Poignant New Film Chronicles Bed-Stuy Community's Approach to Growing a New School

In the fall of 2006, a former DJ and basketball point guard turned first-time principal Dr. James O’Brien opened a high school in Bedford Stuyvesant that is now the subject of a documentary.

The school, the Brooklyn Community Arts and Media High School (BCAM), located at 300 Willoughby Avenue and Kent Street, is one of 350 “small schools” opened in New York City since 2002.

Today, BCAM is at the center of the city’s efforts to transform a top-down public education system into a new model that gives educators the autonomy to build their own schools, tailor curriculums to communities’ needs, and provide students with real choices in their education.

The documentary, “Growing Small” (working title), chronicles a four-year journey from the school's opening, with a freshman class of 106 students, until its first graduation. The students at BCAM see Principal O'Brien, their teachers and their parents as a part of whole community that supports their growth and success.

“I became interested in documenting the development of this particular school because I grew up in Brooklyn and went to public schools, and BCAM was not at all what I remembered about public schools,” said Jyllian Gunther, the film’s director and producer.

Gunther and Principal O’Brien were friends before the school opened. And so initially, she started at the school as a documentary film teacher. Almost immediately, she made the decision to begin documenting its growth because of the school’s unconventional approach to education. She wanted to see what would work, what wouldn’t work, and why.

“These were not the teachers I remembered,” said Gunther. “They were very positive, idealistic and had great energy. The founder of the school is white, but I made effort to not make it a white-guy-saves-the-day story. So it’s focused instead on the students and the community that rallies behind them. I was careful to make sure the story was honest and recognizable to the students in the film.”

But even with the biggest of ideas and the best of intentions, how the school started out was not how it ended, and things were not necessarily as they appeared, acknowledged Gunther.

There were learning curves, unexpected turns and false assumptions about the types of curriculum that would best serve the students’ needs— things they couldn’t have known without first trying.

“In order to be remotely successful in a school like this, you have to bridge idealism and expectation with the actual reality,” said Gunther.

“For example," one teacher said, "When we started, we thought arts courses that the kids related to, like hip hop, would be a panacea, but that wasn't enough. And by senior year our graduating class had no time for these kinds of classes. We had to focus entirely on academics, graduating kids and getting them off to college.”   

“The first class experiences a different school than the kids that choose it four years later,” said Gunther.

“It’s a different class than the kids that choose it four years later,” said Gunther.

Still, there were things that did work, including yoga classes, visual arts classes, African dance and outside internships that focused on bringing real-world context to the use of media and the arts.

“It’s something about it, I just don’t know what it is,” said BCAM student John Dargan, who is featured in the documentary. “This energy, this positive energy… It’s like, when I wake up for BCAM in the morning, I feel happy!"

Since many of the students were encouraged to shoot footage themselves, cameras became almost invisible over time, lending itself to a film verité, character-driven narrative combining footage shot by Gunther and the film’s subjects, and offering unprecedented access to intimate moments in the students’ lives, from classrooms and counselor’s offices to students’ and teachers’ homes.

“Growing Small” is in the final process of getting completion funds on a Kickstarter Campaign, where their goal is to raise $10,000 to start shopping the film to various festivals.

Readers can go to the movie’s website or Facebook page to see both the short and long trailers, where they can also link to the Kickstarter page to make a donation. So far, they’ve reached 52 percent of their fundraising goal, and they have two weeks left to raise the remaining funds.