Encompassed – Bronx Science Stories

“In a period of awakening, your standard issue Bronx Science student is prime material, and that was true throughout the ’60’s.”

"I don’t know if this is okay, but I want to give a shout out to my best friend from high school Joshua Guitellman, who has now passed […] We had very different backgrounds but he was a great guy, always smiling and always happy, and we clicked […] Josh was the first person who passed away in my life that it took me a while to even get back to normal. My family was just like, “We don’t know what to do” […] It turned out to be his parents, who I had never met before he passed. Like I said, completely different backgrounds, but they opened their arms to everyone. Still to this day, around the time of his birthday, they’re always saying, ‘If you need to come over we are available.’ They always make time for us. They’re definitely the best remedy I’ve had since his passing and I’m so glad I got to know them [...] That's the great thing about a school like Bronx Science. You take kids from all over the city, all different backgrounds, and you bring them into one place."

“My creativity ended up in trying to solve problems. Principal Stanley Blumenthal used to have Lunch With the Principal once a month, where you could come to him with different things you wanted to fix. I would always come to as many of those as I could to suggest different things he could fix around the school and to this day I spend most of my time looking around the city for things I’d like to fix.”

“My sister was three years older than I am, so she had been in the country only a few minutes. We were going with someone from our housing project on a bus, and my sister asked her in yiddish, ‘What is that building? It looks different.’ And this woman said ‘that’s not for you. That’s a very special school, you can’t get in there because you’re an immigrant.’ My sister walked into that school with hardly any english and met Mr. Kopelman. He spoke yiddish to her and said, “you can come if in one month I can see that you can fit in here. If not, you have to go to another school.’ My sister, within one month, learned English, showed her ability in science. She’s the only student I know of who ever got into Bronx Science without taking the test. She was a brilliant student. But i think, when you ask me about Bronx Science, that school had a soul. It wasn’t just a technical entry exam–it had people there who had a kind of life experience, motivation, and a profundity about human beings, and that’s what made that school very special. It’s kind of the beauty and also the charisma of that school.”

“It was a crazy time in the early ’60’s. I have a vivid recollection of getting yelled at for not standing straight during the pledge of allegiance, and I vowed never to go to assembly in the morning again, which I could avoid by going to Math Lab. That was really the focus of my life for a few years: not getting drafted, staying in engineering, finding a job that was related to the national defense effort, and stopping working when the draft lottery was over.”