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Charter school parents won’t be the only ones taking to the streets tomorrow. Protests are also planned against planned teacher layoffs, a charter school co-location, and low funding for struggling schools.

Public Advocate Bill de Blasio is organizing a “Parent Day of Action” against the city’s 4,100 planned teacher layoffs. Yesterday, de Blasio launched a website featuring videos of parents speaking out against the cuts. Tomorrow, starting in Brooklyn during the morning commute, de Blasio will be joined by parent volunteers to collect anti-layoff testimonials from other New Yorkers at sites throughout the city. The testimonials will be posted in real time to de Blasio’s Twitter and YouTube pages and to his own parent advocacy site, according to spokesman Matthew Wing.

In Manhattan, parents and teachers in the Brandeis High School campus are rallying at 5:30 p.m. against the potential addition of a charter school, Upper West Success Academy. The rally precedes a public hearing about the co-location, which would bring an elementary school into a building that so far has only middle and high school students. The hearing is sure to draw supporters of Upper West Success, one of few schools in Eva Moskowitz’s Success Charter Network that is not named in the UFT-NAACP lawsuit.

And in the Bronx, student activists are planning a half-hour march at the end of their school day to demand that the city use federal funds to help more low-performing schools. The students, from the Urban Youth Collaborative and other groups, are walking to Banana Kelly High School, which the city announced earlier this month would receive new funding and supports, from Samuel Gompers High School, which was not included in the city’s “restart” plans.

Attending one (or more) of tomorrow’s events? Send pictures and comments to tips@gothamschools.org.

Brandeis High School will phase out beginning this year.

Few were surprised today when Department of Education officials descended on the Upper West Side’s Louis Brandeis High School to inform staff that the long-struggling school has been slated to close.

For years, the school has been among the lowest-performing in the city, with a four-year graduation rate of just 33 percent. This year Brandeis received a D on its DOE progress report, used to evaluate how much students are improving.

By the time teachers and staff gathered today in the school’s basement auditorium for a 3 p.m. meeting, most appeared to know why they were there. One teacher told me that rumors had spread through the building all afternoon. “There’s been talking ever since we had gotten our progress report,” said another teacher, Tara Bernard, a speech pathologist who has worked at the school for four years.

“We’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop for years,” said another teacher as he left the building.

But some students said they thought the school was improving. A ninth-grader told me he heard the school had problems, but he hadn’t experienced them. And an older student said the school had fewer fights than in the past. Bernard, the speech pathologist, said the school had been relatively stable in her four years working there. (more…)