P.S. 38 Roberto Clemente

ELA proficiency at 36.8% sits well below the District 4 average of roughly 50%, and math at 18.6% trails the district's 45.2% by a wide margin. But the trend line is genuinely encouraging on the ELA side: scores climbed from 13.2% in 2017 to 36.8% in 2025, with the steepest gains coming in the last two years. Math has been bumpier — it hit 17.6% in 2023 before slipping to 8.5% in 2024 and rebounding to 18.6% in 2025 — suggesting curriculum instability rather than steady progress. The Grade 5 cohort performs markedly better than Grade 3 (55% vs 22.7% in ELA; 27.3% vs 8.7% in math), which hints that students who stay through the upper grades are catching up, even if the school as a whole still has a long climb ahead.

The day-to-day feel here is warm but uneven. Parents are unusually satisfied (93%, above the district average) and rate trust in teachers (94%) and the principal (95%) far higher than at most city schools — a remarkable signal given how tough the surrounding conditions are. Teachers rate instructional quality at 96%, well above the district's 87.3%, and they give school safety an 88% thumbs-up, slightly better than the district norm. The one crack in the picture is teacher-principal trust at 78%, meaningfully below the other teacher metrics and worth asking about. Attendance is right at the district average (87%), but chronic absenteeism affects 47% of the student body — nearly half the kids miss enough school to count as chronically absent. The discipline file is essentially clean: zero suspensions in 2023-24, and the school has had one suspension or fewer every year since 2021.

P.S. 38's student body is 53% Hispanic and 33% Black, with smaller shares of White (11%), Asian (1%), and multiracial and Native American students. The economic need index of 90.3 places this among the city's higher-need schools, and 24% of students have IEPs. The demographics closely mirror the surrounding East Harlem census tract, which has a median household income around $44,000 and a poverty rate near 30%. With 180 total students across pre-K through 5th grade, class sizes average about 20 — meaning the school is small enough that families and staff tend to know each other well.

East Harlem (South) is a working-class, predominantly renter neighborhood where the median household income sits around $44,000 and about 30% of residents live below the poverty line. Homeownership is rare (under 8%) even though the median home value exceeds $828,000, reflecting how uneven the housing market is. Only about 9% of households include children, so families with school-age kids are a meaningful but not dominant slice of the community. Just over a third of adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher.

The school is genuinely walkable for transit users. The 103 St station on the 6 line is about a 4-minute walk away, the Q line at 96 St is around 7 minutes, and the 6 at 110 St is roughly 9 minutes — so families have real options for getting here from across East Harlem and the Upper East Side.