GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Two schools that had faced closure votes this week are being taken off the chopping block.

The Department of Education said today it would no longer seek to close the middle grades of Wadleigh Secondary School of Performing and Visual Arts or the KAPPA VII middle school in Brooklyn. Teachers reported getting the news at the end of the day today, one day before the citywide school board was set to vote ont he closure proposals.

Chancellor Dennis Walcott said the department had made the decision after listening to community input at public meetings and behind the scenes.

“While these two schools continue to struggle, what we learned is that they are also poised to quickly improve,” he said in a statement.

But supporters of the schools, particularly Wadleigh, said the city’s statement was a smokescreen and said they would still travel to Thursday’s Panel for Educational Policy meeting in Brooklyn to protest closure votes for 23 other schools.

The real reason for the unusual reversal, they said, was that influential politicians in Harlem had sprung to Wadleigh’s aid — and threatened the Bloomberg administration in the process. (more…)

The agenda items before the Panel for Educational Policy Wednesday night were relatively uncontroversial. But that didn’t dissuade the teachers union from staging a mass protest.

The protest was aimed at Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to remove half of teachers at 33 low-performing schools, which he announced during his State of the City speech last week. It began when more than 100 members of the United Federation of Teachers flooded the front rows of Brooklyn Technical High School’s auditorium, breaking into chants of “Save Our Schools!” and blasting whistles to delay the meeting’s start.

Michael Mendel, a union official, took the microphone to lambaste the panel, which has approved hundreds of school closure proposals since Bloomberg gained control of the city’s schools in 2003.

“You should be removed from office,” Mendel said. “You are a disgrace to public education.”

Then, in the middle of the public comment period, the group of teachers stood up and walked out en masse.

Plans to close and reopen struggling schools won’t start appearing on the panel’s agenda until next month. Last night, the agenda focused instead on proposals to move or expand schools, including Community Roots Charter School and the Academy of Young Writers. (more…)

On the agenda of the Panel for Educational Policy tonight: changes to schools in eight buildings in three boroughs.

The meeting is sure to be tame compared to next month’s, when the panel is set to vote on proposals to close or shrink 25 schools. The most contentious item facing the panel tonight could be the city’s plan to move a Brooklyn high school closer to where its students live, which students and staff at the school support.

The panel is also voting on a co-location plan for a new charter school started by the Children’s Aid Society, a 158-year-old social services provider.

Geoff is at the meeting, taking place in Brooklyn Technical High School’s cavernous auditorium, and we’re going to try something new with our coverage. Rather than live-blog the meeting, we’ll stream Geoff’s Twitter updates here.

View our full Twitter feed to see Rachel’s updates from a school closure hearing at Brooklyn’s P.S. 19 — and potentially other tidbits, as well.

Protesters opposing Department of Education proposals brandished hand puppets before the Panel for Educational Policy.

In the start of what has become an annual ritual, the Panel for Educational Policy Wednesday night listened to hours of rowdy public comments opposing the city’s policy of placing charter schools inside existing school buildings, then signed off on plans to do just that.

The panel gave the go-ahead to a Success Charter school co-location in Cobble Hill in Brooklyn, an affluent neighborhood where many parents and elected officials have said the school is not wanted.

Panel members Gbubemi Okotieuro, of Brooklyn, and Patrick Sullivan, of Manhattan, each raised issues about the co-location plan for the Success Charter school, which did not originally apply to open in the area.

Marc Sternberg, the Department of Education official in charge of new schools, said the department had determined the neighborhood had experienced an “explosion of kindergarten enrollment” and needed more elementary schools.

“It was made clear to us by SUNY that the charter school could be opened in District 15,” Sternberg said, referring to the state organization that authorizes charter schools, which approved the Success Academy school for nearby District 13 or 14.

Sullivan was the only panel member to vote against any of the plans, casting a “no” vote on the Cobble Hill c0-location and abstaining from several other votes.

The panel also approved plans to open a charter high school in the old Boys High School building and a second Success charter school in P.S. 59, both in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. It also signed off on a plan to expand Esperanza Preparatory Academy, a dual-language school in East Harlem that shares a building with a citywide gifted school, TAG Young Scholars, whose parents had opposed the change. (more…)

Two weeks before the city’s school board is set to vote on a slate of controversial school changes, the Department of Education has relocated the meeting from Midtown Manhattan to central Queens.

Instead of taking place at the High School of Fashion Industries, the Dec. 14 Panel for Educational Policy meeting is now set for Newtown High School in Elmhurst, Queens, about eight miles away. On the agenda: proposals to expand schools in the Bronx and Manhattan and to co-locate charter schools in three different Brooklyn buildings.

A public hearing this week for one of those co-locations, the siting of a new Success Academy charter school in Cobble Hill, drew nearly five hours of heated testimony.

Critics of the department charge that the move was intended to squelch public comment. They’re asking the city to move the meeting again, to a location nearer to schools that would be affected by the panel’s votes.

But DOE officials said the change happened learned that construction underway on Fashion Industries’ auditorium would not be complete before Dec. 14. They said they picked Newtown as a replacement because it is near public transportation and has an adequate auditorium that was not already booked.

They also said the department tries to distribute panel meetings across the city throughout the year, and the previous schedule had four meetings in Manhattan, five in Brooklyn, two in the Bronx, and only one each in Queens and Staten Island. (more…)

A family firewall around discussing school issues has Chancellor Dennis Walcott taking a hands-off approach to managing trouble at a chaotic Queens school.

Walcott’s daughter, Dejeanne Walcott, is a physical education teacher at Queens Metropolitan High School, where an organizational crisis has caused schedules to shift frequently and left some students without instruction, including in physical education classes.

After last night’s Panel for Educational Policy meeting, where he vowed that the problems would be solved, Walcott said he had first heard about the troubles at the school “a couple weeks ago.” He said his top deputy, Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky, had heard complaints around the same time.

But Walcott would not say whether his daughter mentioned the issues to him, emphasizing that he and Dejeanne try not to talk shop.

“My daughter and I have established a protocol with each other with respect to business,” he said. “We try not to mix our respective lives as far as education is concerned.” (more…)

The agenda for tonight’s Panel for Educational Policy meeting, held in Queens, contained just two topics: School locations and the Department of Education’s financial contracts.

But it was scheduling crises at two Queens high schools that dominated most of the meeting at Astoria’s Frank Sinatra High School of the Arts, drew just a few dozen parents.

We reported this week that Queens Metropolitan High School had revised students’ schedules as many as 10 times this year amid an organizational crisis. Last month, NY1 reported that thousands of students at Long Island City High School were enraged after the school changed their schedules midyear.

Tonight, Department of Education officials vowed to repair the damages. Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky, who stepped in at Queens Metropolitan on Wednesday, called the debacles “rare” and vowed that they “will not be repeated.”

Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott, whose daughter is a physical education teacher at the school, echoed Polakow-Suransky’s promise, saying, “We pledge our support to make sure we do not repeat this at all.” (more…)

The possibility of a public comment session evaporated just moments into tonight’s Panel for Educational Policy meeting, after nearly 200 protesters drowned out Department of Education officials.

The panel had convened for a special meeting about the city’s new curriculum standards. But as Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott and the standards’ architect, David Coleman, took the stage at Seward Park High School, protesters aligned with the Occupy movement launched a chorus of complaints via “the people’s mic.” (more…)

Since the first protesters arrived at Zuccotti park nearly five weeks ago, the Occupy Wall Street movement has ignited protests from California to the United Kingdom. The city Department of Education could be next.

Calling Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott a member of the maligned “1 percent,” city education activists say they are planning to bring hundreds of protesters to next week’s school board meeting for an “Occupy the DOE” action.

The idea to form ODOE came to organizers, many of whom are city public school teachers, during a Sunday afternoon “grade-in” for educators at Occupy Wall Street, according to Leia Petty, an organizer who works as a guidance counselor in a Bushwick high school and is a long-time activist.

As the teachers discussed how the OWS movement intersected with public education, she said, they united around a shared concern that educators and families have been shut out of DOE decision-making process. So they decided to protest the entity that does ratify DOE decisions: the Panel for Educational Policy, which is holding a special meeting next week about new academic standards.

Petty said ODOE protesters will fill the 350-seat auditorium and draw attention to the PEP’s track record of ignoring public testimony before approving the DOE’s proposed policies. Most of the panel’s members were appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. (more…)

A week after hundreds of its members who worked in schools were laid off, the DC-37 union is hosting a trial of the Department of Education.

The Coalition for Public Education, a local activist group, organized the trial, to be held Saturday at DC 37′s downtown headquarters, to air concerns about public education under mayoral control. Already more than 100 parents, teachers, students, and community members have signed up to testify, according to Akinlabi Mackall.

The event is meant to resemble Panel for Educational Policy meetings’ public comments segment, which frequently attract many people but rarely influence the panel’s decisions, said Mackall, the father of a public school graduate.

“The PEP and the mayor have pretty much turned a deaf ear to the voices of teachers and students,” he said. “We’ve seen people be very eloquent and very passionate, but then there’s just a rubber-stamp response.”

He said CPE would record the testimonies and present them to state lawmakers. The group will also use the complaints as a blueprint for organizing future meetings around issues that trial participants raise, he said.

Some of the same criticisms are likely to arise at a second education event being held Saturday 12 miles north, at Lehman College, where Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. is convening a borough-wide education summit. (more…)