Student activists from the northwest Bronx took their fight for more school seats down south – to IS 184 in the south Bronx – where they let Schools Chancellor Joel Klein know exactly how displeased they were with the city’s new Five-Year Capital Plan. "Build more schools! Build more schools!" they chanted loudly during the public speaking portion of the meeting, often drowning out Klein’s efforts to defend the city’s plan.

On the ninth floor of the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in Norwood, Shadhey Camacho, 3, accepted her first gift of the season – a baseball autographed by former Mets superstar, Darryl Strawberry, six days before Christmas. Sitting in a chair wearing fluffy pink slippers, a sparkling plastic tiara perched on her scarred bald head, Shadhey (pronounced shaDAY) smiled when Strawberry, a cancer survivor himself, handed her the ball of stitched rawhide. She gripped it like a pro.

It began as many good and great community things do – from humble beginnings. Barbara Stronczer, one of Bedford Park’s community pillars, remembers working with her neighbors to tie a tree (illegally she admits) to a lamppost in the 1970s. That was a time when the city, unable to ensure the most basic of services like heat and hot water for tenants, was actually considering shuttering the 52nd Precinct. Ceremonial tree lightings, with all the attendant glee and festivity, were, to put it kindly, not on the agenda.

Finally, the 800 kids at PS 246 in North Fordham have a place of their own to run around, shoot hoops and simply play. Originally built as a school for the blind, PS 246, located on the Grand Concourse across from Poe Park, doesn’t have a gym or auditorium, and the only place to play or gather was a cracked asphalt lot in back of the building.

The Croton Filtration Monitoring Committee will cap off a year of increasingly spirited monthly meetings with a Dec. 21 finale that will feature DEP Commissioner Emily Lloyd. Community anger over the DEP’s failure to secure more jobs for local residents will undoubtedly be a lively topic once again, especially with the bulk of construction set to begin early in 2007.

A fledgling senior housing project on the campus of the Academy of Mount St. Ursula in Bedford Park recently received a $10 million boost from the federal government, which will fund a third of the proposed 240-unit development, the Fordham Bedford Housing Corporation said. The Housing Corporation has been working with Mount St. Ursula for the past few years to create senior housing on the sprawling and under-utilized Ursuline campus, which includes a Catholic all-girls high school and a convent.

It’s the kind of thing that should make any schoolteacher proud. Instead of just accepting what they were told and nodding their heads listlessly, students, parents and community residents decided to do a little research when they were told that our community didn’t need the 1,500 high school seats it was lopping off the five-year capital plan.

Starting in September 2007, 28 first-graders will take their seats in a brand new gifted and talented program at PS 54 in North Fordham, as part of the city’s plan to open four new "self-contained" gifted programs in Region One, which covers the western half of the Bronx.

New York City is planning on almost two-thirds of Bronx students failing to graduate high school, says a new report that has outraged elected officials, non-profit advocacy groups and a raucous crowd of more than 400 concerned parents and student activists at a rally in North Fordham two Saturdays ago.