NYC NOW - A New Bronx Public High School Where Hip Hop Is On the Syllabus

Episode Date: June 29, 2026

Big changes to federal student loan repayment take effect July 1. Carolina Rodriguez of New York's Education Debt Consumer Assistance Program walks us through what's changing. Also, this fall, New York City will open the Bronx School of Hip Hop. That's a first-of-its-kind public high school where MCing, DJing, breaking, graffiti, and knowledge of self are pathways into English, math, science, and social studies. Founding Principal Jason Reyes joins us to explain how the school's five core elements map onto coursework and how Bronx hip hop pioneers like Grandmaster Caz and Melle Mel are shaping what students learn. -Got any questions, comments or story ideas? Send us a message at [e-mail] Photo: David Dee Delgado / Getty Images News Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From WNYC, this is NYC Now. I'm Eurek Panobi in Frigine A Pierre. When we think about hip-hop, we have five core elements, right? Which are emceeing, DJing, breaking, graffiti, and knowledge of self. So what we are doing is we're taking these elements and totally integrating them into the learning experiences of our young people. New York City announced the opening of five new schools this fall. One of them is the Bronx School of Hip Hop, a public high school focused on the art form. City officials say it's the first of its kind in the nation, and on today's episode,

Jenae talks with founding principal Jason Reyes. But first, here's what's happening in our region. We are expecting some really, truly extreme heats over the next week, and if you see what's happening elsewhere, this could be potentially deadly. Dangerous heat is expected to arrive this week, and officials are urging New Yorkers to prepared just as crowds gather for Fourth of July events and World Cup matches. Governor Kathy Hokel says temperatures could top 100 degrees in parts of the state, with high humidity making conditions even more dangerous.

Our top priority is keeping Yorkers safe and taking every step we can to prepare for this event. Health officials advise you to stay hydrated, check on your elderly neighbors and anyone without air conditioning, and limit time outdoors during the hottest parts of the day. Nights are also expected to stay unusually warm, which will offer little relief from the heat. Cooling centers will open if the city declares a heat emergency. New York officials say they're expanding security measures in the city, ahead of this week's America 250 celebration. Millions of people are expected along the city's waterfront

for the parade of tall ships, military flyovers, and fireworks. Governor Kathy Hockel says the state has been planning the event for years. Officials say that security will include enhanced counter-drone operations and increase patrols on land and water throughout the holiday weekend. The George Washington Bridge's towers will soon shine every night. The Port Authority says it's permanently lighting the bridge's two towers from dusk until 10 p.m., starting with a ceremonial lighting on Monday night. The agency says the move marks the nation's 250th birthday

and will make the nearly century-old bridge a centerpiece of next weekend. against America 250 celebrations, when tall ships and naval vessels sail up the Hudson. The towers have never been lit nightly since the bridge opened in 1931. In Men's World Cup news, the knockout stage is here, which means hundreds of thousands of fans will once again be swarming the area. France will face Sweden on Tuesday at MetLife Stadium, and the U.S. will open the knockout round on Wednesday against Bosnia and her

to Govina in California. Including Tuesday's game, there will be three remaining World Cup games played in New Jersey, the last of which will be the championship on July 19th. The New York State Comptroller put out a report last year that shows that roughly one in four New York City residents is burdened by student loan debt. Changes to federal repayment plans are set to begin on July 1st. Up next with Janay, a breakdown of what this means for New Yorkers. That's after the break.

Welcome back. There's a date I've been talking a lot about in my group chats. July 1st, 2026. That's the day that changes to payment options for federal student loans go into effect. Oh, hi, good morning. We'll be WNYC talking to folks in the neighborhood about student loans and the changes to student loans with payment? Do you have student loans better?

I do, yeah. Have you heard about this? I haven't. The New York State Comptroller put out a report last year that shows that in New York City, roughly one in four residents is burdened by student loan debt, with an average debt of almost $40,000. My producer, Iru, and I went out to the streets of Brooklyn to talk with New Yorkers to hear what this means for them. I was the first of my family to go to college. I'm from Mexican immigrants. I was raised with my grandparents who couldn't read it right. Tiffany Navarro is a 44-year-old

New Yorker and the first in her family to go to college. She's also an educator and has been paying off her undergraduate and grad school loans for 22 years. If you don't mind, how much do you have in student loans? I have 100,000. Were you part of the save plan? I was, yeah. On July 1st, the save plan will expire. For borrowers like Tiffany, that means navigating new repayment options, and in most cases,

higher monthly payments. The one I have now is 184. I pay every month. And then the other one that's 100,000, which is going to kick in soon, I think they said that and it'll go to like $5.50 or something. Tiffany's situation showed me what this looks like in dollars. But for other New Yorkers that I spoke to, student debt was more about how their future feels rather than their finances.

I don't know how much my new monthly wait's going to be, but I've been getting lots of correspondence saying that it's going to go up. Yeah. So you have no idea what your student loans are going to go up to? No. Do you plan to continue to pay them? I'm going to try to, yeah. I'd like my credit to stay.

That's Marbury's Daly Butts, a New Yorker with $150,000 in student loan debt. I feel like student loans at this point feel something so overwhelming that they're almost like from out of sight, out of mind. But I feel just like really overwhelmed, even thinking about how to kind of crawl out of the amount of debt that I have from the loans. And then there's T. Another New Yorker who doesn't carry student loans himself, but whose wife does. I asked him about all the things his family could be spending that money on if they didn't have student loans. Being a little bit less stressed, actually like living our lives, like maybe going on a vacation that we deserve, like being able to eat a little bit better. Tay feels like this isn't just a New York issue, but being in New York, it doesn't help.

My cost of living is rising so exponentially that like it is pushing people out. and to be, like, caught in decades of, you know, loan repayment, that's obviously only making that worse. Carolina Rodriguez is the director of New York's education debt consumer assistance program, and she's here to break down these changes and what they mean for New Yorkers. Carolina, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. All right, so can you remind us how we got here and why things are changing in the first place? Of course.

One of the biggest changes that I think it's on our mind right now is exactly that. The safe repayment plan and the fact that it's going to end, there are about 7 million bars nationally, and obviously many of them are also here in New York, that are going to have to switch repayment plans. Now, it's important to know, and there's been a lot of confusion, that servicers are going to notify the borrowers and let them know when they need to change. So bars are going to have two to three months to change. So the deadline is not actually July 1st.

That's when we can expect servicers to send out formal notices. But again, bars are going to have a little bit of time to transition out of save and choose another repayment plan. Okay. So if someone's listening right now and panicking on June 29th, they still may have at least two more months. But how can they still stay ahead of these changes? We have key recommendations.

I think for a lot of bars, the anxiety of thinking that they're not going to, you know, to be able to afford any repayment plan is really preventing them from looking at their options. And we know that the system is really complicated. The one advice I have for all of my clients who are looking to change is go to student a.gov and run the IDR application. If you are able to run the application, mind you, you don't have to submit it yet if you're not ready. You will be able to see your repayment plan options and get a sense of what that repayment. amount is going to look like. If once you run the application, you see a payment amount that you're ready to make, then you can process the application. You're not going to get a bill right away.

It's going to take about two months for the servicers to process that application. So in other words, you're going to have a little bit of time before you actually make your first new payment. That's really good to know. So once save expires, can you just talk about the plans that will remain in effect and talk a bit more about those repayment options? So there are two big categories that I'm going to talk about really quickly. One, we call the legacy borrower. If you're not going to borrow any more loans after July 1st of this year, you're going to be considered what we call legacy borr, and you should have access to more income-driven repayment plans. That is IBR, pay, ICR, and the RAP plan. If you're going to borrow more,

more after July, even if it's one more loan, then you're going to be more limited. Your only repayment plan based on income is going to be the RAP plan, and your only repayment plan based on your loan balance is the new tier standard repayment plan. So it's really going to depend on that one question. Are you going to take out more loans after July or not? You will have a lot more options if you don't take out more loans after July. I do want to note, however, that this is completely different for parent plus loan borrowers. Parent plus loan borrowers are going to be even more limited. Their only option is going to be the new tier standard repayment plan if either they take out more loans after July or they still have direct

parent plus loans. In order to have access to repayment plans based on income, a parent plus loan borrower needed to have consolidated by now because they needed to have that consolidation dispersed by June 30th. And right now, unfortunately, it's probably a little too late. They cannot do a consolidation and meet that July deadline in order to still have access to payments based on income. Oh no. Why is it too late? It usually takes a month or two months to finalize a consolidation. So anyone who's trying to consolidate, let's say today, may risk not having the consolidation completed by then. My producer and I hit the streets of Brooklyn

to talk to some student loan borrowers, and I spoke to a New Yorker who says, you know, the money that he's spending on student loans could be better spent, you know, maybe saving for vacation. How common is that tradeoff for New York borrowers right now? Very common. And it is really unfortunate, in part because it has an impact on everyday finances. And it is also very common for us to see that only one spouse has student loans.

And yet it becomes a family affair because the entire household budget is impacted. So we do see that obviously higher education debt is preventing people from having a family, getting a house, or being able to afford reasonable housing. Sometimes we think about like the end goal of being able to buy a house. For a lot of New Yorkers and New York City residents, it's even more particular than that, right? It's a question of, am I going to be able to afford food, right, at the end of the month? Am I going to be able to pay my rent? And no one, and I say no one right now, given the cost of living, has an extra 200, 300, or in some cases, extra $1,000.

Yeah. We've been going through some numbers from the state controller's office. when it comes to student loan borrowers, and apparently they contribute to a total statewide student loan debt burden exceeding $90 billion. How does that match up to other states in the country? I think one of the interesting things is that you can expect that states with higher populations are going to have higher loan balances. So the big ones are obviously New York, Florida, and California.

Other smaller states are going to have lower balances, not to say that the issue is not the same, right? Like anyone who has higher education debt, student loans, is facing the same challenges regardless of where you live. There are probably about one million of those bars in New York City. There are 2.4 million bars in New York State. So in the city, we do see, obviously, a concentration of those bars struggling and dealing with this debt. I spoke to another New Yorker who works in public interest, and they were counting on discounted payments. Do these changes have any effect on public service loan forgiveness? That is a great question.

We often get a similar question where people pursuing public service loan forgiveness believe that they would be eligible for a lower repayment plan option. And that is not the case. The repayment plan options are available regardless of whether someone is pursuing forgiveness or not. The key with public service loan forgiveness is that you do have, have to pay based on income. So that would be IBR or the new RAP plan. But there is no discount there. The benefit of public service loan forgiveness is after you meet the 120 qualifying payments. So after 10 years of

working in the public sector and after 10 years of making payments under a payment plan based on income, also known as income-driven repayment, any remaining loan balance gets forgiven. But until then, you do not necessarily get any special benefit when it comes to the repayment plan options if you're pursuing PSLF. So I guess your advice to someone in her position would be keep making those payments. Correct. Yeah. What are some other resources for New Yorker specifically seeking loan forgiveness?

There are many forgiveness programs available through the federal government, but I should also know that there are some state forgiveness programs available to. to anyone who resides in New York State, and those are available through the Hess website. Now, in terms of the federal programs, there are three main ones that we're always talking about. One of them we already discussed, that is the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program. There's also income-driven repayment forgiveness that says you can get your loans forgiven after 20, 25, or 30 years. And I know that sounds like a mighty long time, but time passes by and you do want some type of light at the end of the tunnel. The other federal forgiveness programs that many people don't know but could

potentially benefit is called total and permanent disability discharge or TPD. TPD allows people who have a chronic health condition or disability to get their loans discharge. And again, not a lot of people know about it. Clearly, we're talking about very specific people, those who have a chronic health condition, sometimes older adults who may have some health crisis and may qualify. But if you go to student a.gov, there is an entire section under loan forgiveness, and you'll be able to see the additional discharge programs like teacher loan forgiveness, barredefense, repayment, and many more. All right. Carolina Rodriguez is the director of New York's Education Debt Consumer Assistance Program. Thanks so much for joining me. A pleasure. Welcome back.

The academic year is coming to an end. But for staffers of a new high school, opening this fall, it's a countdown to their official launch. New York City announced the opening of five new schools, and one of them is the Bronx School of Hip Hop. The high school would be a one-of-a-kind learning ground for hip-hop culture, entrepreneurship, and performance while students engage in AP-aligned coursework through project-based learning. Joining me to talk more about it is founding principal Jason Reyes. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you for having me. So tell me about the inspiration behind you even starting a school school. like this in the first place?

So, you know, such a culmination of different ideas, different educators, pioneers that were having conversations around having a school that's rooted in hip-hop culture. You know, in my former role as middle school principal at 129, one of the things I did there was I leaned heavily into hip-hop culture as a vehicle for learning. and what it did is it showed like dramatic increase in engagement, attendance, and achievement. So as I was doing this, as just, you know, day-to-day running the school as a principal, you know, others have been doing this in silos. A proposal was put forth to New York City public schools, went through the whole process, got community buy-in, and, you know, at that point, they start to look for a leader for that proposal and that that search led to me. And, you know, from that point on, the design time was

like on and popping. And this is like, now I'm like, okay, we get to do this magical thing. Yeah. That I've been experiencing and just really like go out and make history. And when you talk about the ways that you incorporated hip hop in the classroom at that middle school that you mentioned that you worked at. What did that look like? So, you know, at first, we just started with really like making sure that the space was an accurate reflection of the culture where kids were coming from. Far too often children enter schools that sit in the middle of their neighborhoods. And as soon as they enter the school, they kind of told, like, you got to take off who you are and become someone else. We kind of flipped that on its head and said, no, like, we're going to like really

celebrate identity of being a Bronx kid, a hip hop scholar, and really lean into that. So we had these really powerful murals. We went away from traditional bell systems and had hip hop, you know, instrumentals playing. And then in terms of academics, we took a really, really hard look at some of the practices and how we were going to integrate this culturally relevant instruction. Can you talk about those elements and, you know, kind of tell us what that coursework looks like? What is this school actually preparing students for? So when we think about hip-hop, we have five core elements, right?

Which are MCN, DJing, breaking, graffiti, and knowledge of self. So what we are doing is we're taking these elements and totally integrating them into the learning experiences of our young people. So traditionally you have ELA, you have math, you have science, you have social studies as our four core subjects. What we are doing is we're integrating those elements for not just a cultural relevance lens, but to also show the rigor that exists in both. So when you think about MCing, what you're thinking about, what you're really seeing is literary analysis, rhetorical devices. persuasion, voice, writing. When you think about DJing, you're thinking about analysis and iteration. When you think about graffiti, graphic design and public expression.

Breaking is movement and science and self-expression as well. And then knowledge of self is leadership, civic engagement, and understanding oneself in the grand scheme of society. So if you're looking at analyzing literature, you can easily pair Shakespeare with Kendrick Lamar, right, and kind of see where there's similarities, where there are differences. But the nuance lies in that children are going to probably see more of the value of understanding Kendrick Lamar's versus now they didn't really understand what Shakespeare was doing. Yeah. So the engagement rises because students kind of see their culture and their learning. What is this school preparing students for?

Like, what's the goal here? So the goal really is to make sure that students walk out of our school as hip-hop scholar, entrepreneurs. So when you're walking out into the world, whether you're going into college or into careers, who you are is very important how you navigate in the world and how to use your voice and own every space that you step. into is also very important. And hip hop is a major influence in doing that, right? So what we are saying with this school is like, yes, you have students that will be definitely super vested in like the performing arts and the music part of it.

And the next emcees of the genre. The next MCs, the next record label owners, the next producers. But you don't even necessarily have to want to do that to experience this. and go out in the world with the skills that you are going to walk out of the Bronx School of Hip Hop with. So students leave prepared for the next step in possibly pursuing a career, be it music, be it business, whatever. But I got to ask, when did you first fall in love with hip-hop? That's a beautiful question. I'm originally from the Soundview section of the Bronx.

And in the back of my building, in Bronxdale houses, they used to have these jams. And throughout the summertime, when we were all from school, you get to be out there with the DJs. And there would be battles going on back and forth to dance. And just the overall community and the voice that I experienced at that age, it was just, I just hit different. And that's when it happened for you. Yep. What year was this? This had to be 1983, 384.

Okay. Okay. Yeah. So hip hop was alive and well. during that time. Absolutely. Yeah. You mentioned that you all are only starting with ninth graders.

Why is that? So the progression for each year, it makes sense, right? So we start with ninth grade and then every year we'll be building a year. If we were to, let's say, probably open up nine through 12, you're going to get kids at different levels. And that probably is a little bit of a heavier lift when you're opening a new school. Yeah. So New York City public schools, you know, they're taking a very like,

pragmatic approach to make sure that is done correctly. Yeah. I know that you're working with a special group of advisors and mentors, Grandmaster Kaz of the Cold Crush Brothers is one of them. And, you know, I'm just wondering, like, how did you get a pioneer like him? I mean, you have Melly Mel, special ed. Like, how did you get these guys involved? So, you know, all credit to these pioneers and legends, you know,

this is something that they have been advocated. in their careers far beyond Jason Ray as being a part of any of this. Really? Yeah. So, you know, they are definitely people that, like, when we talk about having authentic experiences and understanding the history that is so beautiful in the hip-hop culture, they are paramount in providing that voice, right? You know, while I was a little kid in the back of Bronx, their houses,

I was listening to Grand Master Melie Mel, right? You know, so listening to the message, now you get to have someone on as an advisor, but also like to have conversations with students, also in an advisory aspect, telling them about much more than just the music, also about the business side and just different experiences as artists, pioneers. For listeners who are unfamiliar with Grandmaster Cass, I mean, he's one of the names that you can't help but mention when you talk about the start of his. hip-hop. What does success look like for the Bronx School of Hip-hop? That's a great question and something

that's been on my mind since I've taken on this endeavor. First and foremost, that students are centered. Success will look like our kids graduating, 100% graduation rates. I always shoot for like we want every child, not all children, every child, to be successful. have a pathway forward either if they want to deepen their studies and go on to college, but if they're going to go into business or into the industry, that they have something as a foundation to what they're going to do next. Because, you know, we're going to have students that are extremely creative, but understanding the business side of an industry, understanding how to own what you create, right? That legacy is important. So what we really want is our

students are young people to have that ownership over the culture and to not only just kind of like look at it as something to make money, but also how they give back to their communities. Well, this is exciting. I don't think anyone has looked forward to a new school year before, but I'm sure you are. I'm very, very excited. This is something that I feel is monumental, not only for hip-hop culture, but for our city. So I'm definitely, definitely on cloud 10,000 right now. For sure. Jason Reyes is founding principal of the Bronx School of Hip Hop. Thanks so much for joining me. Thank you for having me.

And thank you for listening to NYC Now. I'm Jene Pierre. See you next time.