GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

The city has no plans to fight an appellate court ruling that will keep open 19 schools marked for closure, Chancellor Joel Klein said today. But it does plan to open new schools in the same buildings.

That’s despite the fact that the same closure proposals that judges deemed inadequate were also used to justify opening 17 new schools in those buildings.

Whenever the city wants to shut down a school or make several schools share the same building space, state law requires city officials to prepare “educational impact statements” (or EIS’s) that examine how the changes will affect students and the surrounding community. The EIS’s that the citywide school board approved in January included, in the same documents, both the plans to close the 19 schools and replace many of them starting next year.

Today, five appellate court judges unanimously ordered the city to reissue those EIS’s with more detail than what the court called “boilerplate information about seat availability.”

But Department of Education officials said today that ruling does not mean the city has to re-start the public approval process to co-locate the new schools in the buildings where they had planned to shut schools down. “The court’s decision relates to the phase-out of failing schools, not the siting of new schools,” said DOE spokesman Danny Kanner. (more…)

The Harlem Children's Zone is planning to open a new building for one of its two charter schools on the grounds of the Saint Nicholas Houses. The school's proposed site is marked on the map in blue.

The city and the Harlem Children’s Zone announced a deal today that would create more charter school space in Harlem — without, officials hope, setting off a new front in the bitter space wars there.

The deal would have the city and philanthropists team up to fund construction of a new building on the grounds of a Harlem housing project, the Saint Nicholas Houses, HCZ President Geoffrey Canada and New York City Housing Authority Chairman John Rhea said.

The new building would eventually nearly double the number of students in HCZ schools without imposing on nearby district schools in Harlem. The convenient deal could avoid political headaches, but it will also likely raise questions about whether erecting a new $100 million building in Harlem is the best use of city capital dollars. (more…)

Principal wannabes hoping to open up new city high schools got marching orders from city officials last night: Try to focus on students still learning English or vocational programs.

The advice came at a meeting held by the Office of Portfolio Planning, where more than a dozen people stood before an audience of community board members and parents and tried to sell their vision for a new high school. Most said they wanted to open schools that focus on English Language Learners or students who are older and are not on track to graduate.

Though the final proposals are not due until December, the principal-hopefuls were there to see what kind of reception their envisioned new schools would get from parents and community board members.

Johanny Garcia, an assistant principal at the Urban Assembly School for Careers in Sports, proposed a high school for ELL students, which he once was. (more…)