That didn’t stop dozens of teachers from lining up outside the Brooklyn Museum yesterday afternoon for one of the last hiring fairs before school starts next week. Members of the Absent Teacher Reserve, the pool of teachers whose positions have been cut, mostly due to budget cuts or school closures, received special invitations to the job fair from the DOE, encouraging them to be “proactive” in their job search.

If those teachers are not offered jobs this week, they will be asked to rotate between different schools on a weekly basis as substitute teachers, according to an arrangement made by the teachers union and the DOE earlier this summer to avoid teacher layoffs. In previous years, ATRs were typically assigned to one school for the entire year to cover for absent teachers.

There were 1,940 teachers in the ATR pool as of Aug. 19. Typically, the pool shrinks in the first weeks of the school year as principals hasten to fill open positions.

Those who logged into the job portal for excessed teachers yesterday morning found information on what schools to report to in September.

English teacher Jerome Madramootoo, who was excessed after the city began phasing out Jamaica High School in June, said he was assigned to work at Newtown High School in Queens next month, but given no specific information about what he would be doing there.

Madramootoo said he hoped it would be teaching English, his license area. But he said he wondered what impact he could make on a temporary basis. He came to the job fair armed with a copy of the high school year book he helped produce at Jamaica High School in 2010. He said he wouldn’t be able to lead long-term projects like year books as a substitute teacher.

“The only benefit is that you still have your salary,” he said. “But who would you learn more from, a teacher you had for the full year, or a teacher you had for a half year, or a week? I can’t finish a novel with you, I can’t get into poetry with you in just a week.”

He decried the lack of stability in the new ATR system, and said it hurts students by denying them regular access to qualified teachers.

“You can’t bond with students if there’s no stability. This agreement is not about the students at all.”

Other teachers at the job fair said they were willing to take their chances on the weekly substitute teaching assignments, even though they acknowledged that their experience would be wasted.

“I feel like I’m robbing the kids,” said one Brooklyn elementary school teacher whose position, which she held for five years, fell victim to last-minute budget cuts.

She said this job fair was her first, and she deliberately did not make much of an effort to find a new position.

“I got an assignment for September at a middle school, but I teach elementary school,” she said. “And [a colleague] told me that at the beginning of the year, you don’t really do anything because there aren’t very many teachers absent anyway. If the DOE doesn’t take this seriously, why should I?”

Correction: A previous version of this article stated that the job fair was intended for excessed teachers only. According to DOE officials, other people  were also invited to attend.

Jamaica High School students, teachers and parents cheer a speaker at the school

For the past two weeks, education officials have spent nearly every weeknight holding public hearings at each of the 25 district schools the city wants to close next year. Seventeen of the schools are in this for the second go-around, after a union lawsuit foiled the department’s attempt to close them last year.

As a result, this year’s hearings are both formatted differently — part of an attempt to better explain the closure decisions and avoid another lawsuit — and less emotional, despite communities’ still-simmering anger and frustration.

GothamSchools reporters recently attended three of these hearings.

Jamaica High School

The group of students, teachers and parents that gathered in Jamaica High School’s auditorium was smaller than the large, boisterous crowd that packed last year’s hearing.

But, as several students pointed out, the school is also smaller this year. After the courts blocked the city from closing Jamaica and 18 other high schools last year, the size of the incoming freshman class shrunk dramatically.

Even before the school’s enrollment fell this year, students and teachers argued, Jamaica’s academics suffered from cuts that have forced teachers to salvage copy paper and reuse Scantron sheets for tests. When enrollment plummeted this year, the school was hit even harder, losing many of its teachers.

“Bring back Ms. Gordon!” students yelled as Dena Gordon, a former social studies teacher at Jamaica who was excessed last year after the school’s enrollment dropped, rose to speak.

Gordon compared her experience at Jamaica to the East-West School of International Studies, the small school where she teaches now. At Jamaica, she struggled to find basic supplies for her students; at the small school, she can summon a cart full of laptops for her students to use on short notice.

“I didn’t become a better teacher because I went from Jamaica to an A-rated school,” Gordon said later. “I am the same teacher. I am the same person. I bring the same skill set with me. The point is, you can’t say it’s the teachers or the students — it’s the way [the DOE] services Jamaica.”

Deputy Chancellor John White responded to the charges of inequitable funding by pointing out that all city schools receive their funding through a formula determined by the number of students each school enrolls. Other schools that receive the same amount of money per student boost student achievement far higher, he said.

“We know that we can do better here because there is proof that we can do better here,” White said.

Several teachers also suggested that one reason Jamaica’s graduation rates have fallen behind those of other city high schools is that the staff refuses to give students passing grades they haven’t earned. Teachers often repeat anecdotal stories about being pressured into granting students passing grades in order to boost schools’ ratings in the city’s accountability system, and the practice drew renewed attention last week after the city opened an investigation into grade inflation at the Theater Arts Production Company School following a report in the New York Times.

Signs waved in the Jamaica’s audience read “Persistently honest diploma” (a play on the “persistently lowest achieving” status that has been assigned to Jamaica).

Ali Khawaja and Vasudeo Ramsoroop, two juniors at the school, said that they thought the smaller schools that share Jamaica’s building were giving their students a better education than many students at Jamaica receive.

“But they have way more resources, and it kind of increases their motivation to do better,” Ramsoroop said.

And, the two said, they preferred to have the city fix Jamaica while they are still enrolled than to provide new options for future students.

“I’ve been here for three years. Why can’t they just make our program better?” Khawaja said. “Why do they have to make a new one and put more money into that? They work on grants; why can’t they get a grant for us?”  —Maura Walz

Columbus High School

Last year, when staff and students at Columbus High School in the Bronx fought against closure the first time, the hearing went until midnight. This year’s hearing fell two hours short of that mark. This was due in part to some school-closure-fatigue students and teachers said they felt after fighting with the city for nearly two years.

But it was also because Columbus’s principal Lisa Fuentes is trying to convert the district-run high school into a charter school, giving the schools’ defenders hope and lessening their anger and resentment. Only once did students’ yells overpower the voice of a city official — at many closure hearings, the booing is a near-constant. People mostly did not have to be reminded that their time at the mic was up. A few students taunted Department of Education officials for spending too much time on their Blackberrys or (appearing to) be asleep. But in general the crowd was passionate, not hostile.

For their part, DOE officials let the hearing take its course as though it was an act of catharsis they were administering. They answered questions in a quiet monotone and avoided contradicting speakers’ claims.

Columbus’s School Leadership Team focused not on the school’s possible closure, but on trying to convince the panel of city officials before them that becoming a charter school would change Columbus for the better. They argued that Columbus has been given the highest concentration of needy students of any high school in the city and few resources to help them. As a charter school, they wouldn’t have to admit over-the-counter students who show up after school has begun and are often years behind academically.

“Charter conversions are public schools that have sought to do things differently and have found that the benefits of independence outweigh the additional responsibilities,” Fuentes told the city officials. “That’s exactly what we’d like to have the opportunity to do.”

It will take more than the city’s approval for Columbus to get the go-ahead to convert into a charter school. By law, more than half of students’ parents have to vote in favor of the proposal.

Columbus teacher Christine Rowland came prepared to the hearing with a handful of her students’ papers. The city had compared Columbus to Truman High School “unfavorably,” she said, but Columbus has more low-incomes students, which makes a difference in the classroom. She’d asked her students to write brief responses to why they hadn’t done their homework and she read these aloud.

One student wrote: “I didn’t make my homework because I work. I have a little job. I work after school in the Bronx. I only work in the Bronx two days: Monday and Tuesday. And I have my break day Wednesday. Also, I have another job in Yonkers, where I work Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.”

Another answered: “I recently lost a brother and I’m not living in my own home. I’m staying with my grandparents and with family. It’s been so crowded, I haven’t really been able to do my homework. It’s not peaceful.”

State Senator Jeff Klein, a Columbus graduate, also put in an appearance at the hearing to back Fuentes’ charter school plans.

“This could bring, I think, a new renaissance to Columbus high school,” he said. ”Bring Columbus High School back to the way it used to be. We still have the students. Their names may have changed, but they’re still the type of kids that we want to make sure are our future.” — Anna Phillips

Paul Robeson High School

Many of the 100 people who turned out for Paul Robeson High School’s closure hearing on Friday seemed resigned to the school’s fate.

“It’s a done deal,” said a parent. “We all know it’s a done deal.”

Like Jamaica and Columbus, Robeson is one of 17 schools that the city is trying for the second time to close, after a judge voided the closure decision last year for procedural reasons. “Roughly half of the kids who come to this school will graduate,” Deputy Chancellor John White said at the hearing. “Our goal is to change the outcome for kids.”

But academic performance wasn’t the focus for most of the roughly 50 people who spoke at Friday’s hearing. Instead, opponents of the closure plan, many wearing black armbands, took aim at the process by which the city has moved to close the school. Teachers charged that efforts the city said it had made to help the school never happened, and an assistant principal pointed out that the city isn’t trying to close other nearby high schools with lower graduation rates.

Department officials said they would provide evidence that the city tried to help Robeson improve before the Panel for Educational Policy’s closure vote scheduled for February 1.

If the panel approves the city’s closure plan, Robeson’s building could soon be home to a technology-themed school. According to an internal DOE document obtained by the New York Times, the city is planning to install a new, IBM-supported school that goes up to Grade 14 in the space that would open up as Robeson phases out.

More than a few community members expressed concern for the students who would attend Robeson during the phase out. One man, who claimed to be a teacher from a current phase-out school, described his job as “one of the worst experiences of my life.” Teacher Stephanie Siegel asked how the phase-out would affect neighboring schools.

During the question and answer session, White addressed these concerns. “The challenges next year will be the same as the challenges Robeson faces this year,” he said.

Many in the audience were audibly unsatisfied with his response. — C.W. Arp

Administrators at Jamaica High School, which the city plans to close next year, initially banned the play. They then reversed their decision, permitting students to put on their adaptation of the Greek tragedy “Antigone.”

In the play, Klein assumes the role of King Creon, who in the original story favors one brother over another and refuses to give the one he dislikes a proper burial. But in the students’ play, the two brothers are Jamaica High School and the schools that now share its building. The adaptation’s authors are clear: Jamaica is the unpopular one.

In this scene, the prophet Tiresias comes to visit Klein to advise him against closing the school:

Many of these schools are already on the city’s radar. Two of them — the School for Community Research and Learning and I.S. 195 — are on the list of schools the city plans to begin closing next year. Others, such as Herbert Lehman High School, earned poor grades on their annual progress reports and were considered for closure.

With the addition of these 21 schools, the number of schools eligible for (but not yet undergoing) federal “turnaround” strategies is up to 43. By next April, the city’s Department of Education has to send the state a plan for how it will improve each of these schools.

“We need to apply to the state with a school-by-school plan with a proposed budget and we’ll go back and forth with them on a draft until they finally approve,” said DOE spokesman Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld. “We have a technical deadline of sometime in April, but obviously we want to get moving on this as soon as possible.”

If the city’s plans are approved, schools will begin working under one of the improvement models next September. For each of them, the city will receive, at most, about $2 million for three years. The size of the grants will vary depending on the size of the school.

Last year, when state education officials named the schools eligible for school improvement grants, it gave the city extra time to submit its plans for how to improve them. City officials said that with the addition of 21 schools, they may need to ask for more time again.

DOE officials have four school improvement models to choose from, but they are only considering two: transformation and turnaround.

The least invasive of these, known as the “transformation” method, is already being used by eleven city schools. This model relies on removing a school’s principal, bringing in extra support services, and experimenting with longer school days and new teacher training.

In comparison, the “turnaround” model is like a root canal for a school. It calls for a school’s principal to be replaced and its teachers and administrators to reapply for their jobs. Only 50 percent of the staff can be rehired, but the students remain the same. In some respects, it is similar to the process the city currently uses to phase-out schools and open new ones in their stead, except that in the “turnaround” model, the school retains its name and does not change the type of students it admits.

City officials said that because of the similarities, they are considering using the turnaround method — and the federal money that comes with it — to improve schools they initially planed to close, such as the School for Community Research and Learning and I.S. 195. Other schools that landed on the city’s closure list this week, such as Jamaica High School and Paul Robeson High School, that are also eligible for the federal grant money, could be put through the turnaround model instead.

In order to use the turnaround model, the city will have to forge an agreement with the teachers and principals’ union, allowing them to side-step the contract and remove school employees without a hearing.

Yesterday, city officials announced their plans to close 11 district schools and recommended that the state not renew the charter of Ross Global Academy, a Manhattan charter school.

The final list of planned closures includes most — but not all — of the schools the city originally proposed to close last year before it was blocked by a lawsuit brought by the city teachers union, the NAACP and other groups.

Citing improvements the schools have made over the past year, the city is sparing four of the 19 schools the city proposed closing last year: the Choir Academy of Harlem, W.H. Maxwell Career and Technical Education High School, the Middle School for Academic and Social Excellence and the Business, Computer Applications and Entrepreneurship High School.

The city is proposing that most of the schools on its list stop admitting new classes next year and phase out over time. For two schools, KAPPA II and the Academy for Collaborative Education, the city plans to shutter all grades at once at the end of this year.

City officials culled the final list of 25 district schools to close from a larger list of 55 schools that they targeted for possible closure earlier in the fall. Of the 30 schools on that list that were spared today, 14 may still undergo one of two federally-approved strategies for school improvement.

One of those scenarios, known as the “turnaround” model, requires that the schools’ principals be replaced and its staff and teachers re-apply for their jobs; only half may be re-hired. The other model, known as “transformation,” relies on replacing the principal, bringing in outside support services and experimenting with new teacher training and school schedules.

The city and union are currently in talks over which schools might use each model.

Here is the final list of schools the city wants to close. The schools highlighted below were announced today.

After a judge’s ruling postponed closures at 19 schools — 14 of them high schools — many of the schools began reporting that they were severely under-enrolled. Metropolitan Corporate Academy had eight incoming ninth graders and Jamaica High School in Queens had 23 — a number so low the school’s principal doubted he’d be able to have a freshman class. Now that the city has completed its second round of high school placements, more students are set to enter these schools next year.

But the numbers are still extremely low. While there are now 23 students enrolled at Metropolitan Corporate Academy, the school traditionally saw an incoming freshman class of between 70 and 100 students. Many of these schools still have enrollments too low for them to support a ninth grade program. If the city does not assign them more students, they could be forced to phase out their ninth grades, skirting the court’s ruling that the schools should remain intact.

A spokesman for the Department of Education said the city expects the enrollment numbers to climb.

Roughly 500 students who were given a choice between a saved school and another school have yet to inform the city of their decision. The under-enrolled high schools will also be able to receive over-the-counter students who move to New York over the summer and are typically assigned wherever there are empty seats.

Part of the reason for the diminished enrollments could be the city’s high school admissions process. This year, students who listed any of the then-closing schools as one of their top choices were matched to other schools. But after a judge’s ruling postponed the closures, the city sent those students a letter giving them a second chance to pick a high school — this time including the would-be closing schools on their list of options.

To make its preference clear, the city’s letters discouraged parents from sending their children to the schools marked for closure.

Jamaica High School in Queens is currently looking at an incoming class of 23 ninth grade students, according to minutes taken during a meeting between the school’s principal and union chapter leader. If more students don’t enroll, the high school will not be able to offer a ninth grade next year, which is what would have happened under the city’s original plan to phase out the school.

A portion of the minutes reads:

Mr. Acham said that our expected number of students for the fall would be between 850 and 900 pupils and not close to 1400 that we currently are enrolling.  He added that the number of incoming grade nine students who have made a full commitment to Jamaica High School for this fall was only 23 and this number was down from a potential incoming class of merely 60. Therefore, the Principal concluded that we do not have a sufficient number of freshmen to run our programs.

A spokesman for the Department of Education, Danny Kanner, said Jamaica’s enrollment numbers would likely go up, but would not offer an explanation of how this would happen or how many students had been matched with the school’s ninth grade next year.

“We do not yet know the final number of students that will be in the freshman class, but we expect that it will be higher than what is currently in the system,” Kanner said.

Part of the reason for Jamaica’s diminished incoming ninth grade could be the city’s high school admissions process. This year, students who listed any of the then-closing schools as one of their top choices were matched to other schools. But after a judge’s ruling postponed the closures, the students were re-matched and given the choice of attending a school the city had marked as failing, or a different one.

To make its preference clear, the city sent these students’ parents a letter saying that if the city wins its appeal, the 19 schools will begin phasing out next year.

“Basically what the DOE is doing is de facto closing us,” said Jamaica chapter leader James Eterno.

The city plans to open two small high schools in Jamaica’s building next year: the High School for Community Leadership and Hillside Arts and Letters Academy.

The bombshell decision leaves the fate of all 19 schools and their staffs up in the air and could force the Department of Education to rewrite arguments for why they deserve to be shut down. The ruling is the first time a court has interpreted the new mayoral control law Albany put in place last summer.

A lawyer for the city, Michael Cardozo, said the Department of Education would appeal the decision.

“We are disappointed by today’s ruling, which, unless it is reversed, requires the Department of Education to keep open schools that are failing our children,” Cardozo said.

In February, the teachers union sued the city, arguing that the DOE had violated the law that governs school closures.

The city received the decision at 12:30 this afternoon, two days after the deadline for high school students to be told which schools they’ll attend in the fall. In her ruling, Judge Joan Lobis wrote that her decision should not affect the 80,000 students who did not apply to the closing schools.

She acknowledged that the decision would be an “inconvenience for respondents and hardships for students who are awaiting the results of the school matching process.” In total, there are 8,500 students who applied to the closing schools.

But she wrote, “the court cannot overlook what it reluctantly concludes are significant violations of the Education Law by respondents.”

DOE officials said students who didn’t apply to the 19 closing schools would get their high school matches “as soon as possible.”

If the court’s decision is upheld, Department of Education officials could be looking at another month of bruising public hearings at each of the schools slated for closure. In another possible scenario, the department could decide that it’s too late in the year to redo the process and decide to postpone the closures until next year.

In a statement sent to reporters, Cardozo disputed the judge’s ruling that the city had not followed public notification and hearing regulations, but did not argue with the claim that the city’s impact statements lacked necessary information.

A spokesman for the DOE said department lawyers are reviewing the decision and did not have an initial comment.

Affected schools:

New Day Academy
Christopher Columbus High School
Paul Robeson High School
W.H. Maxwell Career and Technical Education High School
Academy of Environmental Science
Jamaica High School
School for Community Research and Learning

Beach Channel High School
Metropolitan Corporate Academy
Choir Academy of Harlem’s high school grades
Norman Thomas High School
Global Enterprise High School
School of Business, Computer Applications and Entrepreneurship

Monroe Academy for Business/Law
Frederick Douglas Academy III’s middle school grades
KAPPA II
P.S. 332
Middle School for Academic and Social Excellence
Academy of Collaborative Education

Mulgrew v._Board of Ed.

After hearing about Jamaica High School’s proposed closure, former New York Times multimedia producer Monica Evanchik was inspired to seek out stories from some of the school’s teachers.

Evanchik then condensed those interviews into a 10-minute video of five teachers reflecting on what Jamaica’s dissolution would mean for its students and staff. Mike Pallisco, a history teacher at Jamaica, talks about what it’s like to watch parents turn away from his school’s table at the city’s annual high school fair.

“Every once in a while, and it hurts even worse, you get someone who graduated from Jamaica. They’re there looking for a high school and they go, ‘Oh I can’t send my kid there.’ And I look at them and I go, ‘But you went there.’ And they’re like, yeah but with all the news I’ve heard…I can’t send my kids there. And I look at them and I say there is absolutely nothing wrong with the school.”

The citywide school board, known as the Panel for Educational Policy, will vote on Jamaica’s closure tomorrow evening.

Parents, teachers and alumni cheer on the testimony of a Jamaica High School supporter at a public hearing on the plan to close the school last night.

From Queens to Brooklyn, hundreds of teachers, students, and alumni poured into auditoriums last night to defend their high schools from closure.

In Queens, supporters of Jamaica High School turned out in droves for the public hearing, a meeting also attended by Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott and some of the Department of Education’s top brass.

The arguments against phasing out Jamaica and replacing it with several small schools in the same building were similar to those voiced at a question-and-answer session with DOE officials held at the school last month, which also drew an angry crowd.

When one speaker pointed out Walcott’s presence in the back of the auditorium, audience members rose from their seats, turned around to face him, and chanted, “Save Jamaica High School.”

The Queens representative on the Panel for Educational Policy, Dmytro Fedkowski, asked the DOE to postpone the board’s vote on the proposals until the department releases more information about how the closure decisions were made.

“These proposals seem to be moving forward at an alarming rate,” he said.

Fedkowski has one of 13 votes that will determine the fate of the 20 schools slated for closure. He said he is still unsure how he will vote at the panel meeting on January 26.

“We haven’t made a decision yet,” Fedkowski told me after testifying.

The lack of clear criteria for the phase-out decisions has been a common criticism of the plans, one that was also made last week by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer.

DOE officials cite the school’s low enrollment and stagnant four-year graduation rates, and argue that smaller schools will better serve Queens students.

Critics of closing Jamaica say the school is educating a needier group of students, who frequently need longer than four years to graduate and who some observers argue are often excluded from the city’s small schools.

Robert Klugman, an alumnus of the school who has also taught there for 24 years, said that Jamaica graduates are prepared for the world, no matter how long it takes them to get their diploma. He quoted a remark from Chancellor Joel Klein, who asked what parent would send their student to a school with persistently low graduation rates like Jamaica.

“I’ll tell you who,” Klugman said. “The parent who knows that when their student walks out of this school, they are ready not only for life but also for college.”

In the Bronx, students, teachers, and alumni of Global Enterprise Academy and Christopher Columbus High School also came out to argue against plans to close them. Supporters of Columbus make the same case that Jamaica’s advocates do: in the last several years the school has been deluged with some of the highest-need students in the city and given almost no help in educating them.

“I don’t expect a student who comes to this country in their junior year of high school to graduate at the same time as someone who has been here for 18 years,” said one Columbus student. “If you came to Albania, to my country, I wouldn’t expect that of you either.”

Supporters of Global Enterprise, a small high school that opened in 2003 inside the Columbus building, said the school was too new and had not been given a chance to succeed. Others said it was nonsensical to close the school when the DOE has acknowledged that the school doesn’t meet their criteria for closing.

“What you’re asking is for a school to be phased out that was restructured in January of 2009,” said Global Enterprise principal Michelle Joseph, who has only worked at the school for a year and a half.

“This is an indictment of your procedure. It’s a political maneuver and you’re teaching these students that education and improvement actually do not work.”

City Councilman David Weprin (right) signs a petition urging the DOE not to close 20 city schools. Councilman Eric Ulrich (left) plans to deliver the petition to Chancellor Joel Klein's office this afternoon.

Members of the Queens City Council delegation called on Chancellor Joel Klein to abandon plans to close 20 city schools today.

Standing on the steps of Tweed Courthouse and joined by colleagues representing other boroughs, Queens Council members accused the Department of Education of threatening to close schools without first trying to improve them or seeking community input.

City Councilman Eric Ulrich, who represents Rockaway Beach, said the DOE did not notify his office before announcing its proposal to close Beach Channel High School.

Ulrich is circulating a petition signed by nearly all of the Queens Council members calling on the DOE to abandon its plans to close the borough’s schools.

Ulrich said he intended to deliver the petition to Chancellor Joel Klein’s office this afternoon. (He jokingly said he might nail it to the doors of Tweed.)

Many of the 11 Council members and members-elect who attended the news meeting called for discussions with parents, community leaders, and the teachers union about how to improve struggling schools before resorting to closure.

“The Chancellor is turning his back on these students and these schools,” Queens Councilwoman Elizabeth Crowley said. “That is unacceptable.”

Three of the 20 schools the DOE has marked for closure this year are in Queens and two of the three — Jamaica and Beach Channel — are large high schools. Critics of the DOE’s plans to shutter the schools worry that the closures would displace students from eastern Queens, crowding them into already crowded schools such as Francis Lewis High School.

City Council members petitioned Chancellor Joel Klein to abandon plans to close 20 city schools.

]]> http://gothamschools.org/2009/12/21/queens-city-council-members-petition-klein-to-save-schools/feed/ 8 http://gothamschools.org/2009/12/17/hundreds-turn-out-to-protest-plans-to-close-jamaica-high-school/ http://gothamschools.org/2009/12/17/hundreds-turn-out-to-protest-plans-to-close-jamaica-high-school/#comments Thu, 17 Dec 2009 22:03:34 +0000 Anna Phillips http://gothamschools.org/?p=29495

Hundreds of Queens residents filled the school's auditorium. Many had graduated from Jamaica or could name family members who had.

An event billed as a question and answer session about the proposed closure of Jamaica High School quickly became a pep rally for the school’s supporters last night. 

Hundreds of angry students, parents, and teachers packed Jamaica’s auditorium last night to protest the Department of Education’s plan to close the school. Chants of “Save our school” and “Four more years” could be heard blocks away and department officials had to fight to explain per-pupil funding and the school’s phase-out plan over waves of boos and shouts.

One of several large high schools marked for closure, Jamaica has struggled in recent years with low graduation rates and a high number of students who have learning disabilities or are recent immigrants and don’t speak English.

In its proposal, which the Panel for Educational Policy will vote on in January, the DOE says it plans to replace Jamaica with two small high schools.

Built in 1927, the school has graduated generations of Queens residents, many of whom turned up last night to defend their alma mater. Many who spoke accused the DOE of underfunding Jamaica while “dumping” some of the most difficult to educate students on its doorstep.

Alan Coles, a retired Jamaica teacher who still coaches the girls track team, said that after the school was listed as persistently dangerous in 2007, it lost the majority of its best students.

“Students who could not get into any other school were sent here,” he said. “So what did they expect our graduation rate to be?”

Jamaica’s four-year graduation rate is 46.2 percent and has slowly been increasing over the last several years.

Dopeen Mohammed, a junior in the Gateway honors program, said during the time she’d been at Jamaica the school had lost its Advanced Placement chemistry and Spanish classes to budget cuts, along with more than a dozen teachers. Other students asked why the new small secondary school that shares the building, Queens Collegiate, has more Smart Boards and new computers than Jamaica has.

“If you have the kind of resources to open two new schools, why not put it into building up this school?” asked Michele Williams, president of Jamaica’s parent association.

“We have put a lot of resources into the school,” responded Debra Kurshan, head of the DOE’s Office of Portfolio Planning.

“We don’t doubt there are a lot of successes at Jamaica. But we do have a large number of students who are not doing well,” said Jeanette Reed, the superintendent for District 28.

James Eterno, Jamaica High School's UFT chapter leader. (GothamSchools Flickr)

The head of the union chapter at Jamaica High School said teachers there have been expecting the school’s closure for years and criticized the city for planning to open new small schools without offering help to the struggling large one.

James Eterno, a history teacher at Jamaica for 24 years, said teachers anticipated bad news after the school received a D on its progress report this year. But signs that the 1,500-student high school was in trouble had been apparent for years, he said.

In 2007, Jamaica was placed on a citywide list of schools labeled “persistently dangerous,” and letters were sent home to students and parents informing them of the designation. Enrollment dropped, Eterno said, and when Jamaica became the last choice of eighth-grade students applying to high schools, a new population of students who were less enthusiastic about school entered the school. (Eterno laid out this story in a community section post about Queens high schools back in September.) 

Of the school’s roughly 500 ninth grade students, slightly less than half did not apply to the school but were placed there after they moved to Queens, sometimes from other countries and knowing little English, Eterno said.

“What [the city] should have done and what they could have done was to give us the funding, let us lower class size, let us have reasonable guidance caseloads and let us see if it works,” Eterno said. “Then if it doesn’t work, then you can make the case to close us down.”

Eterno, who is running for president of the teachers union this spring, said he learned of Jamaica’s proposed closure this morning in a meeting with the school’s principal and superintendent. Administrators told him the DOE planned to open two new small schools in Jamaica’s building next year: a high school and a school serving grades 6-12.

A spokesman for the DOE, Will Havemann, said the department would not comment on schools going into Jamaica next year. He said new schools opening in the fall will be announced in early 2010.

“We have a record of taking buildings that have a hard time attracting students and turning them into places where students want to go and we have every intention of continuing that work at Jamaica,” Havemann said.

Listing the overcrowded high schools in the area, Eterno wondered where eighth-grade students who would have otherwise gone to Jamaica would enroll next year. In their first year, small schools typically have incoming classes of just over 100 students. Jamaica has five times that many in its current ninth grade.

“Two start-up schools at Jamaica next year won’t do a darn thing to dent the overcrowding. So how does that help anybody?” Eterno said.

Havemann said the two high schools placed in Jamaica would be designed with the borough’s overcrowding in mind.

“We believe that by putting new and better options in the building, we’ll be able to better serve students and reduce the enrollment burden,” he said.

He writes:

I’m in one of the most overcrowded schools in the city, Francis Lewis High School. Our building is designed for 1,800 kids, and last year we were up to 4,450. This year we hit 4,700, and the sky’s the limit. Where the extra kids will go I have no idea. …

On the other hand, James Eterno, chapter leader at Jamaica High School, has a completely different problem. Not enough kids are enrolling in his school. Could we help one another?

I’m in one of the most overcrowded schools in the city, Francis Lewis High School. Our building is designed for 1,800 kids, and last year we were up to 4,450. This year we hit 4,700, and the sky’s the limit. Where the extra kids will go I have no idea. I teach in a trailer out back, and you wouldn’t use it to house your dog if you had a choice.

In the trailers, you never can tell if there will be heat on cold days or AC on hot ones (and don’t buy a used car from anyone who tells you tin keeps you cool). The bathrooms are an abomination. Though school trailers are all the rage in New York City, you never see them on the news. If I didn’t visit one every working day of my life, I probably wouldn’t believe they existed.

On the other hand, James Eterno, chapter leader at Jamaica High School, has a completely different problem. Not enough kids are enrolling in his school. Could we help one another? That way, if, God forbid, there were ever a fire or something, perhaps more of us could make it out alive. How did things get to this point?

It’s complicated. Longtime teachers know that a lot of incidents routinely go unreported. The Bloomberg administration, early on, declared all incidents would be reported, and some administrators took those words to heart — as did those at Jamaica. The consequences are highly unlikely to encourage other administrators to do the same.

The city labeled Jamaica a “priority” school, and then an “impact” school. Ultimately, the state labeled the school “persistently dangerous.” Under NCLB, this triggered a letter home to all Jamaica parents, offering them an opportunity to transfer their kids to another school. Understandably, the school population dropped precipitously. Was Jamaica persistently dangerous, or was it just reporting more incidents than its neighbors?

Administration then began to move in the opposite direction. This resulted in the disastrous policy (by no means unique to Jamaica) of not allowing staff to call 911 without administrative approval. This was widely covered in the media, and likely resulted in even lower enrollment at Jamaica.

The DoE’s position was that Jamaica needed surveillance cameras, police, and metal detectors to improve. Eterno felt it would’ve benefited more from additional counselors, teachers, and social workers. But that was not to be the case. In fact, in 2008 Jamaica had over a dozen teachers, excessed due to declining enrollment, sitting in the school day after day, sometimes working as subs.

Why couldn’t these teachers have been used to decrease class sizes, and consequently give more attention to kids at Jamaica? The answer may be that the DoE had other plans for the space created by the exodus of local kids.

In 2008, Queens Collegiate, a school co-sponsored by the College Board, was placed in what used to be the social studies wing of Jamaica High. Jamaica’s social studies department was banished to an office in which they shared a single electrical outlet. Meanwhile, according to Eterno, Queens Collegiate rooms got paint, computers, smartboards, and everything else private-public ventures are entitled to in Mayor Bloomberg’s New York.

Additional schools create additional levels of administration and eat up classroom space, worsening overcrowding. Eterno asks, “Wouldn’t it be a better idea to fix a place like Jamaica?” At overcrowded Francis Lewis High School, I wonder the same thing. Why couldn’t the free space in Jamaica be used to help us, rather than a privately-sponsored school? Why doesn’t the city invest in technology, magnet programs, and better conditions to draw kids to Jamaica?

In fact, why don’t they offer prospective Jamaica students lower class sizes (which parents declared their number one priority on a DoE-sponsored survey)? Hasn’t Mayor Bloomberg accepted hundreds of millions of CFE lawsuit funds for that very purpose? Isn’t fixing schools for our kids, whether or not they win charter lotteries, whether or not they’re accepted into elite schools, worth a try?

Eterno says of the DoE, “If they perceive you as troubled, they don’t throw you a lifeline. They seem to say, ‘Good, you’re drowning. We hope you go under.’” But is that attitude unique to Jamaica? It doesn’t appear so. Our school is just a variation on a theme. They perceive us as successful, and seem to want to overcrowd us until we reach a breaking point — which is nothing short of inevitable.

It’s sort of a Catch 22 — struggle and you’re in danger of closing, but excel and you’re packed to the rafters and beyond. Why not give Lewis kids a real incentive to attend Jamaica, or any nearby school for that matter? Any time it felt like it, this administration could wake up and help me and James Eterno.

More importantly, it could help the thousands of kids we serve.