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Deja vu

February 8, 2012

For second year in a row, a new Moskowitz school is being sued

by Geoff Decker, at 6:40 pm

Sabrina Tan, a lawyer for Advocates for Justice, describes the firm's suit over a new charter school.

Backed by a law firm that has battled the Department of Education in court repeatedly over the past year, a group of Cobble Hill parents announced today that they are suing to stop Eva Moskowitz’s Brooklyn Success Academy 3 from moving into their neighborhood.

Fifteen public school parents signed onto the suit, which Advocates for Justice said it would be filing today.

The suit claims the city and Moskowitz circumvented state education laws when they abruptly changed plans for the school late last year. BSA 3 was originally approved for either District 13 or District 14, but the city revised its proposal in late October and announced the school would instead share a building with two high schools and a special needs elementary school in District 15.

Opposition to the plan quickly mounted and reached a climax when protesters clashed with Moskowitz at a meeting she hosted for prospective parents in November. The city’s Panel for Educational Policy approved the co-location plan two weeks later.

It’s the second time in as many years that a Success school has been the subject of a lawsuit from the surrounding community. Last April, parents on the Upper West Side filed suit against the city’s plan to site a Success school on the Brandeis campus, charging that the network was not serving the needy student population that was written into its charter. The suit was dismissed just weeks before the school was slated to open.

Advocates for Justice was not involved in that suit, but it has been an active litigant against the DOE over the last year. The group sued over the botched parent leader election proceedings last spring and a case over collecting costs from co-located charter schools is still making its way through the courts.

The latest lawsuit seeks to challenge the legality of the co-location plan based on at least two provisions in the state’s 2010 charter law. The lawsuit alleges that Moskowitz failed to revise her charter application when the city changed its plans to site the school in a new district. The SUNY Charter School Institute, Success’ authorizer, has written that Moskowitz did not need to revise her charter because the school was not moved outside of borough of Brooklyn, and since New York City was considered one district, state regulations didn’t require a revision.

The suit also claims that Moskowitz’s original application met a requirement for community input in districts 13 and 14 but not in District 15, where the school is set to open.

“If they had followed the rules and bothered to ask parents and the community in our building and in District 15 for input, this co-location would not be happening next year,” said Colleen Mingo, a parent leader at the School for International Studies, one of the schools in the Baltic Street building where BSA 3 is slated to open.

In a statement, Success spokeswoman Jenny Sedlis said more parents had already submitted applications for the Cobble Hill school than it would be able to accommodate. She dismissed the lawsuit and press conference — which was organized by Alliance for Quality Education, a union-back advocacy group – as being about the “politics of education.”

“It’s unfortunate that a few adults intent on protecting the status quo would sue to sacrifice the possibility of a brighter education and future for hundreds of children, and we will fight this lawsuit vigorously to ensure that doesn’t happen,” Sedlis said.

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  • nuff said

    Why don’t they sue based on Moskowitz outrageous salary. If  Charters are publicly funded and Cuomo wants salary caps at $199,000 why is she allowed to pull down over $450,000 plus bonuses etc etc? Can anybody even determine her total compensation?

  • Guest

    How can the DoE say they can’t afford new space (which their reps did say at a district 2 CEC meeting) and then turn around and give space to charters. I’m sure a lot of those applications to Success are from parents worried they won’t get a spot in their zoned school. District 15 (and District 2 where Eva has her sights set on building 2 schools) are bursting with great schools. We need more of those, not sucking money, resources and space into charter schools where they are not wanted.

  • UWSide parent

    Jenny Sedlis has blathered on for years about Success’ big waitlist and their overwhelming volume of applications, but it is bogus. Upper West Success couldn’t even fill itself up. Families just apply to everything they can, even things they would only choose as a last resort, and then when they get into their zoned school or a G&T or magnet school, they go. The numbers Success uses are false indicators of demand. More Sedlis hot air.

  • teacher

    I heard it was over a half million dollars a year…

  • bee

    Good luck to the Cobble Hill parents! It’s time for the good side to win. Let’s keep our public schools public!

  • Local Communities Matter
  • Mcruz

    It is regrettable that some feel the need to drain resources away from educating children in order to bring seemingly frivolous lawsuits.  If more effort was employed into building bridges between the schools, rather than resorting to ugly “turf wars” that help no one, maybe our students would be better served. As a parent who is extremely invested in my child’s education and social development, I feel strongly  that adults need to focus their energies on devising comprehensive and meaningful lesson plans, and modeling positive collaborative behaviors for children to learn.  Suing only creates more acrimony and loss of educational resources that no one can afford.

  • Local Communities Matter

    So what do you suggest local communities, who are disenfranchized by the Mayor’s policies, do? They want what you’re writing about, to be a part of the decision making process concerning the schools in their community and the education that their children receive.

  • a15parent

    Mercuz,
    The DOE would not be spending money on this lawsuit had Success Charter, the DOE, and  SUNY played by the rules and followed the law.  

  • LeFlerp

    Here’s an open invitation for some enterprising critic of charter schools:  Try to quantify the resource drain created by charter schools.  It would require these questions to be answered:  (1) how many dollars are going to charters in a given budget year; (2) how many students are attending charters; (3) if all of these students were to enroll in non-charter public schools, what costs (administrative, capital, or other) would that impose upon those schools; and (4) what additional system-wide costs would such enrollment shift impose (such as salaries and benefits for additional teachers).  Because public education should be freely accessible, this analysis should be based on the assumption that every student who attends a public charter school would be enrolled in a public non-charter school if the charter school didn’t exist. 

    Maybe I’ve missed it, but I’ve never seen this done.  If I were to see a compelling, credible demonstration of the extent of the resource drain created by charter schools, I’d be very likely to hop on the anti-charter bandwagon.

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