Dr. Oliveri Replaces Ubieta as AP Language

Former Assistant Principal (AP) of World Languages Arlene Ubieta resigned from her position in late August after accepting a new role in the Language Department at one of the Department of Education’s (DOE) District Offices in Queens. Interim Acting (IA) AP of World Languages Dr. Ernest Oliveri has taken her place.

Dr. Oliveri was the AP of Security and the AP of the International Baccalaureate (IB) Program (which included their language program), at Washington Irving High School, an underperforming school that closed in 2015.

Dr. Oliveri discovered his interest in world languages when he began to learn the language of his family’s heritage, Italian, in college. “My parents are Italian. They didn’t speak Italian in the home. I heard it in my grandparents’ home,” he said. “When I went to University I studied Italian, and when I graduated college, I got myself a Euro-pass and I traveled to Italy, just me and my Italian. I fell in love with it, it’s a beautiful country and a beautiful language.”

Dr. Oliveri continued his language studies after college, building on his high school Spanish when he met his wife. “I married a Spaniard,” he said. “It was really an affair of the heart that brought me back to the study of language.”

At Stuyvesant, Dr. Oliveri will be teaching the new fifth-year Spanish elective, Great Films From the Spanish Speaking World. “One of the ways I improved my Spanish was by looking at Spanish films. One time I got ahold of a [Spanish] film and I looked at the film for three months with the script in my hand,” he said. “[Films are] a very good way to learn [a] language and it really helped my fluency.”

Dr. Oliveri also hopes to expand the language opportunities offered to students. He created a fourth-year Latin class because an Advanced Placement Latin course will not be offered this year. Moreover, he is arranging a Japanese film festival with Japanese teacher Chie Helinski.

“There are other ways to learn a language in a culture other than being in a classroom. There are dimensions to a language [other] than learning to conjugate verbs and learning vocabulary. There is culture and I would like to expand that [at Stuyvesant],” he said.

Dr. Oliveri will maintain his interim status until the DOE’s C-30 process for permanent hiring is completed. Under this process, an AP candidate must be approved by both IA Principal Eric Contreras and Superintendent Marisol Bradbury.

Ultimately, Dr. Oliveri hopes to be accessible to both the students and the staff. “I hope the students will feel free to come in and share their highs and lows with me,” he said. “It is my job to help them through that and [I want to establish] the same [relationship] with the staff.”

Additional reporting done by Julia Ingram