Our World Charter School Holds Art Auction

Photo Barbara Pascarelli Among those posing are (back row): Michael Duffy, head of the Office of Charter Schools for New York City, OWNCS Executive Director Brian Ferguson, Steve Zimmerman, OWNCS Chairperson of the Board of Trustees front row: teachers, parents and students. Our World Neighborhood (OWN) Charter School held its first annual Spring Arts Festival over two nights, Tuesday and Wednesday, May 20 and 21, at the Our World Charter School Middle School, 31-20 37th St., Astoria. Guests attended opening ceremonies and then toured an exhibit of more than 700 multi-media artworks by OWN students, in which they bid at a silent auction to raise money for the school and enjoyed hors d'oeuvres and beverages. The exhibition was curated by OWNCS Art Teacher Karen Rosenberg.

Winning bids were announced the following evening after a choral concert performed by students at the school, with Sarah Horaczwek, OWNCS music teacher, conducting. A special silent auction was held with "Deer at Night", a 20- by-24 print by Jocelyn Lee, the sole item up for bid. Works by Lee, an international photographer and 2001 Guggenheim Fellow, hang in museums in Paris, France, Essen, Germany, Houston, Texas, Rockport, Maine, and at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Lee, born in Naples, Italy, received her Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from Yale and her Master of Fine Arts degree from Hunter College. She has exhibited nationally and most recently, at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Our World Neighborhood Charter School combines a back-to-basics morning program of skills development in math, spelling and phonics with the Paragon curriculum in the afternoon. Paragon, developed by the school's management partner, Mosaica, is an interdisciplinary, thematic-based program of science, geography, literature, music, the arts and history. The combination seeks to advance student achievement by balancing (and supporting) enrichment with core skills. The charter school monitors student progress through the use of State assessments and nationally normed standardized tests. It then creates achievement profiles for each student that permit the school leadership to track each student's progress during the course of the academic year. The charter school is an outgrowth of the Astoria Parents Network, which was formed by parents concerned about overcrowding in the local public schools.

Steve Zimmerman, OWNCSC Board of Trustees chairperson, said the goal of the school is to be the "paragon of liberal arts of New York City, not only in reading and math, but to really, really show the arts".- Barbara Pascarelli