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What is the story underneath this story?  Six years old…this “failure” is during the “choice”, “small schools are better” watch of the Mayor and the DOE.  There are no “failing” schools.  There are struggling schools.

Cypress Hills Collegiate Prep is a good school and is becoming better daily.  It has a very caring faculty who along with the administration have created a family like atmosphere.  What this article failed to mention is that the school started in a completely different location in a state of the art new building for the first two years which parents considered to be a safer location.  Prior to the start of the third year, the school was forced to move to the Franklin K. LaneCampus and at that time it was the second most peristantly dangerous school in all of NYC. Many parents decided to take their children out of the school as a result the attendance rate went from well over 90% the first two years to just about 80% the next three years.  Also, many of the students who departed were the stronger students and they were replaced with students who were not as academically advanced. Also, not mentioned in this article is the fact that the school does not have a six year graduation rate which automatically puts the school at a disadvantage becuse their 4 year graduation rate and 4 year weighted graduation rate are counted or weighted double relative to their peer groups. What does this mean?  The peer groups 4-yr graduation rate and 4-yr weighted rate are weighted at .25 each because they also have a 6-yr graduation rate and 6-yr weighted rate.  However for Cypress this is not the case because the school has not been in existence long enough to have a six graduation rate.  Instead the four years rates are weighted at .5.  This means that the peer schools have two additional years to improve their graduation data and Cypress does not.  Funny how the Progress Report data is skewed to hurt Cypress.  Other factors include the fact that the very people who are to support Cypress Hills have not remained the same for any two years in a row. For example, this school community only met the superintendent Ms. Watts the day she came to inform the community that the school might close.  She never stepped a foot inside this school prior to that day and she only became the superintendent at some point during the 2010-2011 school year.  As for the network  leader she too is new and was only placed into this position in March 2011.  Inclusive of the meeting with the Superintendent she has only been in this school a total of three of four times and she has not been back since the meeting with the superintendent.  How concernced are they about this school community?  For the first four years the school was held up as a model school to new principals.  Then came the “F.”  No one came and helped this community identify where the issues were or how to fix them.  More importantly no one flagged the issues before the “F” was received.  The principal is supposed to have a support network (CFN) to assist him.  However, the people in these roles were frequently changing.  More ironic is the fact that the documents Principals were to use to help them calculate the Progress Report grade were also incorrect and these documents are supplied by Tweed.  How does one discover where the issues lie in the data if the documents to be used are incorrect and the people who are supposed to assist you in this task know less than school data speciliast who was a novice. More insulting is the fact that Multi Cultural was referenced in this article and omitted was the fact the previous Principal allegedly gave studens the answers to the Regents exams as reported in the NY Post yet their Progress report grade of a “C” was allowed to stand. There are many more schools like Multi Cutural out there but the DOE pretends they do not exist. The moral of the story is, if you are a new principal such as the one at Cypress and you run your school with integrity and you do not give students the answers to Regents exams, you run the risk of losing your job and your school closing.  The Cypress team has been proactive in figuring out how to improve the school’s outocmes.  For example, the superintendent and her team kept pressing the students about the learning environment survey.  The students shared that the questions reflected the entire campus and not solely the school.  The students maintained that once they were on the fourth floor (Cypress) everything was good but upon entering the building they had to deal with the campus staff and their opinion of them was not as high. To summarize Cypress Hill is a good school that has created a nurturing atmosphere.  It has increased the academic rigor, students are taught to find their voice as evidenced by the very active student government and through advisories students begin their four year portfolio starting in the ninth grade.  Franklin K. Lane is a much safer campus today thanks to the hard work of the school Principals, Sgt. Washington, and the balance of the campus community. The professional development provided to the faculty at Cypress did not cost the DOE any money because the school principal raised the funding from outside sources such as NCLR. The faculty received professional development regularly from Cambridge Learning, AUSSIE, etc.