one of the two Spanish teachers he had planned to hire.
But to some people, the shifting approaches felt like chaos. “There was a general administrative disorder that characterized the school,” said one parent who worked closely with the administration and, like many of those interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of adversely affecting his child’s education.
This parent told a story encapsulating all he felt was good — and bad — about the principal’s management style. Dr. Maldonado-Rivera did not think highly of the city’s substitute teachers, so when a teacher was absent, a colleague filled in — sometimes Dr. Maldonado-Rivera himself. In one science class, he led a lesson on the atom.
“Gathering six children in the center of the room he said: ‘O.K., you’re the nucleus. Stand in the middle, and hug each other tightly,’ ” the parent explained. “And then to another group he said: ‘You, you’re electrons. Run around randomly. And you, you’re the charge, so jump to the outside.’ It was a tremendous lesson.”
But in the front office, the parent said, “all kinds of things weren’t getting done.”
Relationships between teachers and administrators were increasingly strained.
“His philosophy was just go, just do it,” said Dana Ligocki, a social studies teacher who quit in the middle of last school year. “It doesn’t matter if we’re doing things well, but it matters if we do a lot of things. I started to see that that was his way of being a leader. And then safety gets cut or curriculum gets cut.”
Dr. Maldonado-Rivera said that some teachers left for personal reasons, and that others could not live up to his high expectations.
“It’s a very ambitious school with a high intellectual demand,” he said. “We don’t need to apologize for having high standards for teachers. I’d ask myself, ‘Would I want my son to be learning science or math with this teacher?’ And if it’s not something I would want, then that’s something I would need to fix.”
COLUMBIA parents were supposed to be partners in their children’s education, and the school’s diversity was a big draw. But those active in the School Leadership Team and the parent association tended to be disproportionately white and professional.
“In terms of actually doing the everyday work, the numbers of Hispanics is very limited, ” said Victor Acosta, one of the active Hispanic parents, whose daughter, a ninth grader now, was in the founding class. “There’s no tradition of volunteering in the schools in the first generation. You send your kids to school and the school takes care of it.”
By the school’s third year, meetings — and follow-up e-mails — had become increasingly contentious, participants said. (Dr. Maldonado-Rivera said that it was “not a functional entity.”) Some questioned whether the electives taught by college students or parents were appropriately supervised. Some protested discipline procedures — children were sometimes asked to apologize before the whole school for misbehavior, a process one parent likened to “public shaming,” and Dr. Maldonado-Rivera once held the whole seventh grade after school for 40 minutes because some children had been acting up in the hallways. Parents and teachers pushed for a guidance counselor; Dr. Maldonado-Rivera said the school did not need — and could not afford — one.
Perhaps the biggest debate came over academics. Some students scored as high as 90 on the entrance exam, but the mean was a 28. Once in, all faced the same accelerated curriculum. Some soared; others sank. At one point last school year, a third of the seventh grade was on academic probation.
Struggling students were tutored after school, pulled out of electives, kept behind in the classroom during J-Term. Some were counseled out — Dr. Maldonado-Rivera said there was 8 to 10 percent attrition for academic reasons each year. “Sometimes,” Mr. Stillman said, “you end up cutting your losses.”
Some parents and teachers proposed establishing different levels of classes to accommodate the achievement range. But Dr. Maldonado-Rivera refused to compromise his vision of a school where all children learned together at the highest levels. “If part of your philosophy is a commitment to strength in diversity,” he said, “then you have a commitment to not tracking.”
Critics complained that the principals’ vision blinded him to reality and that he was more interested in branding the school as “world class” than dealing with its problems. “It wasn’t working, but he didn’t see it as needing to be fixed,” said Ms. Margeson, the parent with a boy in eighth grade.
At an established school, many of those debates would have been over. But Columbia’s culture was up for grabs. Who would define it? Who made the rules?
THEN, on June 22, 12-year-old Nicole Suriel drowned in a riptide in Long Beach.
A city investigation found that no regulations were broken on the beach that day, though it did fault Columbia for not having proper permission slips for the trip and suggested that the school could have done better. “There was a lack of adequate planning by the principal and assistant principal,” the report said, “a failure to provide a sufficient number of adults to supervise the children at the beach, and poor judgment by the teacher in charge, who either failed to realize that there were no lifeguards on duty or failed to recognize the additional danger presented by their absence.”
The teacher who had been the main chaperone was fired, and Mr. Stillman stepped down as assistant principal. Dr. Maldonado-Rivera said he had offered to resign if it would save their jobs, and then was put on probation. He was adamant that his decisions had not contributed to the drowning. “The systems of risk management that we had in place were way beyond anything that the D.O.E. required,” he said.
But — in a turn of the kaleidoscope — a significant number of others at the school saw things differently. A faculty group led by Mr. Nalley, the teacher who had helped a student learn to ride a bike, went to the union arguing that the drowning had been “part of a pattern of negligence at the school,” said a member of the group, Ms. Ligocki, the social studies teacher. When the investigator’s report did not go that far, Mr. Nalley, the union representative at Columbia, protested the findings publicly and then told city officials about the principal’s relationship with Ms. Marin-Reyes.
A group of the principal’s supporters also went to education officials, to deny any improprieties between Dr. Maldonado-Rivera and Ms. Marin-Reyes, which, in an odd twist, ended up spurring the investigation.
Mr. Nalley declined to be interviewed. Instead, he e-mailed an excerpt from a report on the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster: “Hubris refers to an exaggerated pride or self-confidence that turns into arrogance. It results from excessive admiration of oneself, a series of previous successes, uncritical acceptance of accolades and a belief that one is exempt from the rules. In the end, hubris is eventually rewarded with disaster and comeuppance.” Mr. Stillman said Dr. Maldonado-Rivera’s critics exploited the tragedy. In a moment of great emotional turmoil, “each person read into the situation their private critiques of José,” he said.
“It became part of the institutional politics to correlate the drowning with a pattern of risk-taking.”
As September drew nearer, the principal raced to hire new teachers — seven, or about half the faculty, including Mr. Nalley, had departed by midsummer. Dr. Maldonado-Rivera said his intention had been “to save the school, rebuild the boat and go back out.”
ON Nov. 30, Dr. Maldonado-Rivera was in a meeting when someone from the superintendent’s office handed him a letter saying he was fired. It seemed “surreal,” he said, not least because he had been assured that he would get off with “a hit on the chin.”
Dr. Maldonado said a call he made to the chancellor’s cellphone went unreturned. The students were eating lunch, and Dr. Maldonado-Rivera had them moved to the gym.
“I wanted to speak to my children,” he said. “I wanted to explain to them what was going on.”
But the superintendent warned him not to, the principal said, “or I would be removed by a police officer.”
Instead, the students were given the news in small groups; some teachers just handed them each letters announcing the firing.
“Some students started to cry,” said Kiambra Griffin, a ninth grader, who quickly created aFacebook page — Bring Back Dr. José Maldonado-Rivera to Columbia Secondary School — though she had the feeling that it would be futile. Natalie Ravitz, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, said in an e-mail that officials had considered “the full history and scope” of the principal’s conduct and found “repeated, serious failures in judgment and violations of our regulations.” She added: “As much as we understand that this is emotional for the Columbia Secondary community, we cannot turn a blind eye to his record.” Neither Dr. Maldonado-Rivera nor Ms. Marin-Reyes denied the facts in the report, except to say that their relationship did not become romantic until the summer. “I thought for a conflict of interest money had to be exchanged,” Dr. Maldonado-Rivera said.
A week after the firing, there was another parents’ meeting, this time drawing about 50 people. Things proceeded calmly as the interim acting principal, Gary Biester, a longtime math teacher and administrator, spoke with a translator by his side.
Damaris Solis Padilla, whose daughter is in the ninth grade, said that she thought Dr. Maldonado-Rivera’s firing had been unfair, but that she was ready to move on. “We’ve got to have a school that still can run and thrive and be all the good things it’s supposed to be, despite this one person leaving,” she said. “When the leader leaves, the families are really important, because we’re the ones that stay.”