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Unleashing anger from Upper East Side parents, Department of Education officials last night backed off a plan to move a high school there to East Harlem in order to make space for an elementary school.

Neighborhood parents had praised the plan because it would create a new elementary school with its own space immediately in a baby-boom neighborhood, but teachers and parents at the high school that would have to move called it racist, saying their students — who are mainly black and Hispanic — should not be pushed to a building across from a housing project in order to make room for white families.

The department’s new proposal is to keep the high school where it is and open a new elementary school in temporary quarters, while looking for a permanent space.

The plan would add a new elementary school to a section of the Upper East Side that has not had a local, zoned school for nearly a decade. The unusual situation arose when officials deemed PS 151 unsafe and closed it in 2000. Neighborhood parents and elected officials have been pushing the city to open a replacement for 151, but until recently school officials hedged, saying that nearby schools could accommodate the neighborhood’s children. (more…)

After a rocky journey marked by allegations of dystopianism and favoritism and almost too many principals to count, the charter school founded by the millionaire Courtney Ross is moving out of Tweed Courthouse and into a home of its own. That’s happening despite the fact that there is still no resolution to the cheating scandal that hit Ross Global Academy charter school last year, when its principal was pushed out after being investigated for tampering with tests.

Next year, Ross Global Academy charter school will move to a new East Village space, which it will share with the progressive East Side Community High School. Another small high school, the Urban Assembly School of Business for Young Women, is leaving the building for its own new space, at an office building in Lower Manhattan.

A person at Urban Assembly today told me the school is excited to get a new space. “It’s very crowded here,” the person said. “We were supposed to be here for one school year, and it’s already four.”

Ross expects to have more students next year, 384 up from 316 this year, Department of Education spokesman Will Havemann said.

In Ross’s place, two new elementary schools are starting off with kindergarten classes in the basement of Tweed next year. They are eventually scheduled to move into larger spaces now under construction. Downtown Express has a profile of the new schools.