Good morning. It’s Friday. It’s the time of year when school principals often retire. We’ll meet one who is stepping down at age 91. We’ll also look at the latest move by the writer E. Jean Carroll to stop Donald Trump from talking about her.

Michael Veve says he has spent more time talking about sex with Elaine Schwartz than with anyone else he knows, including his wife — except for the middle-school students he and Schwartz teach in a class called “Family Living.”

And Schwartz is the principal of the school, where Veve has taught since the early 2000s.

She has been at the school, the Center School on the Upper West Side, even longer. She co-founded it in 1982, a little less than half a lifetime ago. A little less than half her lifetime, anyway. She is 91 and is retiring. “It’s just time,” she said.

As middle schools in New York City go, the Center School is unusual, and not just because of her longevity. Most such schools have three grades, starting with sixth. But the Center School has four grades, starting with fifth. And students from every grade are in every class (except math and Latin — “nobody comes in speaking Latin,” Schwartz said).

There is no principal’s office — “not that I know of,” said Kamar Samuels, the superintendent of the district that includes the Center School. Schwartz works from a desk in a closet-size alcove in a classroom. “I like to hear the kids,” she explained. “It’s the only way you know what’s going to happen.”

And of the school’s 16 teachers, four are alumni. “She makes fun of me because I have yet to be able to call her Elaine,” said Emily Reiver, a teacher who was a student in the early 2000s, “because she was always Ms. Schwartz to me and I’ll always call her Ms. Schwartz.” Reiver said she wished Schwartz would be in charge “until I’m ready to retire.”

Through her 50s — and her 60s, her 70s, her 80s and now into her 90s — the tone at the school seems not to have changed.

“From the outside, people come to the school and it looks like chaos — it’s noisy,” said Timothy Holst, a teacher. “She has no problem with chaos,” he said, referring to Schwartz. “Sometimes new parents are coming in and they don’t understand what’s going on here. My analogy is always the sausage factory. You’ve just got to trust what the sausage factory is doing. Eventually you’re going to have delicious sausage.”

Reiver said trust at the school figured in another way: “She trusts her teachers,” Reiver said of Schwartz. “That’s the main takeaway about her. We all thrive because of her trust in us.”

And her apparent autonomy. Schwartz has functioned as “a wall between us and the world of the D.O.E. through Bloomberg, de Blasio and countless superintendents,” Veve said, referring to the city Department of Education.

For her part, Schwartz said that “the way we’ve been successful is that we stayed under the radar — if you’re under the radar, the system is too big for anybody to notice you.” She said that “we do exactly what the Board of Ed wants.” But, she added, “We do it our own way.”

Samuels, the district superintendent, recalled that after his first meeting with Schwartz, “I came back to my team and said I cannot believe my 91-year-old principal is my most innovative principal.” He added that “her way of keeping students at the center of what she does is something I’ve learned from. It’s nothing short of amazing.”

Schwartz said she had taught when she was younger, and in the 1970s worked on the development of an Upper West Side high-rise built under the middle-income Mitchell-Lama housing program.

But she did not take up residence when the building was ready for occupancy. “I was going to,” she said, but realized that her potential neighbors “thought I was going to be the landlord and that they were going to ring my bell.” She entered a housing lottery and soon moved into a nearby brownstone.

Then, in 1982, she co-founded the Center School.

For the eighth graders graduating as she retired, the requirements included a 16-question test.

The first question was: “On a blank U.S. map, fill in all states. Use arrows for small states.” Later there were questions about Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court decision that codified the notion of “separate but equal,” and Brown vs. Board of Education, the 1954 decision that overturned it.

It was an open-book test, and no wrong answers were allowed. “I make them do them until they get them right,” Schwartz said, explaining that the questions were “stuff we feel everyone should know.”

Different leadership “is going to be a sea change for all of us,” Veve said — and something will definitely be different.

“The new principal does not want this to be his office,” Schwartz said.

Weather

Prepare for a chance of showers and thunderstorms, persisting through the evening, with temps near the high 70s. At night, temps will drop to the high 60s.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Wednesday (Eid al-Adha).

The latest New York news

Politics

Bronx D.A. race: Darcel Clark is running for a third term, emphasizing a balance between public safety and justice. Her opponent, Tess Cohen, is focused on alternatives to incarceration.

Father and aunt bailed out Santos: Representative George Santos had tried to keep the names of the people who guaranteed his $500,000 bond sealed, but two judges rejected his efforts.

More local news

Lawyers pay fine for A.I.-generated brief: A Manhattan judge imposed a $5,000 fine on two lawyers who prepared a legal brief full of made-up cases and citations, all generated by ChatGPT, and then submitted it in court.

Nightclub druggings: In just 15 days, Kenwood Allen killed four people, prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney’s office said. In all, he is accused of victimizing 21 people.

Most popular rental neighborhoods: Where do New Yorkers want to rent? Here are the city’s most popular areas based on traffic to rental listings.

Spider-woman with a crochet hook: In “My Neighbor’s Garden,” an installation at Madison Square Park, Sheila Pepe uses the humble art of crochet to shape space and build community. “My favorite thing is crocheting 20 feet in the air,” she said.

How much will talking about E. Jean Carroll cost Trump?

The writer E. Jean Carroll is again suing Donald Trump for defamation. This prompts a question: How much will talking about her end up costing him?

A Manhattan jury last month ordered the former president to pay $3 million in damages for defaming Carroll when he said her accusation that he had raped her decades ago was a lie. The next day, Trump appeared on CNN and again accused Ms. Carroll of making up her story. He also called her a “wack job.”

Forbes magazine says that Trump is worth $2.5 billion, but his actual wealth is in dispute — he has said his net worth fluctuates with his mood. He has used his legal problems, which include state and federal indictments, to raise money for his presidential campaign by tearing into prosecutors and plaintiffs.

My colleague Benjamin Weiser says that Carroll’s complaint will be heard as part of a trial scheduled for January, stemming from verbal assaults he made against her in 2019. Carroll has said she lost her job as an advice columnist for Elle magazine after those attacks. She is seeking at least $10 million in compensatory damages for harm to her reputation. After Trump’s diatribe on CNN, she said she also wanted “a very substantial punitive damages award” that would “deter him from engaging in further defamation.”

A lawyer for Trump, who has asked a judge to reduce to reduce the amount he already owes Carroll, did not respond to a request for comment.

METROPOLITAN diary

Birth day

Dear Diary:

It was July 23, 2010, and I was in the labor and delivery ward at Beth Israel Hospital to give birth to my son.

My then-husband and I were excited and nervous. My mother was visiting from Montana — a vacation in the big city to meet her first grandchild.

I had been induced earlier that morning, and my labor was progressing slowly. We spent the day joking around, reviewing the baby names we had chosen, waiting for the action to really begin.

By the middle of the day, my contractions were getting stronger and coming more frequently. Late in the afternoon, my midwife decided it was time to kick things up a notch. She described the next steps: She would break my waters with the goal of strengthening contractions and speeding up labor.

“But first,” she said, “I have to move my car.”

— Jenna Pike

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. See you on Monday — J.B.

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.

Melissa Guerrero and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].

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James Barron is a Metro reporter and columnist who writes the New York Today newsletter. In 2020 and 2021, he wrote the Coronavirus Update column, part of coverage that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service. He is the author of two books and was the editor of “The New York Times Book of New York.”

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