GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

BaShan Taylor reads a script opposing school budget cuts over the phone. (Photo: Chris Arp)

With less than 10 days before the city’s budget deadline and no deal yet on education cuts, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio is encouraging parents to take to the phones.

When Chris stopped by the “11th Hour Phone Bank” at de Blasio’s 1 Centre Street office earlier this evening, about 20 people had turned up to make phone calls. Organizers said they hoped to ask 2,500 people tonight to call 311 with their opposition to the budget cuts and planned teacher layoffs. (more…)

Calling their protest “Fight Back Friday,” teachers and parents at a handful of schools wore all black today in opposition to Mayor Bloomberg’s threatened teacher layoffs and budget cuts. (more…)

Michael Hall, the father of a second grader at P.S. 114, said the Canarsie elementary school should remain open.

Teachers, parents, and community activists protested the city’s plans to shutter a Canarsie elementary school today in front of the Department of Education’s headquarters. (more…)

Though the citywide school board has already voted to close Christopher Columbus High School, students, teachers, and alumni rallied on the steps of City Hall today to make the case for their Plan B. Columbus’s faculty wants to convert their large, traditional high school into a charter school, but it will need the city’s permission first.

“I think our challenge has been to get the Department of Education to take our proposal seriously,” said Columbus teacher Christine Rowland. In the last year that Columbus has been working on its charter application, the city has promised to help, then offered conflicting advice and no support, Rowland said.

At the rally today, Columbus faculty and students urged the DOE to accept their proposal to keep their school open. In order to convert into a charter school, more than half of Columbus students’ parents have to vote to approve the change and Rowland said the school has already collected many of their ballots. But the response from a DOE spokesman indicated that the department isn’t interested.

“Columbus ranks in the bottom 6% of all high schools across the city, and one of every two students who walk through its doors doesn’t graduate on time,” spokesman Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld wrote in an email. “We’re not willing to gamble that the same organization that has failed kids year after year can suddenly turn around. This commnity needs new and better schools for families, and that’s what we intend to provide.”

GothamSchools loves visitors. So we were delighted when a group of ninth-graders and their teachers from the Renaissance Charter High School for Innovation stopped by our offices this afternoon.

We talked about how we spend our days as reporters; how strong writing can benefit students no matter what career they end up in; and how the students might start a newspaper at their school, which just opened this year.

Just a reminder: If you’ve got a journalism class or after-school club and want to come visit, let us know.

Three Brooklyn students — from left to right, 7-year-olds Olivia and Jai and 9-year-old Isabella — used their snow day to build a snow fort in Prospect Park today.

We know what high school teachers would have been doing if there had been school today: proctoring Regents exams. But we’re wondering what other teachers and students would have been doing today if 19 inches of snow hadn’t fallen.

For Jai Jaroslaw, age “seven and three-quarters” and a second-grader at Brooklyn’s P.S. 321, the unexpected day off meant getting to spend the morning in Prospect Park building a snow fort.

If it had been a normal day? ”I guess I would be doing math, and now I would have lunch,” he said. Jai’s father, Victor Jaroslaw, a teacher at Fort Greene’s P.S. 46, would have spent the day teaching science.

What would your day have looked like if school had not been cancelled, and how are you spending the day instead? Tell us in the comments.

Students from the Kurt Hahn Expeditionary Learning School paid a visit to the GothamSchools team this morning to talk about journalism and the stories they’re writing about their own school. When they’re done, we’ll hopefully be able to share them with you in the community section.

If you’ve got a journalism class or after-school club and want to stop by, let us know.

Justin Wedes, a former city teacher who started an online petition asking State Education Commissioner David Steiner not to grant Cathie Black the waiver she needs to become chancellor, spoke on the steps of Tweed Courthouse Sunday. On the left was Michael Meyers, director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition. To the right was civil rights attorney Normal Siegel.

Parents and civil rights advocates gathered on the steps of the Department of Education headquarters yesterday to protest Mayor Bloomberg’s appointment of publishing executive Cathie Black as the next schools chancellor.

Their objections to Black’s appointment were two-fold: firstly, that Black lacks the educational experience necessary to lead the nation’s largest public school system; and secondly, that the mayor that the mayor chose a friend and kept the selection process hidden from the public and much of his staff.

“This unlimited claim that Cathie Black is the best is unsupported and untested in any school setting, in any classroom, by any experience on her part as a teacher or a supervisor of teachers,” said Michael Meyers, the executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition. “Cronyism is not a synonym for the best.” (more…)

A group of city public school parents blasted NBC today for its week-long special programming on education, saying that the network has kept parents and skeptics of education reform off the air.

The network is running a series of televised interviews and panel discussions it is calling “Education Nation” all this week. Parents gathered today outside of the “Learning Plaza” the network has built at Rockefeller Center to complain about the series’ line-up of speakers, which is dominated by politicians, officials and philanthropists.

“Parents are offended about the way in which NBC has refused to invite a single NYC public school parent onto any of their panels,” said Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters. “Instead, the network has allowed wealthy billionaires once again to control the agenda.”

The group also criticized NBC for allowing Mayor Bloomberg to deliver a policy speech televised on the network Monday morning without taking questions from reporters.