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.

The Department of Education said today it would no longer seek to close the middle grades of Wadleigh Secondary School of Performing and Visual Arts or the KAPPA VII middle school in Brooklyn. Teachers reported getting the news at the end of the day today, one day before the citywide school board was set to vote ont he closure proposals.

Chancellor Dennis Walcott said the department had made the decision after listening to community input at public meetings and behind the scenes.

“While these two schools continue to struggle, what we learned is that they are also poised to quickly improve,” he said in a statement.

But supporters of the schools, particularly Wadleigh, said the city’s statement was a smokescreen and said they would still travel to Thursday’s Panel for Educational Policy meeting in Brooklyn to protest closure votes for 23 other schools.

The real reason for the unusual reversal, they said, was that influential politicians in Harlem had sprung to Wadleigh’s aid — and threatened the Bloomberg administration in the process.

By keeping Wadleigh open, “they’re trying to divert attention from the issue that legislators are finally stepping forward against mayoral control,” said Noah Gotbaum, a member of the district’s elected parent council who had been involved in efforts to save the school.

Angered by Wadleigh’s position on the chopping block, Assemblyman Keith Wright had crafted legislation to roll back mayoral control and give some authority to other entities, such as the State Education Department and the City Council.

Wright had previously been undecided on mayoral control of the city schools. But he joined a growing number of New Yorkers who are dissatisfied with the governance structure after nearly a decade under Mayor Bloomberg. A poll released today found that just 13 percent of city voters believe the mayor should retain sole control of the schools after Bloomberg leaves office in 2013, a number that has been more than halved in the last five years.

Today, Wright said that he was pleased by the news that Wadleigh would be saved but would still circulate his bill, a first step toward formally introducing it.

“I think it’s still appropriate,” he said. ”It was clear on its face the Bloomberg administration was trying to clear the space for some co-location of a charter school, which is absolutely ridiculous. I just thought it was wrong.”

The charter school, Harlem Success Academy, was approved last year to move into the building in September and will do so as planned, according to department officials.

That issue has Wadleigh’s advocates unwilling to celebrate victory. A woman who answered the phone at the school this afternoon said that department officials had informed students and teachers in two separate meetings this afternoon about the change. She said teachers and staff were relieved by the news but wanted to know whether the middle school, which enrolled just 86 students last year, would be able to expand.

“Before we jump up and down we need to know the answers,” said the woman, who said she did not want her name published because she was afraid of reprisal.

“Of course we’re happy that we’re not being closed but it’s still a perplexing feeling,” said Anthony Klug, Wadleigh’s union chapter leader. “We still strongly believe that no school should be in this predicament.”

And Paul McIntosh, the school’s librarian who had recruited fiery scholar Cornel West to Wadleigh’s defense, said he thought the building would have space for a third school only if Wadleigh’s substantial arts spaces are reduced. (A second school in the building, Frederick Douglass Academy II, made the department’s closure shortlist but was ultimately not selected to close.)

“While one can applaud what happened today, it still doesn’t rest well with me as far as what I have observed,” McIntosh said.

One of the many elected officials who had sprung to Wadleigh’s defense, City Councilwoman Inez Dickens heard the news by phone directly from Walcott this afternoon and asked whether HSA would still move into the building, according to a spokeswoman, Lynnette Veslaco.

“The fight’s not over, but it’s a good day today,” Velsaco said. “The council member still has an issue with the co-location.”

Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, who had appeared at a raucous public hearing about Wadleigh’s closure last month, said he hoped the news would augur additional resources for the school.

“These turnabouts are all too rare, and the victory is a credit to this vibrant school community that never gave up,” he said in a statement. “I look forward to working further with parents and teachers to keep Wadleigh on the right track, and to ensur[ing] today’s announcement is followed by the concrete support Wadleigh needs to succeed.”

Hazel Dukes, head of New York City’s chapter of the NAACP, said she was impressed by tightly organized defense of Wadleigh that she experienced at the closure hearing. That organization must have frightened city officials, she speculated.

“They knew that hell was going to break lose” if Wadleigh were closed, she said.

It’s a sentiment that Wright seconded. “Wadleigh was the line in the sand,” he said. “They would have had to come through the community before we’d let them close it down.”

City officials denied the charge that Wadleigh’s last-minute save was politically motivated.

“We make decisions based on the outcomes we believe we can achieve for students, and over the course of our engagement process we came to believe that Wadleigh’s Middle School has a good chance of turning around under new leadership,” said Frank Thomas, a department spokesman.

The current principal, Herma Hall, announced last week that this Friday would be her last day at the school, and next week, Tyee Chin, who currently works at Brooklyn’s Edward R. Murrow High School, will take over.

A scant number of schools have been removed from the closure list at the eleventh hour before, often after receiving a groundswell of support. Last year, the city withdrew its proposal to close Brooklyn’s P.S. 114 after community leaders and elected officials, including de Blasio, argued that the school had been undermined by an incompetent principal. In 2010, the department decided to phase out only portions of Alfred E. Smith Career and Technical Education High School after originally suggesting that the entire school should be closed. (Ultimately, no school closed that year because a lawsuit voided the closure votes conducted in February.)

But many schools that are now just a day from a closure vote have had vigorous defenses mounted on their behalf, to no avail. And the second school removed from the closure list today, KAPPA VII, hadn’t mounted a perceptible defense at all.

The city said the principal who took over at KAPPA VII this year had made positive changes that appeared likely to continue.

Still, even the president of KAPPA VII’s local parent council, Khem Irby, was surprised when she learned the school would remain open. She said she thought a different school in the district that had demonstrated community support, Satellite III, was a more likely candidate for resurrection.

“We were expecting it to be Satellite III, not KAPPA VII, if anything. definitely,” she said. “They’re not doing what we asked. We just had a long meeting with DOE last night and we asked for Satellite III.”

Satellite III is one of 23 schools that face closure votes Thursday night by the Panel for Educational Policy, which has never rejected a city proposal. Twenty of them would be phased out and three are middle schools that would be closed.

On Tuesday, more than 1,200 charter school parents traveled to Albany as part of Lobby Day. Their main ask was that legislators set aside seats for them on the city’s elected parent councils. The councils, known as Community Education Councils, frequently discuss charter schools but have no formal authority over them.

A Department of Education spokesman told me on Tuesday that the city’s position on the request had not changed since 2009, when officials argued that seating charter parents on CECs would represent an inappropriate conflation of charter and district school management.

As it turns out, that’s not quite true. The city hasn’t actually made up its mind about whether to support a bill introduced by two legislators — Assemblyman Peter Rivera, a Bronx Democrat, and State Sen. Marty Golden, a Republican from Brooklyn — that would reserve one of the 11 seats on each council for a charter school parent.

I heard today from Micah Lasher, the city’s chief lobbyist in Albany, who said that the city had taken a deeper look at the issue on request from charter advocates and found merit in their argument.

“There’s a recognition that the CECs are a primary arena in which education debate play out on the local level and at the moment charter parents’ voices are largely not part of those debates in large measure because they are not well represented on the CECs,” Lasher said. “We’re quite sympathetic to that concern.”

But at the same time, he said, charter schools are distinct from district schools for a reason. The Bloomberg administration has encouraged charter schools to proliferate and has promised to fast-track dozens of new schools.

“Our longstanding concern about preserving the independence and autonomy of charter schools that has been so critical to their success remains a concern,” Lasher said.

A Department of Education spokesman, Frank Thomas, explained today that the department supports opportunities for all parents to get involved, no matter what kind of school they attend. But he suggested that installing charter school parents on CECs could undermine a movement that has been based on separation from the traditional district school bureaucracy.

“We want to see all parents of public school children — whether they attend a charter or a non-charter school — get more involved, and applaud the Charter Center for pursuing this goal,” Thomas said in a statement. “At the same time, real autonomy has been critical to the success of the city’s public charter schools, and we would not want to erode that independence and inadvertently give those pushing an anti-charter agenda the power to throw up more roadblocks.”

He added, “Given these goals and concerns, we will follow the discussion in Albany and reserve judgment on this legislation.”

Akeem Pearce, a Robeson senior, eats lunch in the student lounge shortly after 2:30 p.m.

By the time afternoon periods roll around, Stefanie Siegel struggles to keep her English classes focused on the assignments in front of them. Many of the students haven’t eaten since the early morning, or the night before, and they watch the clock for 2:01 p.m.

That’s when class ends and lunch begins at Paul Robeson High School, an Crown Heights school in its first year of phasing out.

“I teach a senior English class in the morning and afternoon. Those [afternoon] kids were really hard to deal with, and it was mostly because they were hungry,” Siegel said. “My first period was 10 a.m., and that group was much easier to work with. There’s just a huge difference.”

Students start school at 8:35 a.m. Some hop off campus to buy food after seventh period, shortly after 1 p.m. Siegel said, and many teachers allow them to eat the food at their desks.

“We have some really old-school teachers who say, ‘no eating in the class,’ but even they have had to allow it,” she said.

“If you don’t make it for the breakfast program — and a lot of them don’t — and if you don’t bring something with you, you haven’t had any breakfast,” she said. “These kids might not have had dinner last night, either.”

Citing poor attendance and low graduation rates, the city decided to close Robeson last year, despite a vigorous defense by students at raucous public hearings. This year, Robeson did not admit a ninth-grade class.

Now that Robeson has started to shrink, it must jostle for cafeteria time with two new schools that have opened in the building, The other schools offer lunch to students from 11:42 a.m. into the early afternoon.

Last year, Robeson students were served lunch over three periods, between the mid-morning and the early afternoon. Now, all but a tiny handful eat at the same time, after classes have concluded for the day.

Some Robeson students are scheduled for lunch at 11:42 a.m., according to a department spokeswoman, Marge Feinberg. But Siegel said the lunch slot, part of a program for a small handful of chronically absent students, was added only this week. More than a dozen students said after school Tuesday they did not know about the early lunch period option.

Principal Ronald Wells, who came to Robeson last year after several stints as an interim principal, declined to comment.

A Robeson High School schedule.

But Siegel explained that the administration believes the timing of the free cafeteria meal is ideal for getting students to stay after school, when tutoring is offered.

It’s a position that resonates with some students.

“[The timing] used to be more of a problem,” said Lizabeth Cooper, a Robeson senior who represents students on the citywide Panel for Educational Policy, which voted to close the school. “Students used to leave at lunch time and not come back. This is making them stick through the day.”

But the attendance strategy comes at a cost, many Robeson students say.

“It’d be great if lunch were earlier, because I’m starving by the end of the day,” said Angel Parrales, a senior. “Teachers will let us eat during class, but it’s just chips, not a full meal. You can’t live off chips alone.”

At 2:30 p.m. Tuesday, senior Akeem Pearce said over a takeout container of fried chicken and rice that he often doesn’t have time for breakfast, so he relies on vending-machine fare to hold him over until dismissal.

“It’s tough,” he said. “Later in the day, my stomach [is] talking to me, and the teacher is talking to me at the same time. I don’t know who to listen to.”

Nearly twice as many New Yorkers trust the teachers union to protect students’ interests than they do Bloomberg, according to a new poll out of Quinnipiac University. Bloomberg’s approval rating on schools has hovered around 25 percent since early 2011, according to the poll.

The poll, conducted Jan. 30-Feb. 5, found that 56 percent of registered voters in New York City say they trust the union more to go to bat for students. Less than a third, 31 percent, said they trust Bloomberg more. (The poll of 1,222 registered voters had a margin of error of 2.8 percent.)

Among households containing public school students, the split was even more pronounced. Just 21 percent of those voters picked Bloomberg, and 69 percent chose the teachers union. Parents’ backed the union more often than even households with union members.

The news comes in an education-packed poll conducted after a month in which in a showdown over new teacher evaluations led Bloomberg and Gov. Andrew Cuomo each to ratchet up rhetoric against teachers and their unions. The poll found that the percentage of New Yorkers with favorable opinions of teachers had fallen, from 54 percent last March to 47 percent now.

But while a different poll earlier this week found high approval for Cuomo’s school policies, a set of questions designed to assess New Yorkers’ feelings about a slate of policy initiatives Bloomberg proposed during his State of the City address last month elicited mixed results.

In that speech, Bloomberg proposed increasing the salaries of teachers who receive high ratings on new evaluations and offering loan forgiveness to top college students who become city teachers.

The poll asked New Yorkers for their opinions on those ideas and others. Here’s what they said:

Overall, according to the poll, just 26 percent of New Yorkers approve of how Bloomberg has handled the schools. That figure is statistically identical to the 25 percent low Bloomberg received last spring, during the waning days of Cathie Black’s brief tenure as chancellor. Fifty-seven percent of poll respondents said Bloomberg’s takeover of the schools had been a failure, the same as last year.

Black New Yorkers and those living in the Bronx gave Bloomberg his lowest approval ratings on schools, 21 percent and 19 percent respectively. He did best among New Yorkers making more than $100,000 a year: A full third of them said they supported his schools management.

The news for Chancellor Dennis Walcott was also not good. His approval numbers stayed the same since December, at 34 percent, but his disapproval rate has continued to inch upward and now stands at 37 percent.

Overall, just 13 percent of New Yorkers said the mayor should retain sole control of the city schools after Bloomberg leaves office in 2013. Two-thirds said a new mayor should share control with an independent school board. The law authorizing mayoral control of the city schools is set to expire in 2016.

Half of respondents say they want their next mayor to be someone with government, rather than business, experience. But they gave only mixed reviews to the job performance of three city officials who are plotting mayoral runs: City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, and Comptroller John Liu.

Charter Parent Action Network Director Valerie Babb addresses charter school parents and students in Albany. (Photo courtesy of the New York City Charter School Center)

An annual caravan of charter school parents to Albany took place today with a specific mission: convince legislators to approve a bill allowing charter parents to run for the city’s local parent councils.

It’s a battle that charter advocates will have to fight without the Department of Education’s help. The city has never supported allowing charter parents to run for parent councils, even as it has encouraged the proliferation of charter schools and allowed them to operate in district space.

State law requires that each school district in the city field an elected parent council, known as a Community Education Council, to provide an avenue for parents to weigh in on schools policy. Some of the council’s duties, such as presiding over public hearings about co-locations, involve charter school issues. But the Bloomberg administration has constrained the councils’ authority and their only statutory function is to redraw school zone lines, which do not affect charter schools. They do not actually approve or reject co-locations.

Still, the CECs are seen as one of the few formal venues for parents to voice opinions about department policies, and charter school parents see the exclusion as an equity issue. They have convinced two legislators — Assemblyman Peter Rivera, a Bronx Democrat, and State Sen. Marty Golden, a Republican from Brooklyn — to introduce a bill that would reserve one of the 11 seats on each council for a charter parent.

“In order to protect our children and their continued access to a great public education, charter parents need and deserve a seat at the table to help inform the decisions about the schools in their neighborhoods,” said Valerie Babb, director of the Charter Parents Action Network, in a statement. “By supporting this legislation, our lawmakers will send a strong signal to families that their voices carry just as much weight as other public school parents in their districts.”

The city’s position is that the same signal would also undermine the very foundation of what makes charter schools unique. In 2009, District 1′s council invited charter parents to join and said they would lobby for a change to let the parents participate. At the time, a department spokeswoman pointed out that there is a reason the state law and city regulations do not have a mechanism for including charter parents in district committees.

“What makes a charter school a charter school is that they operate outside the jurisdiction of the district,” the spokeswoman said.

Today, department officials said the city’s position remains the same: Seating charter parents on CECs would represent an inappropriate conflation of charter and district school management. Charter schools and district schools are governed by different state laws.

It is true that charter school parents typically cannot enter the regular CEC election process — a process that has always attracted few candidates and last year was spectacularly botched. But they are in fact eligible to serve on CECs if they have children in both district and charter schools, had a child in a district school in the last two years, or are appointed by the borough president.

Lisa Donlan, president of CEC 1, said today that few charter parents avail themselves of those options.

“Why would they make that their main ask when they could do it now through a variety of mechanisms and they aren’t doing it?” she asked. “They don’t necessarily need to go up and change the legislation.”

The request was the centerpiece of this year’s Charter Lobby Day, which drew more than 1,200 charter parents to Albany today to push the CEC issue and other equity concerns. Last year, more than 2,000 people made the trek and focused on funding, particularly for facilities. The year before that, parents sat in on a budget hearing and took aim at a state law that capped the number of charter schools; later that spring, legislators raised the cap.

But while the size of the caravan was smaller this year, the number of schools represented increased. Of the city’s 136 charter schools, 114 sent parents to Albany today, where they were joined by parents from 22 additional schools across the state. Last year, parents from 80 of the city’s then-125 schools participated.

A father and son walk uptown after joining crowds to celebrate the New York Giants' Super Bowl victory.

City students were among the hundreds of thousands of New York Giants fans who flooded the streets around City Hall today to celebrate the team’s Super Bowl victory.

I took a lunchtime walk near our Lafayette Street office to soak in the spectacle and encountered, amid the crowds, families who had pulled their children from school today for the ticker-tape parade along Broadway’s Canyon of Heroes.

It’s a practice that is not officially sanctioned but got encouragement from former Mayor Rudy Giuliani in 2000, when he said students should be allowed to skip school for the Yankees’ World Series parade, as long as they read a book about baseball as well. After the Yankees’ 1998 World Series victory, high school attendance was 72 percent on the day of the parade, down from about 85 percent on typical days.

The Giants have been less of a draw in the past. In 2008, the last time the Giants won the Super Bowl, school attendance fell by about 4 percentage points on parade day across all grade levels.

About 20 seniors from Queens’ Bayside High School had gathered at the corner of Howard and Lafayette streets after the festivities.

“We were very excited. We didn’t go to school,” said one student who declined to give her name because she had skipped school. “The teachers know we’re here, but no, none came with us.”

Outside Roll and Go Pizza at the corner of Broadway and Franklin Street, I met five students from Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School who said they had traveled from Brooklyn in a group of 20 but had lost their classmates in the crowds.

Senior Rifat Ahmed said she was too young to help celebrate the Giants’ 2008 win but had skipped school to celebrate the Yankees’ 2009 World Series victory. She said she went to FDR for two periods this morning — for a free period and gym class — before boarding the subway to Manhattan. (Another student said he hadn’t attended school at all today.)

“I just wanted the feeling of being there, with the toilet paper being thrown, and the footballs,” Ahmed said.

FDR is the school GothamSchools featured today in a story about teachers’ efforts to help an 18-year-old enrollee overcome illiteracy. It is also facing “turnaround,” or a process in which it would close and reopen with a new name and half of teachers replaced.

Ahmed said the city’s turnaround plan was misguided for FDR, which she noted serves many students who are considered English language learners and also routinely sends students to selective colleges with full scholarships.

“Our school has the greatest staff ever,” said Ahmed, a former executive in FDR’s student council. “Mayor Bloomberg — he’s not getting to know anything that’s happening there.”

Five students from Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School who attended the parade. Senior Rifat Ahmed is at center.

This story originally appeared in Miller-McCune. Since this story was completed, New York City has said it would require Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School to undergo “turnaround,” which would cause the school name to disappear and half the teachers to be replaced.

At 18 years old, Moustafa Elhanafi has embarked on an academic journey that has brought him tantalizingly close to obtaining a high school diploma. (Ben Preston)

On a hot, sunny September afternoon — the sticky kind so common in New York City that time of year — a tall, dark-haired young man with his shoulders hunched slightly forward padded into Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School’s back entrance and into a small courtyard. Moustafa Elhanafi sought the school’s principal. He needed her help. Not being a student there, he didn’t know what she looked like or where he would find her inside the massive, unfamiliar building. In the courtyard beneath the shade of a wide-leafed tree, looking for crafty students cutting class, stood Principal Geraldine Maione.

“I saw her, and I didn’t know if she was the principal, but she was wearing a suit, so I asked her if she was,” said Moustafa.

Maione welcomed him inside and listened to what he had to say. With his father beside him, Moustafa told Maione how, at 18 years old, he still didn’t know how to read or write. He had tried and failed at other schools, and he was willing to work as hard as he could to learn, but Moustafa said he needed help. After 15 minutes relating his frustrations, he began to cry. Maione, too, became emotional. She told him she knew just the person who could help. As if on cue, special education teacher Rosalie Dolan strode around the corner on her way home for the day, right into the tear-streaked faces of Moustafa and Maione.

“He cried, she cried, I cried,” recalled Dolan, relating the details in the thick accent shared by so many of the South Brooklyn school’s teachers. “I don’t know how to explain it; it was like a rainforest. I think we all had a spiritual experience that day.”

The trio’s first meeting that day launched Moustafa on an academic journey that has brought him tantalizingly close to obtaining a high school diploma. Outside of school hours, and without pay, Dolan began the painstaking process of teaching Moustafa how to read, one letter at a time.

That was in 2008, at the end of Moustafa’s three-year run at the Roy Campanella Occupational Training Center — known colloquially as the OTC — a school for developmentally disabled children. The New York City public school system — the largest in the world — has many resources at its disposal, but as Moustafa’s case suggests, it’s not always successful at plugging every student into the right ones.

Moustafa had been enrolled in what is known as an inclusionary program — special education classes sponsored by the OTC, but held on the campus of John Dewey High School, the conventional school right next door. But Moustafa felt out of place in OTC classes. He couldn’t get the hang of reading and writing, but he was different from his classmates, most of whom suffered from Down syndrome, mental retardation, and other severe disabilities. The OTC is well known for helping students with such problems, but its approach wasn’t working for Moustafa.

Moustafa had asked his teacher, Marian Bruce, to help him learn to read, and said that she invited him to show up before class for tutoring. But at those sessions, something was missing. He recalls being asked to copy lessons for class onto the board, mimicry that didn’t help him correlate sounds to letters. Plus, he said, “I’m a slow writer. I had to go one letter at a time, and by the time I finished, the bell rang and class started. It didn’t help at all.”

Frustrated and depressed, Moustafa eventually stopped going to school. His father didn’t like what he saw. “I said, ‘Moustafa, you need to read and write to get a job,’” recalled Ahmed Elhanafi, a now-retired taxi driver who raised his two sons in Bensonhurst, not far from FDR. Ahmed pep-talked his son into asking for help from the principal of the high school in their neighborhood, starting the trek to Geraldine Maione’s shady tree.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Moustafa Elhanafi gets tutored on the subjects that give him difficulty. (Ben Preston)

Moustafa Elhanafi was born in New York City to Egyptian immigrant parents, both literate in English and Arabic. At age 2 he moved with his mother to Egypt while his father stayed behind. His parents divorced a short time later. Moustafa stayed in Egypt for the next six years, speaking only Arabic, but never learned how to read or write the language. When he was 8, his mother moved back to New York, and Moustafa moved in with his father in Bensonhurst, where he’s been ever since. Like most other kids in New York City, he was enrolled at the neighborhood public school.

After a year at Nelson A. Rockefeller School, school authorities decided that Moustafa needed extra help, and in September 1999, he was transferred to Alfred De B.Mason, a larger school with a more robust special education program. Yearly evaluations by school counselors are normal for any student, but Moustafa’s recommended he also see an outside psychiatric specialist to see why his classroom performance wasn’t up to par. Ahmend Elhanafi said he did what they told him to do for his son’s education.

When Moustafa was 11 years old, he was diagnosed as mentally retarded. According to the New York City Department of Education’s rules, every special ed student’s “Individualized Education Plan” is updated on a yearly basis, and students are reevaluated every three years. By 2005, when he was 15, Moustafa’s educational situation hadn’t improved, and the Department of Education classified him ineducable. Too old to continue going to Alfred De B.Mason, Moustafa’s next stop was the OTC.

Moustafa says that a typical day at the OTC included menial tasks like stringing beads onto thread and sorting piles of sugar cubes. “They give you a bag of sugar cubes and you take two cubes out and put them in a Ziploc,” he said. “That’s it. After you’ve filled dozens of bags with dozens of cubes, they take you back to the school to sit there for hours and do nothing.”

Teachers and administrators who worked with Moustafa at the OTC and Dewey High School declined to comment on his time there. (OTC Principal Wendy Weiss said she did not feel comfortable speaking about Moustafa’s case, and other teachers and administrators at FDR cited concerns about violating the NYC Department of Education’s information policy.)

In the midst of this drudgery, Moustafa’s desire to learn to read and write kicked in when his mother started the search for a bride for him, the normal route to marriage in his traditional Islamic culture. The girl she had in mind was still in Egypt, but when Moustafa met her during a trip there to visit family, he remembers liking her instantly. The match was arranged when he was 16, steeling Moustafa’s resolve to attain literacy.

“When you get engaged, you don’t want to be like that anymore,” he said. “You want to show your wife that you can be a man and work hard.”

Despite his drive, he struggled in vain to get a grasp on reading. His father says Moustafa became depressed, and was crying a lot. To make matters worse, he was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. “He was taking the Ritalin for one year and he wasn’t eating,” said Ahmed Elhanafi, who canceled his son’s prescription during the summer of 2008, a year after it had begun. “It didn’t make him smarter; it didn’t help. He was in the wrong school.”

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Rosalie Dolan knows what it’s like to be illiterate. Throughout her childhood and young adult years, neither she nor the New York City public school system knew that she was dyslexic and diplopic (double vision). Like Moustafa, she had been deemed mentally retarded and uneducable. She was married at 16 and had three children by age 20 but no high school diploma. It wasn’t until her kids started pestering her to read to them that she really felt the need to learn how.

“Nobody knew I couldn’t read and write — not even my husband,” she said. “My kids wanted me to read them the Little Golden Books, and I was like, ‘Uh oh.’”

Rosalie Dolan devoted her free time to helping Moustafa learn how to read. (Ben Preston)

She said that she let her brother in on the secret, and that he had promised to help her learn how to read. But he was murdered before they could get started. Just after he died, she remembers spying an open Scrabble set on the living room table. In a moment of frustration, she hurled it across the room.

“The chips went in a big arc and landed all over the floor,” she said. “When I bent down to start picking them up, I grabbed [one of the pieces] and felt the little indentation the letter makes in the wood. I’d never that noticed before.”

She realized that what she saw as a backward railroad sign was what everyone else recognizes as the letter “R.” That tiny, tactile moment started her down a long road that led her to a GED, college, graduate school and eventually, teaching children with learning disabilities how to read. 

“Moustafa is just a 30-years-later version of what happened to me with the Board of Ed,” she said. “We could really bash the Board of Ed for destroying this student’s morale, but that’s not what we’re trying to prove. With the right amount of motivation and attention, you can do anything.”

When Moustafa came to her in the fall of 2008, she said they both had their work cut out for them. He didn’t yet recognize any of the letters, couldn’t sound many of them out, and had a particular problem with vowels. But he seemed excited to learn with his new tutor, and dove into reading instruction using the Wilson Reading System, a method of sound-symbol association entailing “tapping out” letters one by one — cards with pictures, letters, and phonetic spellings for A, apple, ah; B, bat, buh; and so on. Moustafa wasn’t enrolled in school during that time. Dolan spent a couple of hours with him after regular school hours every week — the two of them seated among two crooked rows of empty desks in her small second-floor classroom at FDR. The rest of the time Moustafa was at home, practicing and practicing tapping. C, cat, cuh; D, dog, duh …

“It helps you to understand the sounds of the letters,” said Moustafa. “Then, it comes automatically. I’m not tapping anymore. Now I’m just reading it – I go with the flow.”

It took six weeks of intensive study before Moustafa was able to read his first sentence: “The rat is mad.” Before long, he could read an excerpt from the Declaration of Independence. Then came comprehension of what he was reading.

After a year and a half of tutoring, Dolan said Moustafa asked her if he could start taking academic classes at FDR and work toward getting his high school diploma. For someone to begin not just high school, but school in general, at 18 years old is unusual, but she was impressed by his hard work and dedication, and helped him take the next step. It was time to see Maione again.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

FDR High School’s hallways are a microcosm of the world. Around every corner, a cacophony of different languages meets passersby as 3,500 students from all kinds of backgrounds move through the building. But it’s a happy world; a well-ordered one where students and teachers appear to get along. Geraldine Maione was the school’s principal for six years, and until being transferred to William Grady High School in Brighton Beach in the fall of 2010, she fostered a “kids first” atmosphere.

“What she did was promote a culture — you had to go out of your way to help kids,” said Stanley Fevrine, 31, a teaching assistant who works in the special education department with at-risk teens. Fevrine’s familiarity with Maione’s teaching ethic goes beyond his job at FDR. He was a student in Maione’s social studies class when she was a teacher at Grady and still remembers the first time he met her. “In steps Ms. Maione — this short, gray-haired Italian lady — she had a presence about her. I don’t want to overdo it, but you know when [Michael] Jordan steps on the court? It’s like that.”

Maione has a reputation as a tough teacher and a strict administrator, but also as someone students could rely on when they needed help with just about anything. She remembers teachers calling her stupid when she was a student on Manhattan’s then-gritty Lower East Side. As a grad student at NYU, one of her professors uttered words that she has carried with her ever since: “You have the power to destroy the spirit of a child.”

When Dolan approached her in March 2010 about getting Moustafa enrolled in diploma-oriented academic classes, she said Maione was unflinchingly supportive of the idea, even though Moustafa had no formal education. Enrolling him at FDR meant that if he tried and failed, the school’s rating would be pulled down, taking it just a little farther from the number of four-year graduations required by the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program. At a school like FDR — with a heavy concentration of non-native English speakers — every point counts. Maione was not deterred, and despite the objections of a couple of teachers toward his enrolling late in the term, Moustafa began classes the next month.

As when he learned to read, Moustafa at first had a tough time with classes. Dolan said the teachers who had initially objected to his enrollment came around when they saw how much effort he put into his schoolwork. Since he’s been at FDR, he hasn’t missed a single day of school.

“Quite frankly, I’ve never seen someone try so hard,” said Anastasia Novik, 28, Moustafa’s algebra teacher. “He knows he’s weak, so he gets to school early and stays late.”

At 6 feet, 4 inches, Moustafa towers over most teachers and students, and looks a bit like a ship navigating a sea of people in the school’s busy hallways. He most often wears a shy smile, and has a gentle manner; Maione calls him a gentle giant.

Moustafa doesn’t have a lunch period, and is enrolled in classes eight periods a day. Twice a week, he meets Dolan at 6:30 a.m. for tutoring. Every day, he has a “resource period,” where he gets extra help in subjects he’s having trouble understanding. Novik said she often tutors him during the period she has open to plan and prepare for other classes. He has a job at the school, assisting teachers with administrative tasks.

“He’s a lot smarter than [the school system] gave him credit for,” said Joe DeRanieri, 57, a 19-year veteran of FDR’s special education program who runs the resource room. “They had him in a very low-functioning program, and with the help of Rosalie Dolan and others, he’s almost up to speed.”

When Moustafa gets home from school, his dad fixes him a quick dinner — usually something Egyptian. Ahmed Elhanafi is a constant presence in his sons’ lives. One moment, he’s helping one of them with homework; the next, he’s cooking dinner or doing laundry. Moustafa’s brother Mohammed, 22, who also lives at home, is studying criminal justice at Kingsborough Community College, and hopes to become a cop. While his dad whirls around, Moustafa spends evenings in a chair in their brightly painted living room, studying and doing homework.

“The days are filled with math and science and history,” said Moustafa. “I may not really be that smart, but I worked hard to get to know all this. I needed it in my life.”

Moustafa has passed all of his Regents competency exams — quite an accomplishment for someone who hadn’t taken academic courses before a couple of years ago — and holds a respectable grade point average. After traveling a long, circuitous educational path, Moustafa is scheduled to graduate in June at the age of 21.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

The New York City Department of Education is responsible for educating millions of students, and while it does provide special education resources such as the OTC, some, like Moustafa, can slip through the cracks. District 75 — of which the OTC is part — is the department’s special education section dedicated to severely disabled students, and most of those students graduate with diplomas that aren’t recognized by colleges, universities, or the military. Until a few years ago, Moustafa was on track to join their ranks.

Terry Manger, a school psychologist working at both New Utrecht and FDR High Schools, said that while she’s only known Moustafa since March 2010, there are many factors that could have led to his being diagnosed as mentally retarded. English is his second language. He’s shy. He’s emotionally sensitive. All of those, she said, are things that can affect a student’s performance.

“This is why we have a process where we can always reevaluate and readjust,” she said, adding that three-year evaluations are the best way to keep on top of a student’s changing conditions. “I think that what Moustafa got at FDR was a lot more individual attention. It’s not a question of what someone did or didn’t do — it’s not even the extra mile. It’s the one-on-one.”

Dolan continues to tutor Moustafa before school two mornings per week, still without being paid for it. She has kept records on his progress since they began working together, and would eventually like to use the data to complete a Ph.D. dissertation she postponed in the mid-1990s when life got in the way. She hopes to see Moustafa graduate and go on to college.

Although he is no longer engaged (the girl’s father called off the engagement shortly after her mother died two years ago), Moustafa is determined to get his diploma and go to college. He thinks he’d like to be a pharmacist someday, but right now, simply going to school to learn more is his top goal. His guidance counselor, Helayne Wagner, 54, and several of his teachers said that as he has learned more and more in school, Moustafa has become more confident.

“It’s a miracle,” said Moustafa’s father. “I live with my son day by day and I’ll never forget the change. He was diagnosed wrong, he was in the wrong school, and he was really struggling. But now he’s really opened his mind, thanks to God.”

Making up for years of lost time, Moustafa takes in opportunities to learn with the voracity of someone who has been starved. During the lunch period he sacrificed, he gets extra credit by taking a music class. He tackles the keys of a piano much as he did the letters of the alphabet — one note at a time. Moustafa plays deliberately, hitting the notes and chords of “Are You Sleeping” with accuracy that’s surprising for someone who had never even touched a piano until a few months earlier.

At his job assisting one of FDR’s business career education teachers, he often helps other students with their classwork, something he wouldn’t have imagined doing even a year ago.

“It’s exciting when you understand what the teacher said,” he explains. “You can be proud to share that lesson with a student who doesn’t.”

Miller-McCune is an online and print magazine produced by the nonprofit Miller-McCune Center for Research, Media, and Public Policy. Ben Preston is a journalist who graduated in 2011 from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Last month, Cuomo vowed to withhold increases in state school aid to districts that do not settle in short order on new teacher evaluations that take test scores into account.

The poll, conducted last week by the Siena Research Institute, asked respondents, “Do you support or oppose the Governor’s plan to link school aid increases to the implementation of an enhanced teacher evaluation process?” Seventy-one percent said they support that plan. (The poll of 807 registered voters had a margin of error of 3.4 percent.)

The support was evenly split between respondents in New York City and the rest of the state and was especially high among black New Yorkers (77 percent) and young people between 18 and 34 (78 percent). Households with union members (61 percent) and Jews (63 percent) supported Cuomo’s plan least often, but even they stood by it in large numbers.

Respondents were more divided when it came to the size of the aid increase. Forty-two percent of New Yorkers said the size of Cuomo’s proposed increase — $800 million, compared to a $1.3 billion cut last year — was “about the right amount,” 39 percent said it was not large enough, and 15 percent said it was too great.

Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott was back in Albany today, where a week ago he met with legislators to push Cuomo’s backup plan on teacher evaluations: to use the budgeting process to impose new evaluations without the consent of local teachers unions.

Today’s trip comes days after Mayor Bloomberg proposed a city budget that increases school funding — based in part on an assumption that the city would pull down its expected aid increase from the state.

The Siena poll had all-around good news for Cuomo. In addition to the teacher evaluation news, Cuomo received a 74 percent approval rating and 52 percent of respondents — tied for the highest ever — said they think the state is moving in the right direction.

The full breakdown of how New Yorkers responded to the poll question about teacher evaluations is below. (Click to enlarge.)

Teachers brainstorm where features of the ideal classroom fit into the Danielson Framework's four domains.

Training sessions about a classroom observation model opened up dialogue between teachers and principals this month, even after becoming a flashpoint in the city and teachers union’s ongoing conflict over a new evaluation system.

The city and union planned to host trainings on the teaching model the city hopes to adopt for its new evaluation system together. But after Mayor Bloomberg ratcheted up rhetoric against the union in the State of the City address, the union cut city officials out of the planning. The sessions began two weeks ago, drawing hundreds of attendees even after the Department of Education emailed principals informing them that the sessions were off.

I spent an afternoon last week at a training session at the United Federation of Teachers’ Bronx headquarters, where well over 100 union chapter leaders and their principals were receiving a crash-course on the Danielson Framework, a classroom observation model that serves as one component of the city’s proposed evaluation system. The city has encouraged principals to practice using the Danielson Framework when conducting informal classroom observations this school year, and 140 schools have been piloting the observation model more formally.

As an impasse over new teacher evaluations has deepened between the city and the UFT, a tension has emerged about whether the model is meant first to help teachers improve — the union’s position — or whether it is a tool to help principals usher weak teachers out of the system, as the city’s rhetoric has sometimes suggested.

Catalina Fortino, the UFT’s vice president of education, said the purpose of the training sessions is to foster “a shared understanding” of the model for teachers and principals — an understanding that the city’s pilot of the Danielson framework had failed to develop, she said.

“I don’t think that the way it was rolled out there was sufficient attention and time given to this type of deep understanding about the framework,” Fortino said. “It can be used as an evaluation tool, but school communities needed to spend more time [and] professional learning around what each domain was, what that practice would look like and sound like in the classroom.”

The advantage of Danielson, teachers and principals said, is that it introduces a common vocabulary to talk about what a well-run classroom should look like, even though activities would be different across different grades. For example, guided reading is a common teaching method in the lower grades, so high school teachers would not be expected to use it. But Danielson unites teaching methods under the category of “professional practices,” which tells observers to look for the use of discussion techniques and instruction materials, and how a teacher paces a lesson and arranges students to work in groups or individually.

“This framework is to make sure we speak the same language, but it’s going to look different depending on the class,” said Jasmine Varela, the principal of P.S. 18, which is not in the pilot program.

But Varela’s optimism that the rubric would help her fairly judge teachers wasn’t universal.

Kathleen Bornkamp, principal of P.S. 97, said some of her teachers are not scoring as high on the rubric as she would expect — precisely because the rubric expects the same general characteristics in all grades.

“You’re just not going to see a kid in kindergarten initiate, “Oh that’s a really good question.” There’s just not that language. But that’s not to say that that teacher isn’t a proficient or a highly proficient teacher,” said Bornkamp, whose school is part of the city’s Danielson pilot. “The rubric doesn’t always reflect what they’re capable of. I have some really good teachers at my school and they’re not always coming out to be the highly developed that they are.”

Plus, she said, practicing observing teachers using Danielson had proved to be time-consuming, said.

“The Danielson Framework makes sense, it’s good teaching,” she said. But “the turnaround is tough — getting it online, getting it written up and getting it out to our staff. They want us to do it like within 24 to 48 hours. That’s the biggest challenge for me as principal.”

Pilot schools are visited by talent coaches every other week, who provide professional development an question and answer sessions to teachers about what the evaluation process looks like now and could look like in the future.

Reviewing the union’s presentation about the long list of responsibilities embedded in the Danielson rubric, a middle school teacher who asked not to be identified said students’ home lives present a formidable challenge.

“This is all great and dandy and I’m all for it, but I’ve always said this, what’s up with the parents? These students come from broken homes,” she said. “When you’re talking about meeting cultural competence with high expectations, these are all our responsibilities, but what are the parents doing?”

But another teacher from a small high school pushed back against that way of thinking. She said she preferred to be assessed according to what she does do, rather than according to what she cannot.

“I teach 150 students and I saw five parents on parent-teacher night, total, for [grades] 10, 11, 12,” the teacher said. “I say, I can’t control the parents, but I can reach the kids. I call, I write letters, and I sit with the kids and I drill it into them.”

Indeed, an activity during the training session revealed that many teachers and principals were largely on the same page about what a new model for observations should assess. Asked to identify signs of good teaching, teachers and principals ranked evidence of student work, students’ ability to articulate what they have learned, and an organized classroom high on their lists.

Most didn’t realize it initially, but they had listed several of the components that make up the Danielson Framework.

Independently, the two special education teachers have been contributing to the GothamSchools Community section for some time, Anderson writing about teaching elementary in the Bronx and Johnson about teaching high school in Brooklyn. Now they’re working together to rethink the very philosophy has driven many recent efforts to improve schools.

In a joint Community section dispatch, they argue for a new way of thinking to replace the idea that schools should be judged by their students’ test scores. They write:

We propose a fundamental shift in the framework and language we use to discuss educational reform. Instead of a framework that views students as products, we propose a framework in which the products of education are viewed as the contexts and content of schools themselves. The schools we produce should be positive and nurturing learning environments where students are engaged in a rich, coherent curriculum. Rather than view our students as widgets, we’d do better to view them as vibrant, dynamic organisms, and view the school, by extension, as an ecosystem. While such a model would make it harder to quantify school quality based on a simple numerical scale, it would enable us to have more productive conversations about systemic education reform, and to take action in targeted ways that will have a sustainable impact.

Read Anderson and Johnson’s full argument — and how it relates to the city’s controversial plan to “turn around” 33 struggling schools — in the Community section.

This story originally appeared in Spanish in El Diario, which supplied the translation.

Esteban Durán, an activist with the community organization El Puente, speaks at P.S. 19's school closure hearing last month. (GothamSchools)

P.S. 19, the Roberto Clemente School, is Annabel Cabal’s second home.

“Three generations of my family have been shaped by this school and I am grateful for the years I had here as a student and for what they’ve done for my kids,” said Cabal, who serves as the president of the school’s parent-teacher board.

For 40 years, the Clemente name has branded P.S. 19, paying tribute to a hero as famous for his humanitarian missions as for his baseball milestones.

Clemente, a Puerto Rican, became the first Hispanic baseball player to reach 3,000 hits, including 240 home runs. The former Pittsburgh Pirate died in an airplane crash on New Year’s Eve of 1972, while he was on route to take supplies to Nicaraguan victims of an earthquake.

On Thursday, the city’s Panel for Educational Policy is expected to approve the closure of P.S. 19. The Department of Education has categorized it as a low-performing school. A number of heated protests and meetings have taken place around the proposed closure.

Aside from stirring debates, the shuttering of schools also seems to do away with their names. P.S. 19 could disappear and be replaced with another school, all in the same building on 325 South 3rd St, in Brooklyn.

But the Roberto Clemente name would not necessarily transfer over.

Angel Salón has lived for 38 years in “Los Sures,” the Spanish nickname for the south-side streets that run through Williamsburg.

“All of my kids have been students at P.S. 19 and this school is part of my family,” he said. The closing would be a low blow, he said. “If they do it, the meaning of his name also fades because it is a tribute to great athlete who died for a just cause.”

Maria Morales, the parent coordinator at P.S. 19, agrees. “[The closing is] a slap at our heritage. Like Clemente, we have struggled and came here to be good examples in this country.”

Local elected officials who represent the neighborhood, including City Councilwoman Diana Reyna and Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez, see the closure of P.S. 19 as an attempt to acommodate a charter school that caters to newer residents — at the expense of the long-established Latino community.

Antonio Reynoso, Reyna’s chief of staff and a former student at the Roberto Clemente School, called the move “part of systematic displacement” of Latinos from Williamsburg.

“The city is not concerned about preserving the local character of our neighborhoods. If the building is not called Roberto Clemente, then it doesn’t represent the character of the Latino community,” he said.

Esteban Durán, an activist with the community organization El Puente, said that public spaces named for Hispanics like Maria Hernández — who is believed to have been killed by drug dealers after standing up to them — and Roberto Clemente are important markers of a community’s identity.

“Losing them would negate what millions of Latinos have contributed to this country,” Durán said. “It would be a defeat that would reflect how politics and economics have infringed on our culture.”

The DOE does not have a policy on the naming of schools. A spokesman for the department indicated that a community could propose a name for a new school. Chancellor Dennis Walcott would have the final word.

The fate of P.S. 19 rests on a panel stacked with mayoral appointees. The Clemente name — all of the cultural and historical significance it has — could have a fairer day if the community goes to bat.

Meanwhile, Clemente’s family is also lamenting the potential closure of a school bearing his name.

Vera Clemente raised her voice when she heard that the closure of a public school could also mean the loss of a tribute to her husband.

“My husband still lives in the minds of children and youths,” she said. “It is a shame that organizations honoring his memory and values are disappearing.”

The goodwill ambassador for Major League Baseball has traveled the world to honor Roberto Clemente’s memory. “In so many places, there are installations bearing his name,” she said. “The community is always proud and feels that his legacy is a part of them.”

Even when they have read about him, “children always want to know more about how his life was, and also how he was able to be so successful in baseball,” she added.

Their son José Roberto Clemente expressed sadness at the news about P.S. 19 and said his family would  back any movement to save the school’s name.

“Right now we are working on a project with the MLB to unite all of the schools and sports leagues named after my father,” he said. “It would be sad to have one disappear.”

The association in formation would continue Clemente’s legacy of generosity and could offer scholarships for students and and support services for victims of natural disasters.

El Diario is New York City’s oldest and largest Spanish-language newspaper. Read more education news from El Diario.

• Michael Winerip: Sub-literate essays can earn passing scores on the state’s Regents exams. (Times)
• A DOE contract with a company started by a former employee is raising eyebrows. (Daily News)
• The city is still trying to fire a teacher who retired last year after being found guilty of sex talk. (Post)
• Parents at P.S. 189 say kindergarteners were allowed to engage in sexual touching in class. (Post)
• Students from 45 public and private schools participated in a science fair at Grover Cleveland HS. (NY1)
• Educators and experts say Dominican students’ long absences are culturally bound. (GothamSchools)
• Parents, students, and activists say they will protest Thursday’s vote on school closures. (Daily News)
• One of the schools, Samuel Gompers High School, offers vocational training. (GothamSchools, NY1)
• Another school, P.S. 14, would be Staten Island’s first school closure under Mayor Bloomberg. (NY1)
• The Post blames potential disruptions at Thursday’s PEP meeting on the UFT and Occupy Wall Street.
• Among three schools opening on Staten Island next year is one set to be zer0-energy. (S.I. Advance)
• Students earned $250 selling pot-laced brownies to classmates at I.S. 208 in Queens. (Daily News)
• A columnist notes that Gov. Cuomo first derailed a state deal on teacher evaluations. (Times-Union)
• The Daily News says Cuomo must insist on a slate of evaluations conditions as his deadline nears.

And elsewhere:

• Cami Anderson proposal for a New York City-inspired reform plan in Newark is drawing fire. (WSJ)
• The governor of Connecticut is set to propose more charter schools and more money for them. (WSJ)
• A Pennsylvania district says it is being put out of business by a “charter school on steroids.” (Times)
• A reform group that has done “turnarounds” in 19 Chicago schools is earning mixed grades. (Tribune)
• The backlash against Texas’s high-stakes accountability system appears to be growing steam. (Times)
• No data support La. Gov. Bobby Jindal’s plan to expand a school voucher program. (Times-Picayune)
• More on the controversial pro-charter school video that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is in. (Times)

Pell, who founded Urban Assembly Academy of Arts & Letters in 2005 and steered its growth into one of Brooklyn’s most popular middle schools, announced this week that she was resigning at the end of the year. The announcement comes roughly a year after Pell also oversaw Arts & Letters’ bumpy expansion into an elementary school.

John O’Reilly, who has been a co-director since the beginning of the school year, will take over the helm.

Pell said today that she would be moving on to the Blue School, a growing private elementary school on the Lower East Side that is so far best known as a school started by members from The Blue Man Group. But the school is also steeped in progressive education, a model that Pell is familiar with. Pell attended Saint Ann’s in Brooklyn Heights, one of the city’s most progressive schools, then taught there for three years after graduating from Brown. Pell, a graduate of the city’s Leadership Academy, was a favorite at Tweed and praised as a model candidate from the new brand of young principals in the public school system.

In an interview, Pell said her reasons for leaving had more to do with where she is headed than any difficulties she faced in navigating the bureaucracies of the DOE.

“There is no part of me that’s leaving because I’m not happy,” Pell said. “I enjoy building things and this is an exciting prospect for me.”

The Blue School is currently serves pre-school through 3rd grade and will cap out at 5th grade.

Pell made the announcement on Monday to teachers in a faculty meeting and in a letter home to parents. In the letter, Pell said that her goal from the beginning was to build a collaborative school founded on her own progressive education that could sustain itself whether she was in charge or not.

“When I started the school, I set a goal to build the leadership capacity needed to ensure stability and continuity when I departed,” Pell wrote. “In that way, the school would not depend on any one person or leader.”

“I’m really disappointed to see her go,” said David Goldsmith, last year’s Parent Association co-president and a current member of the District 13 CEC. ”But nobody would wish her anything but the best because she made huge sacrifices and really created a great school.”

Parents were shocked by the news and some said they were “very upset,” Goldsmith said. One reason for parents’ concern is that Pell led the charge in a bruising battle to expand. Now the school will complete its expansion without her at the helm.

But Pell lauded O’Reilly’s leadership and said she was confident in the rest of the faculty to build on the school’s success so far.

“I know Arts & Letters won’t skip a beat — not with the talent we have on our staff, our leadership, our students, and with you, our amazing parent community,” Pell wrote in the letter.

O’Reilly said he was saddened to hear he would be losing his collaborator of four years but agreed that the school’s status was not in doubt.

“I think we’re going to be fine and we’re going to continue to do amazing work,” he said.

Announcement Jan 30 (1)