What happened when Grace Church School decided to become a little less old-fashioned? A riot among the one percent, jpressler writes
Illustration: Joana Avillez When you buy a home in Brooklyn Heights, you aren’t just purchasing real estate, you’re purchasing a lifestyle. The stately townhomes and converted carriage houses, with their window boxes of Algerian ivy winking over splendidly preserved original details — the Grecian columns, the soaring Romanesque windows offering a glimpse of curated furniture — connote a certain level of not just wealth and taste but respectability.
Not long after, Prosky announced her retirement and the rector of the church, which oversees the school, met with the Grace Church School Advisory Board, a volunteer body made up of parents and members of the church, and formed a search committee to find her replacement. Under Prosky, Grace Church had functioned as a “glorified playgroup,” as one parent put it. The children pressed leaves into paper, explored textures, and danced the Wiggle Worm.
Morgano was intimidated and not a little envious. She’d married young and raised three children before getting her master’s degree at 40. Now she was in her 50s and had answered the ad in part because the commute would be easier from her home in Park Slope, but the idea of a new challenge — a school that needed to be brought into the present — intrigued her, and she was pleasantly surprised that the salary it offered was commensurate with Manhattan.
Smith might have believed her fears about Morgano were the result of imagination running wild, except the entire month of September came and went before she and Morgano had a proper conversation. “I’ve heard a lot about you,” the new director said.Morgano looked at the books Smith was holding. “I love books,” she said, as Smith recalls it. “I would always pick a Caldecott winner to read to my classes.
Morgano, who put a stop to the practice of listing teachers’ home numbers in the school directory and told teachers they could no longer babysit students in their off-hours, felt parent-teacher socializing was unprofessional.
While old-line Wasps still gravitated to the historic district, the demographics of the neighborhood were changing.
Specifically, the bankers, lawyers, doctors, and assorted other non-sexy professionals who had long been the bedrock of the Grace Church community, who began to feel like they were being shunted aside for more glamorous newcomers. “I heard we had an old-time parent who gave a lot of money to the school — it’s not fair, but that’s what happens — who applied for their grandchild,” one former teacher confided. “Apparently they put in their application a day late, and Amy rejected them.
Illustration: Joana Avillez “Hi Grace parents!” read the email. “The gala is now less than three months away and we are finalizing our live and silent auction items. We still have space for a handful of exceptional, mind-blowing items , and we know you’ve been waiting until now to send us your best offers. Please please please don’t wait any longer! #Time’sUp!”
To some, the Redicks were the apotheosis of the new element encroaching on the Heights. Renovations to their apartment included the installation of gold bathroom sinks and wallpaper that was said to be custom-made to match the first Louis Vuitton handbag Redick gave his wife. Chelsea and her sister, who were blonde and dimpled and called one another “twinny,” came across to some as an aesthetic aberration. “They look like Sweet Valley High,” observed one Brooklyn Heights parent.
Then there was the board.
The parent was incensed. Still, his child was graduating, so he decided to let it go. Others were not as easily mollified, and believed that Morgano was perhaps “overly solicitous of Chelsea Redick,” as one parent observed, quickly adding, “Not that I care or anybody cares at all.” When an image of Morgano with JJ Redick at a Sixers game surfaced on Instagram in February 2018, eyebrows went up. “This is the person who was like, ‘I want a wall,’ ” says one parent. “People were like WTF.
It was at this point that Redick, perhaps thinking of her husband’s travel schedule, made a face that indicated grave distress. At which point Morgano, according to people in the meeting, leaned over and said to her, out loud, in front of everyone: “You don’t need to worry about that.” “All of us walked out like, ‘WTF is going on,’” said another parent, pointing out that many of the parents, though not celebrities, were powerful in their own fields. “A lot of these people are used to having their asses kissed. They’re not used to being ignored.”
When Jones recovered, she explained to the parents and children that she was very sad because this would be her last year at Grace. After 12 years, Morgano had declined to renew her contract. “Some of the things she told me was that I am hard, cold, and lack in outward warmth,” she later wrote in an email to parents. “She said that I have made parents feel I don’t like their children and my learning environment and curriculum isn’t based on what is known about 3-year-olds. I was speechless.
She fired off an email: “Thank you for sharing what you have learned from other parents regarding the stressful process of applying to kindergartens,” she wrote. “Any perception that we have not been responsive is simply untrue.” Therefore: “We have decided not to send additional communication regarding exmissions to our Pre-K families.
One bright spot in December was the Book and Toy Fair. In the past, the fair had been small and churchy and full of old ladies selling handmade ornaments. This year, Chelsea Redick was co-chairing and had organized a pajama party and a band for the kids downstairs, while upstairs parents shopped, sipped wine, and participated in a raffle for high-end toys that she claimed raised three times as much for the school than in previous years. In other words, they crushed it.
“Happy New Year!,” Morgano commented on Chelsea Redick’s Instagram on New Year’s Eve. “I love you — whoops, I’m fired.”Since this past fall, there have been certain rumors going around our school,” read an email several members of the board received on January 16, 2019. “The teacher survey administered in October 2018 was a good start to furthering the current progress of the school and providing an outlet for future feedback.
An emergency off-site meeting was convened the following day, January 22, 2019. When Chelsea Redick arrived at the Brooklyn Trust Company Building on Pierrepont Street, the home of one of the members, the 17 other members of the board, along with the rector, were gathered in the top-floor owner’s lounge. The mood was grim. Someone had brought in bagels, but no one touched them as, for the next three hours, the fate of Morgano was debated.
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