A snapshot from one of two Panel for Educational Policy meetings about school closures in 2011.

Boisterous protests against school closures have long been accused of lending a circus-like atmosphere to the annual meetings where the Panel for Educational Policy votes on closures. This year, though, the opposition will actually have three rings.

Three separate groups are planning protest actions during tonight’s PEP meeting, where the citywide school board is set to vote on — and presumably approve — 23 school closures and truncations. (Changes to two schools were taken off the table yesterday.)

City officials have vowed not to let the protests disrupt the panel’s proceedings, suggesting that panel members and protesters alike could be in for a long and potentially combative night. Last year, the panel approved 22 closures in two separate meetings that each lasted well past 1 a.m. In 2010, the panel’s vote on 20 school closures took place just before 4 a.m., after more than 10 hours of protests and public comment.

Tonight, the United Federation of Teachers, which has orchestrated the most substantial protests in the past, is planning to start its protest outside Brooklyn Technical High School but then constitute an alternate event, a “People’s PEP,” at P.S. 20, an elementary school with a 600-seat auditorium six blocks away that the union has rented for the evening. Union officials said teachers from the schools up for closure would be invited to give presentations about their schools at the P.S. 20 meeting.

Another group that has been active in opposing the closure proposals, the Coalition for Educational Justice, is taking a different approach: Instead of walking out from the meeting, CEJ members and those active in affiliated groups, including the Alliance for Quality Education and the Urban Youth Collaborative, are marching in protest to it. After a 5 p.m. rally, they’ll walk five blocks east on Dekalb Street to Brooklyn Tech, where they will continue to protest against the city’s proposed closures.

A press advisory for the CEJ event warns that protesters will use the “people’s mic” to amplify their voices during the panel meeting. And they won’t be alone using that strategy. A third protest set for tonight is by “Occupy the DOE,” which grew out of the Occupy Wall Street movement that popularized the human microphone tactic.

The stated goal of the Occupy protesters is to stop the panel from conducting its business by holding an alternate, “democratic” meeting in the same space. Occupy the DOE protesters derailed a special meeting of the panel last fall, and students steeped in Occupy tactics caused Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott to cut short a town hall meeting in the Bronx last week.

A key difference is that tonight’s votes must happen — and, according to the state’s open meetings law, they must happen in public, after public input.

But Walcott said he would not let tonight’s meeting be driven off course by protesters and accused the union of masterminding the Occupy protest in addition to its own.

“There are important proposals up for discussion tonight and my hope is that we will have a respectful process where people can be heard,” Walcott said in a statement. “But if all the UFT wants to do is bus in Occupy Wall Street to disrupt public meetings — which provides absolutely no benefit to students — then we will just have to work around that.  We are prepared to move forward even if there are disruptions.”

The UFT provided some support for the Occupy movement this fall, but it is not providing transportation expressly for Occupy protesters, according to union officials. Still, they said, it is possible that some Occupy-affiliated protesters might board the 13 buses the union is running for families and teachers at schools up for closure. Most of the buses will come from schools in the Bronx, eastern Brooklyn, and Staten Island that could be closed tonight, and Harlem’s Wadleigh Secondary School for Performing and Visual Arts is expected to fill two buses even though its middle school is no longer at risk.

If the protests prove overwhelming for city officials and panel members, state law does allow the votes to be delayed. While the PEP has typically voted on closure proposals in early February, it can legally approve closure proposals up until the end of the school year as long as it has met deadlines for informing the public about the proposals and holding public hearings at each of the affected schools.

Hearings for the 23 schools up for closure tonight took place over the last few weeks. In the coming weeks, the department is poised to formally propose as many as 33 additional closures under the federally mandated school improvement strategy known as “turnaround.” If the city moves forward with those plans, which Mayor Bloomberg announced during his State of the City address last month, it would need to hold additional public hearings and the PEP would need to vote on the proposals. The city has said that would likely happen at the panel’s April meeting.

Occupy Wall Street activists Justin Wedes (right), and filmmaker Kevin Breslin (center) speak to a small group of students and staff at Paul Robeson High School, including English teacher Stefanie Siegel (left).

This week, the subject of Justin Wedes’s regular after school meeting with Paul Robeson High School seniors was part lesson on activism and social media, and part strategy session.

Meeting in the East Brooklyn school’s first-floor student lounge, which in the past year has served both as a place to unwind at the end of a long school day and a place to strategize ways to challenge the city’s school closure policy, Wedes detailed the plans to protest at the meeting where city officials will vote on which schools to close.

Wedes, who is a former city teacher, vocal opponent of school closures, and high-profile Occupy Wall Street organizer, is marshaling activists from within schools to join the Occupy movement in commandeering the evening PEP meeting, effectively prohibiting the agenda proceedings.

Wedes said he has spoken with students and teachers at a handful of city schools this winter in preparation for the event, including Herbert H. Lehman High School and Legacy High School for Integrated Studies.

On Thursday, the city’s Panel for Education Policy is scheduled to vote on half of this year’s controversial slate of school closures. In past years, protesters have delayed the evening vote until the early hours of the following morning. Wedes said the goal is to prohibit the vote from happening at all.

“We’re going to occupy it. We’re going to shut it down,” he said to the gathering of a half-dozen students and staff from Robeson. The PEP “won’t be able to vote.”

Under the banner of “Occupy the Department of Education,” an Occupy Wall Street spin-off, scores of educators, students and people unaffiliated with the public education system have used civil disobedience to derail or shut-down a number of public meetings where the chancellor and other education officials have appeared this school year. One meeting hosted under the auspices of the PEP, was cut short after droves of chanting protesters used the “people’s mic” to take over and staged a walk-out; but unlike tonight’s meeting, it was a special meeting on the Common Core standards with no formal agenda or voting period.

As a city teacher, Wedes made it his goal to inform students about political issues, and he became a leader in protests against school closures and chemicals in schools. But since resigning from teaching in 2010, he has devoted virtually all of his energy to activism, emerging as a spokesperson in the Occupy movement. Through it all, he has been meeting with students — most often at Robeson, but also at Lehman High School in the Bronx and elsewhere — to galvanize them to act against policies they feel marginalize them.

Wedes said the routine of past PEP meetings‘—where PEP members have never voted against an agenda item—demonstrates the need for a drastic change.

“We’ve been through this for years and years,” he said. “You can have hours of public comment, and every single parent and teacher and principal, every student and soon-to-be student who’s not even old enough to be in school can make the most heartfelt plea to these schools to keep their school open, and then at four in the morning, after 7 hours of public comment, motion to vote and then in 30 seconds all those schools are shuttered.”

Several Robeson students said they planned to attend tonight’s meeting to tell DOE officials about the detriments of rising class sizes, and how the phase-out policy has impacted their high school careers.

“I just hope that this whole thing stops, and it ends sooner rather than later,” said Ana Leguillou, a senior who has been active in past protests. “Everything fails, but you have to keep trying and trying in order to succeed. It may be too late for us but that doesn’t mean we should just stop altogether. If we can prevent other schools from meeting the same fate that we are going through…that’s what drives us to keep fighting against it.”

Wedes said the protesters will use a popular call-and-repeat speaking tactic, called a “mic check,” or a “people’s mic,” to drown out the Department of Education’s official microphone.

“Everybody will have a chance to speak, on the People’s mic—On our mic, not on there’s,” he said. “Even schools that aren’t slated for closure should come out ,and will come out.”

The thrum of OWS and the movement’s signature tactics have inflected many school protests this year. Last week, students at Samuel Gompers Career and Technical Education High School shouted “mic check!” several times before speaking at the school’s closure hearing. And several OWS activists taught students from Legacy High School for Integrated Studies, Lehman High School, and others how to use the “people’s mic” during a protest at Union Square.

Wedes has been meeting with Robeson students on an almost weekly-basis since 2010 he said, to talk about activism and plan student efforts to protest DOE measures, such as the decision to phase-out Robeson due to poor performance. Most recently, Wedes invited the filmmaker Kevin Breslin to campus, where they screened a documentary about OWS on a computer in the student lounge after school. Following the viewing, the group discussed issues of racism, class, police power, social media and nonviolence around OWS and other movements.

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.

By keeping Wadleigh open, “they’re trying to divert attention from the issue that legislators are finally stepping forward against mayoral control,” said Noah Gotbaum, a member of the district’s elected parent council who had been involved in efforts to save the school.

Angered by Wadleigh’s position on the chopping block, Assemblyman Keith Wright had crafted legislation to roll back mayoral control and give some authority to other entities, such as the State Education Department and the City Council.

Wright had previously been undecided on mayoral control of the city schools. But he joined a growing number of New Yorkers who are dissatisfied with the governance structure after nearly a decade under Mayor Bloomberg. A poll released today found that just 13 percent of city voters believe the mayor should retain sole control of the schools after Bloomberg leaves office in 2013, a number that has been more than halved in the last five years.

Today, Wright said that he was pleased by the news that Wadleigh would be saved but would still circulate his bill, a first step toward formally introducing it.

“I think it’s still appropriate,” he said. ”It was clear on its face the Bloomberg administration was trying to clear the space for some co-location of a charter school, which is absolutely ridiculous. I just thought it was wrong.”

The charter school, Harlem Success Academy, was approved last year to move into the building in September and will do so as planned, according to department officials.

That issue has Wadleigh’s advocates unwilling to celebrate victory. A woman who answered the phone at the school this afternoon said that department officials had informed students and teachers in two separate meetings this afternoon about the change. She said teachers and staff were relieved by the news but wanted to know whether the middle school, which enrolled just 86 students last year, would be able to expand.

“Before we jump up and down we need to know the answers,” said the woman, who said she did not want her name published because she was afraid of reprisal.

“Of course we’re happy that we’re not being closed but it’s still a perplexing feeling,” said Anthony Klug, Wadleigh’s union chapter leader. “We still strongly believe that no school should be in this predicament.”

And Paul McIntosh, the school’s librarian who had recruited fiery scholar Cornel West to Wadleigh’s defense, said he thought the building would have space for a third school only if Wadleigh’s substantial arts spaces are reduced. (A second school in the building, Frederick Douglass Academy II, made the department’s closure shortlist but was ultimately not selected to close.)

“While one can applaud what happened today, it still doesn’t rest well with me as far as what I have observed,” McIntosh said.

One of the many elected officials who had sprung to Wadleigh’s defense, City Councilwoman Inez Dickens heard the news by phone directly from Walcott this afternoon and asked whether HSA would still move into the building, according to a spokeswoman, Lynnette Veslaco.

“The fight’s not over, but it’s a good day today,” Velsaco said. “The council member still has an issue with the co-location.”

Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, who had appeared at a raucous public hearing about Wadleigh’s closure last month, said he hoped the news would augur additional resources for the school.

“These turnabouts are all too rare, and the victory is a credit to this vibrant school community that never gave up,” he said in a statement. “I look forward to working further with parents and teachers to keep Wadleigh on the right track, and to ensur[ing] today’s announcement is followed by the concrete support Wadleigh needs to succeed.”

Hazel Dukes, head of New York City’s chapter of the NAACP, said she was impressed by tightly organized defense of Wadleigh that she experienced at the closure hearing. That organization must have frightened city officials, she speculated.

“They knew that hell was going to break lose” if Wadleigh were closed, she said.

It’s a sentiment that Wright seconded. “Wadleigh was the line in the sand,” he said. “They would have had to come through the community before we’d let them close it down.”

City officials denied the charge that Wadleigh’s last-minute save was politically motivated.

“We make decisions based on the outcomes we believe we can achieve for students, and over the course of our engagement process we came to believe that Wadleigh’s Middle School has a good chance of turning around under new leadership,” said Frank Thomas, a department spokesman.

The current principal, Herma Hall, announced last week that this Friday would be her last day at the school, and next week, Tyee Chin, who currently works at Brooklyn’s Edward R. Murrow High School, will take over.

A scant number of schools have been removed from the closure list at the eleventh hour before, often after receiving a groundswell of support. Last year, the city withdrew its proposal to close Brooklyn’s P.S. 114 after community leaders and elected officials, including de Blasio, argued that the school had been undermined by an incompetent principal. In 2010, the department decided to phase out only portions of Alfred E. Smith Career and Technical Education High School after originally suggesting that the entire school should be closed. (Ultimately, no school closed that year because a lawsuit voided the closure votes conducted in February.)

But many schools that are now just a day from a closure vote have had vigorous defenses mounted on their behalf, to no avail. And the second school removed from the closure list today, KAPPA VII, hadn’t mounted a perceptible defense at all.

The city said the principal who took over at KAPPA VII this year had made positive changes that appeared likely to continue.

Still, even the president of KAPPA VII’s local parent council, Khem Irby, was surprised when she learned the school would remain open. She said she thought a different school in the district that had demonstrated community support, Satellite III, was a more likely candidate for resurrection.

“We were expecting it to be Satellite III, not KAPPA VII, if anything. definitely,” she said. “They’re not doing what we asked. We just had a long meeting with DOE last night and we asked for Satellite III.”

Satellite III is one of 23 schools that face closure votes Thursday night by the Panel for Educational Policy, which has never rejected a city proposal. Twenty of them would be phased out and three are middle schools that would be closed.

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.

Community Roots Charter School, a socioeconomically and racially diverse elementary school in Fort Greene that put its expansion plans on hold last year amid protest, has struggled to show academic progress. It earned a C on its most recent city progress report and an F in 2010 — a lower grade than the one earned by another charter school, Peninsula Preparatory Academy, that the city is closing this year.

PEP member Patrick Sullivan voted against the proposal. He questioned why the city wanted to expand a “failing” school and suggested the decision was politically motivated to serve the community’s newer, more affluent residents. Deputy Chancellor Marc Sternberg said the school was in high demand in the neighborhood and had shown improvement.

In a brief exchange, Sternberg invited Sullivan to visit the school, but Sullivan declined. “I don’t need to visit the school,” Sullivan said. “It probably looks exactly like a school on the Upper West Side.”

Parents and teachers at the school where Community Roots is slated to open its middle school, P.S. 287, said they weren’t opposed to the charter school’s expansion as much as they objected to the DOE’s decision to move it into their building. The plan, they said, would stall P.S 287′s own efforts to expand.

The panel approved the plan by a vote of 9-3.

Then, members of District 19′s elected parent council criticized the DOE for not following through on a plan to open a new secondary school with middle school grades. Instead, the department decided to move an existing high school, Academy for Young Writers, into the district from Williamsburg and allow it to add a middle school starting next year.

“The kids were supposed to be starting in sixth grade and work their way up to 12th,” said Erica Perez, a council member who brought a petition opposing the school’s move that she said had more than 1,200 signatures.

Stephen Lazar, a Young Writers teacher (and a panel member at a GothamSchools event in August) said he agreed with Perez and other CEC members that the city had not included the community’s input in its decision. But in his testimony, which is below, he pleaded for the community to give the school a chance.

“I feel bad for the administrators who are now in this oppositional position with CEC 19, but it’s a good school that deserves support and I really hope that 19 will grow to love it,” Lazar said in an interview after his testimony.

The panel approved that plan 10-0, with two abstentions.

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.

The four-hour meeting was the first of what is sure be a series of contentious meetings where the panel, whose members are mostly appointed by the mayor, will likely approve plans for dozens of school closures and co-locations. In February, the panel will vote on proposals to close or shrink 25 schools.

At Wednesday’s meeting, which the department relocated from Midtown Manhattan to Newtown High School in Queens, dozens of protesters were bused in early by the teachers union and took up the center of the auditorium. Nearly 100 people signed up to speak and the majority of them used their two minutes to criticize the panel and the DOE.

The protesters, who included many teachers, used hand puppets to mock what they called the “Panel for Educational Puppets,” used the “human mic” to broadcast their opposition, and regularly interrupted speakers and panel members with whom they disagreed.

“I’m here on principle,” said Marissa Torres, a fifth-grade teacher at P.S. 261 in Brooklyn, which is located near the new Cobble Hill charter school. “I see myself as an advocate for parents. Public education is the last bastion of space where poor, working-class parents of color can walk in and demand their rights.”

The majority of the protesters didn’t stick around for the vote. About two hours into the public testimony section of the meeting, they stood up and marched out, chanting “Shame!” as they left.

A small, loosely-affiliated group of charter school parents from Brooklyn also attended and spoke out in support of charter school options. The parents said they were being organized by a new parent advocacy group called Families for Excellent Schools. The organization is a spin-off from Democracy Builders, a parent organization that is run by Seth Andrew, head of the Democracy Prep charter school network.

“The mission for Families for Excellent Schools is to assist and support and train parents to advocate for aggressive education reform,” said Kathleen Kernizan, a parent organizer whose children attend charter schools in the Uncommon Schools network.

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.

Last year, the panel held five meetings in Manhattan and seven in Brooklyn, including five at Brooklyn Technical High School, whose large auditorium could accommodate large crowds when the panel was voting on controversial proposals. The panel met once each in Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx.

The previous year, the DOE relocated a meeting when the panel was scheduled to vote on school closures and co-locations from Staten Island to Brooklyn Tech. (That meeting lasted until 4 a.m.)

After today’s announcement, the activist group New York Collective of Radical Educators is asking the DOE to make the same move again. Justin Wedes, a NYCORE member and former teacher, launched an online petition that already has nearly 200 signatures.

“Considering that all of the proposals on the agenda for this meeting directly affect school communities in these boroughs —especially the proposed co-locations in Brooklyn — we DEMAND that the meeting be returned to Brooklyn Technical HS in downtown Brooklyn,” the petition’s online introduction reads.

Also today, the department announced that the panel would vote on four charter school co-locations and two district school relocations at its next meeting. That meeting is set for Jan. 18 at Brooklyn Tech.

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.”

“My daughter and I have worked it out where she’s not passing information,” he added. “That’s not fair to her.”

As a result, the chancellor said, he’s trying to stay out of the fray at the school.

“When it comes to Queens Metropolitan, I try to let Shael and the others deal directly with it,” he said.

And asked whether he heard that Dejeanne’s subject was among those affected most by the school’s scheduling difficulties, he only responded, “Mmhmm. That’s what I’m hearing.”

Principal Marci Levy-Maguire told parents earlier this week that students have been getting grades in physical education classes without actually being required to exercise. That situation goes against a core belief of Walcott, a fitness fan who has said healthy habits are essential to academic success. Last night, Walcott said he would be going for his first run Saturday since completing the New York City Marathon, his first, on Nov. 6. “I feel great. I’m raring to go,” he said.

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.”

“This is something we take very seriously and will pursue aggressively,” Polakow-Suransky said tonight, adding that department officials helped fix schedules at the Long Island City school and would now take a closer look at how schools slot students into classes.

He said students wouldn’t be penalized for their school’s troubles but acknowledged that consequences of the disorder could persist.

“It won’t be lost time for any students involved, but the destruction to their experience is damaging,” Polakow-Suransky said.

A Queens Metropolitan parent who said she had been contacting the chancellor’s office weekly about problems at the school — City Councilwoman Elizabeth Crowley — was the first member of the public to speak.

In a meeting with reporters, she said it was clear that officials were working to clean up the situation but said that the efforts were coming late.

“It’s only today that it’s getting so much attention,” she said. “It’s good that Walcott’s daughter works there and I send my kids there. We’re going to work together as a community to make sure this happens.”

The school’s PTA president, Nicole Tam, said was surprised to learn earlier this week about the extent of the scheduling problems. She said Principal Marci Levy-Maguire has “put her heart and her mind” to the task of solving the scheduling problem this week.

“She’s actually caring,” Tam said. “She’s talking to parents. She’s not going and locking herself in a room like other principals would.”

After the public comment period, the panel quickly approved proposed changes in building use for 11 Bronx, Manhattan and Queens schools. In one vote, the panel approved making P.S. 51′s new site its permanent home. At last month’s PEP meeting, families from the Bronx school, which was moved after cancer-causing chemicals were detected in the air at its old location, spoke out against the subpar conditions at the new building.

Two weeks ago throngs of protesters bearing the name and hallmark tactics of the Occupy movement derailed a special PEP meeting on the new curriculum standards and vowed to return to subsequent meetings. But with a massive Occupy protest in Lower Manhattan tonight — which included an “Occupy the DOE” action on the steps of Tweed Courthouse — The sparse audience was mostly quiet. Panel meetings are likely to grow more contentious in the coming months as more controversial plans for school openings and closures come up for approval.

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.”

“Mic check!” each protester would call out, commanding the attention of his or her compatriots. Then he or she would call out a statement, pausing after every few words so that others could repeat them, amplifying the statement without the help of a microphone.

“The DOE’s priorities! Are all wrong!” one protester shouted. “We would like! There to be a community conversation! a real community conversation! about the people’s priorities!”

“We want our teachers to be paid more,” yelled a 7-year-old, Anais Richard, who attends P.S. 11 in Brooklyn. “If these things are not done, then we won’t be able to be succeeded.” The people’s mic repeated her statement, complete with the misspoken final word. 

Walcott delivered his opening remarks over the shouting. At one point, he said, “We appreciate the activism, and we look forward to having you participate in our discussion.”

But when Walcott turned the microphone over to Coleman, the tone shifted.

Coleman looked out at the half-filled auditorium, turned to Walcott, and asked if the chancellor thought it was time to shift gears. The pair conferred for a moment and then called off the question-and-answer portion of the event, instead ushering attendees to the third floor, where classrooms had been prepared for small-group sessions about the core standards.

Members of the panel, who had not said anything in the auditorium, left the stage with Walcott and Coleman.

The protesters stayed downstairs and continued chanting. Asked why they had not signed up to attend — and potentially disrupt — the small-group sessions, protesters said they had not wanted to raise the ire of more than a dozen police officers stationed in and around the building. Based on the number of people who entered the meeting, Walcott said there would be 14 small-group meetings, but only three went forward.

At about 7:20 p.m., the protesters, whose numbers had dwindled, filed out of the building, but not before they promised another action in the Occupy Public Education movement: a “general assembly” on the steps of Tweed Courthouse, the Department of Education’s headquarters, next month.

To reporters, Walcott said tonight’s meeting had accomplished its goal, even though it hadn’t gone exactly according to plan.

“The event is still taking place and people are still getting information,” he said. “We wanted to have a large group setting where David would talk to the audience and then give them a question an answer session. That couldn’t happen.”

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.

“The main concern people have, and why the PEP is being targeted, is we feel that it is an unelected and unrepresentative body making decisions on behalf of us. Teachers and students don’t have a voice in the DOE,” Petty said.

City education activists aren’t the first to think about taking over public education buildings in the spirit of OWS. Yesterday in Los Angeles, a handful of educators camped out infront of the headquarters of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

One goal of getting OWS more involved in education issues, Petty said, is to draw people into the conversation on public education who don’t usually participate in public meetings. “That goes, not just for other OWS protestors, but also for parents, students and teachers who don’t go to PEP meetings unless their school is up for closure.”

Tomorrow evening Diane Ravitch, an outspoken critic of the DOE, will speak to OWS protesters in Zuccotti Park about the relationship between economic inequality and school reform, according to organizers.

Julie Cavanagh, an organizer with the Grassroots Education Movement who will be participating in ODOE, said the OWS message and practices reflect education activists concerns.

“There is no greater representation for the lack of democracy in what’s happening in public education policy right now than the PEP,” said Cavanagh, who works a special education teacher. “It’s a group of people who believe they are accountable to one man as opposed to 1.1 million school children. that’s wrong. We want the representational democracy we’re entitled to.”

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. Diaz’s PEP appointee, Monica Major, frequently opposes DOE policies, and Diane Ravitch, an outspoken critic of the department, is the summit’s keynote speaker. Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott is also scheduled to appear.

“This is the first step toward creating a new agenda for education in the Bronx,” said John DeSio, a spokesman for Diaz.

The daylong event, which closed for registration earlier this month with more than a thousand registered attendees, will feature a panel of education policy heavyweights: Major; Shael Polakow-Suransky, the DOE’s chief academic officer; Ernest Logan, president of the principals union; teachers union president Michael Mulgrew; James Merriman, head of the city’s Charter School Center; and Betty Rosa, a member of the state Board of Regents.

Workshops for parents and teachers will address topics such as advocating for special education services and college-readiness challenges for English Language Learners.

Desio said Walcott agreed to speak shortly after he was appointed chancellor in April, and Ravitch signed on in August.

“This is an important event and these are two of the most important individuals in education in the Bronx and the city,” DeSio added. “This will be a great opportunity for their voices to be heard.”

Alan Gary criticizes how the Department of Education response to the discovery of toxins at P.S. 51 while son Nathanial, 11, left, an alumnus of the school, holds a sign that reads "Toxic, Keep Out"

Renewing criticism of how the Department of Education handled safety concerns at their former building, parents from P.S. 51 in the Bronx say their new site isn’t up to par, either.

That was the message that parents and community activists brought to Wednesday night’s Panel for Educational Policy meeting at the Bronx High School for Business. At a press conference outside the meeting and during the shorter-than-usual meeting itself, they charged that the city still has not done enough to ensure safety for P.S. 51′s students and teachers.

The city relocated P.S. 51 in August after detecting dangerous levels of a cancer-causing chemical at the original school building. The city detected the toxic chemical in February but did not disclose the discovery to families until this summer.

“We demand that protocol be put in place to remove students from toxic sites immediately, not five or six months after a problem is discovered,” said Alan Gary, whose son, Nathanial, is a former P.S. 51 student. “We believe it’s the parents’ decision to decide whether or not to send their kids to a school. Dennis Walcott, how dare you? You took away the rights of parents to protect their children by not informing us.”

Parents at the press conference called on the DOE to register each student who was exposed to the chemical, called trichloroethylene or TCE, and monitor their medical conditions over time — something the teachers union has said it will do for teachers who worked in the building.

Kelly King-Lewis pulled her daughter, Saqirah, out of school at P.S. 51 in 2009 after the eight-year-old, who was six at the time, complained of headaches, a symptom of TCE exposure, “constantly,” and said she was organizing parents around their concerns because her eldest daughter spent six years at P.S. 51 before graduating in 2010. Now she is worried her daughters may suffer long-term health effects.

“We should have medical monitoring to or children because we don’t know if there is going to be a physical effect later on down the line,” she said.

She said she is concerned that a routine test found traces of another chemical, called perchloroethene, or PCE, in the new school building, which housed a Catholic school until this summer. Walcott said during the PEP meeting that the PCE readings were insignificant and likely caused by an open container that was later removed from the building.

But parents cited other concerns with the safety of their new site, which the city has leased from the Archdiocese of New York — namely that the building sports broken windows, leaky pipes, and fly infestations.

“There’s holes, there’s leaks in the pipes, in the lunch room and i’ve been told in the auditorium as well, where the students meet every day,” said Marisol Carrero, whose son is in third grade at P.S. 51.

Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Walcott said the DOE would fix any existing infrastructure problems at the school.

“if there are issues to be addressed like leaks and broken windows, we’ll take care of that,” he said.

He also said he would meet again with P.S. 51 parents, who charged during the meeting that he had not kept a promise to meet with them. Responding to comments at the PEP meeting, Walcott said he is “always” willing to meet with parents and would work to set a time for next week. He also said that he and other DOE officials met with P.S. 51 parents before the start of the school year. in August, Walcott apologized to an auditorium full of distressed families for the DOE’s slow response to the safety concern.

P.S. 51 isn’t the only school site that’s potentially dangerous, Jane Maisel, a former Bronx literacy coach, reminded the panel. She said the city is months behind on delivering a report about pollution at the Mott Haven Campus, which was recently built on the site of a former train yard that may have traces of coal tar.

“We don’t know if there’s pollution coming into the school, but we need to know it’s not,” she said.

The meeting, which was sparsely attended aside from P.S. 51 supporters, offered little suggestion of the controversial topics that typically crowd the panel’s agendas. While parents from P.S. 51 finished rallying outside, 15 young women from Start Strong Bronx, an organization that teaches students in eight middle schools about domestic violence, urged panel members to place a stronger focus on teen violence prevention in schools. The panel later unanimously approved regulations to address bullying and sexual harassment complaints in schools.

“i want to thank the community-based organization for testifying at this meeting and the last meeting,” Walcott told the Start Strong Bronx participants. “Your input has been invaluable in helping to shape the policy.”

But the panel’s 13 members won’t be able to see the details of the contracts, which the DOE cannot finalize without their approval.

Department officials said this state of affairs is typical.

The DOE provides panel members with various parts of the contracts being drafted if available, but often contracts up for approval are still under negotiation when the panel members vote, DOE officials said.

Panel members who believe they received insufficient information about a deal may vote against it.

“No” is how Patrick Sullivan, the Manhattan borough president’s PEP appointee, said he plans to vote on Wednesday, when two high-profile contracts are up for approval: a $120 million two-year deal with Verizon Wireless, and contracts of roughly $1.5-3.5 million each over three years with six ”restart partners” — nonprofit Education Partnership Organizations set to take over operations at 14 struggling schools.

“They’re definitely putting the cart before the horse,” Sullivan said. “Approval is pretty much expected. They want the panel to approve in advance what they intend to do, and they will decide the details and specifics.”

When he has asked for more information in the past, Sullivan said he has received copies of the requests for proposals the city issues before finding a vendor, but not details about selected vendors’ specific plans.

Last week, Sullivan and two other PEP members, Dmytro Fedkowskyj of Queens and and mayoral appointee Freida Foster, discussed the contracts up for vote with several DOE officials in a 45 minute-long conference call. It was an unusual conversation, he said.

But Sullivan, who has gained a reputation as the voice of opposition to many DOE actions, said the call raised more questions than it answered.

“In the case of the EPOs, I think it is especially bad, because this is really an extraordinary measure: to take a school outside the jurisdiction of the superintendent and hand it to an outside entity,” he said. “If there’s no contract to review then I have to vote no—and I’ve been told there won’t be.”

The major item on the agenda at tonight’s Panel for Educational Policy meeting is more than a dozen charter school co-location plans. The plans are at the heart of a lawsuit, filed by the teachers union and NAACP, to halt school closures and stop some charter schools from opening, moving, or expanding.

The PEP already voted on the plans once, but in response to the lawsuit, the Department of Education revised all of them over the last several weeks, seeking to equalize allocations of shared space between charter schools and district schools. If the panel approves the new plans tonight, some of the equity charges made in the lawsuit could be neutralized.

I’ll be filing reports throughout the meeting.

10:30 p.m. Panel members have voted and, as expected, have approved all of the co-location plans before them tonight. Votes for seven of the plans each received four votes in opposition, from appointees of borough presidents. Those plans were for the co-locations at P368, Teaching Firms of America Charter School at P.S. 308; Democracy Prep 3 at P.S. 154; Promise Academy I and II at the Choir Academy of Harlem; Harlem Success Academy 1 at P.S. 123; and Upper West Success Academy at Brandeis High School. But with a majority of panel members being mayoral appointees, the opposition was easily outvoted.

Last week, lawyers debating the UFT-NAACP lawsuit called today “D-Day” for the case. That’s because the space-sharing plans approved tonight address many of the complaints lodged against the original plans in the lawsuit. Whether and how Judge Paul Feinman, who is assigned to the suit, takes the new plans into account remains to be seen, but last week he signaled that he might when he deferred making a final decision about whether to halt the city’s co-location plans.

9:45 p.m. Many of the testimonies tonight have criticized a few specific co-location plans: for P.S. 308 and P368, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Brandeis High School. P.S. 308 graduate Aquila Raiford, who went on to attend Stuyvesant High School and then Dartmouth College, testified that it was the quality education she received at Clara Cardwell that paved her road. She returned to P.S. 308 as an English teacher and now opposes any additional co-location at her school.

“Bringing in any school inside 308 is going to ruin the learning environment,” she said after her testimony. She pointed to safety issues of placing young children of incoming Teaching Firms of America Charter School on the building’s third floor.

9:30 p.m. As promised, I’m posting video (above) from the altercation earlier tonight between Hazel Dukes of the NAACP and charter school advocates.

Dukes actually found herself in the middle of two separate physical altercations with two different charter school advocates after each personally addressed comments she made earlier this month that referred to charter parents as “slave masters.” In his testimony, Invictus Preparatory founder Cliff Thomas, who is African-American, said he resented Dukes’ comments. Immediately afterward, Dukes confronted Thomas. “You went to Harvard on my back,” Dukes said. “Not because you’re smart, not because you work hard.”

Later, two parents from the Success Charter Network had to be physically separated from Dukes in the back of the auditorium. One of the parents, Kelly Alday of Bronx Success Academy, had just finished her testimony, which once again personally called out Dukes for her comments. In the address, the woman turned towards Dukes and directly addressed her. That was enough to spark Dukes, who rose from her seat at the front of the auditorium and met the woman at the end. The confrontation lasted for about 30 seconds before security and others stepped between the them.

Afterward, Dukes defended her actions. “I don’t regret it at all.”

Dukes also said that she has met with several of the charter leaders whose schools are challenged in the lawsuit. The one school leader that hasn’t met with her? Eva Moskowitz, of the Success charters. “They are the ones who are dividing the Harlem community,” Dukes said.

8:30 p.m. The evening hasn’t exactly been warm, but tensions just flared in the back of the room as Hazel Dukes, of the NAACP, and a charter school parent engaged in an up-close, highly heated exchange. Video is forthcoming.

8:15 p.m. The first public comments were from members of the Community Education Councils, the elected parent councils in each district. District 15′s Jim Devor, District 13′s Khem Irby, District 3′s Noah Gotbaum, and others all drew rounds of applause as they criticize DOE policies.

One exception was Bryan Davis, from District 6 in Washington Heights and Inwood, who attacked the motives behind the NAACP and UFT lawsuit. He was nearly drowned out by jeers by the time he uttered the following line at the end of his testimony: “It is time the NAACP and UFT came clean about this lawsuit and call it what it is: a job protection lawsuit for the adults.”

Until well into the meeting, no politicians were in attendance and just one City Council member was represented. (The council is currently hashing out last-minute budget details before it votes on the city budget this week.) An aide from Councilman Al Vann’s office, Mandela Jones, spoke in opposition to two charter school co-locations in his district, Bedford-Stuyvesant. He rejected both of the DOE’s revised plans for the schools and pleaded for the PEP to vote no. “Since the Department of Education in crafting and putting forth these proposals has ignored the concerns of our community, I urge the panel to exhibit independence and reject these proposals solely based on their merits,” he said.

Then, Gale Brewer, a councilwoman from the Upper West Side, arrived directly from the Brandeis High School graduation. Speaking about the a co-location plan to place a Success charter school inside the Brandeis building, Brewer raised issues about Success’ incoming enrollment and whether it has an adequate number of English Language Learners. She also said that her district needs more high schools, not more elementary schools, which the Success school would be.

Local NAACP leader Hazel Dukes, whose fiery rhetoric got her in trouble earlier this month, spoke calmly and civilly to PEP members. “We come tonight to respectfully ask that you reconsider co-locations” while the DOE focuses on equitably allocating school resources to all of New York City’s children, she said. “We come tonight to be a partner in education all the children in this city. We respect each of you as you look and review and maybe visit the schools.” She said she has visited schools where co-locations are disputed.

Chancellor Dennis Walcott addresses audience members at the June PEP meeting. Some members interrupted him in protest.

7:30 p.m. Chancellor Dennis Walcott has enjoyed something of a honeymoon in his appearances at panel meetings: While the audience is frequently made up of critics of the Department of Education, the chancellor himself has remained off-limits to the harshest criticism.

But not tonight. Walcott’s introduction drew jeers from the crowd, which is predominantly made up of people who oppose the Bloomberg administration’s education reform agenda.

It got even testier after Walcott stepped down from the stage to address the audience. Within moments, people spoke over Walcott, who was recapping the highlights of a “busy” month for the Department of Education. They challenged him on, among other things, the botched elections for parent leaders, the threat — now passed — of teacher layoffs, and, of course, the charter school co-locations.

Walcott fired back, threatening a few attendees with dismissal if they continued to interrupt him.

People from both sides of the lawsuit are in the crowd. Several members of the NAACP, including New York President Hazel Dukes, are in the center of the auditorium. A small group of parents from the Success Charter Network, which has been integral to organizing protests against the UFT and NAACP, are sitting stage left.

In the past month, city officials have revised each of 20 space-sharing plans outlining how charter schools would be housed inside district buildings. The way that previous plans allocated space between charter and district schools is a central criticism of the teachers union’s lawsuit.

The sweeping revision effort is in direct response to the lawsuit, filed May 18, Chancellor Dennis Walcott acknowledged in a statement.

Several of the plaintiffs listed on the lawsuit praised the revisions and indicated that they might lead to an out-of-court settlement.

In a conference call with reporters, Ben Jealous, the president of the NAACP, a lead plaintiff in the suit, said his organization’s ultimate goal was to place all students in their school of choice. “We are open to all options to settle this suit,” he said.

Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, said in an interview today that he was “happy” with the efforts. UFT lawyers, he said, have expressed cautious optimism that the revised plans would satisfy their demands.

The city’s move means that the plans, many of which were already approved by the Panel for Educational Policy, will require new votes by the PEP and new public hearings to solicit community feedback on their terms. The city began holding new hearings this week.

The most significant revisions made to the plans, called Educational Impact Statements and Building Utilization Plans, will allocate more time in common school building space — such as libraries, cafeterias and gymnasiums — to students enrolled in district schools.

Previously, the plans uniformly gave each school equal time in shared spaces, regardless of the school enrollment, an education official said. But now the DOE is dividing up space based on how large each school population is.

City Council Education Chair Robert Jackson, also a plaintiff, said that a settlement was possible if it included a commitment to allocating school building space more equitably. “Their move toward equity and fairness is a direction they should have moved toward a long time ago,” Jackson said today.

The lawsuit alleges that the Department of Education has not complied with state education law requiring students to receive an equal allotment of resources. Many of the specific complaints detailed in court documents targeted the shared space inequities.

School officials revised the plans in the last month, beginning even before the union filed its lawsuit. Over the next 19 days, officials will hold joint public hearings for all 20 charter schools targeted for co-location, setting up a June 27 PEP meeting that will have to vote on each plan.

Jealous’ comments came in a conference call with bloggers, which he said was organized to clarify the NAACP’s legal position. Noticeably absent on the call was Hazel Dukes, the president of New York’s NAACP chapter, who was initially listed on invitations as a speaker.

Dukes has been a public presence for the organization since the lawsuit was filed last month, but she sparked controversy with comments she reportedly made to a charter school parent on June 1.

In an email, Dukes said the parent was “doing the business of slave masters,” according to the New York Post.

Jealous described the Post report as a “mischaracterization” but declined to condemn the email.

The suit’s next crossroads is scheduled for June 21, when a state judge will decide whether the city can immediately move forward with its co-location and closure plans.

Meanwhile, the joint public hearings have already begun. Tonight is the co-location hearing for Bronx Academy Success.

Parents supporting P.S. 9 and Brooklyn East Collegiate at last night's PEP meeting

A contentious plan to move a charter middle school into Brooklyn’s P.S. 9 was one of six co-locations approved at last night’s school board meeting.

P.S. 9 parents came to the Panel for Educational Policy meeting with a plan of attack against the city’s proposal to move Brooklyn East Collegiate Charter School into the building. One by one, parents took their allotted time to point out specific aspects of the plan that they said were impractical for both schools. They also drew attention to P.S. 9′s own bid to expand into a middle school.

Their expansion plan, however, was not up for consideration and the panel, which has never rejected a co-location proposal, voted to move forward with the space-sharing plan.

Marc Sternberg, the Department of Education’s deputy chancellor for portfolio planning, argued that Uncommon Schools, the charter organization that runs Brooklyn East Collegiate, has a strong record with middle schools.

The vote had the most dissenters of the night, with four panel members voting no, and Chancellor Dennis Walcott suggested that P.S. 9′s middle school bid is not completely off the table. “I’m firmly committed to considering a P.S. 9 expansion,” he said.

While the P.S. 9 vote was the most divided, some panel members also voted against the placement of Democracy Prep charter school in M.S. 197 in Manhattan. Panel members unanimously approved KIPP STAR in Manhattan and VOICE in Queens.

The expansions, with vote counts, were:

• Metropolitan Lighthouse into X093: 10 yes – 0 no – 1 abstaining
• Brooklyn East Collegiate into K009: 7-4-0
• Explore Charter School into K002: 9-0-2
• Democracy Prep into M197: 7-3-1
• KIPP STAR into M115: 11-0-0
• VOICE into Q111: 11-0-0

A revised version of a plan outlining how the two schools would share space is one of the items expected to be passed at tomorrow night’s Panel for Educational Policy meeting. (A majority of panel members are appointed by the mayor, and so city proposals always pass easily.) State education officials overturned a first draft of the plan last month.

The state’s move followed an appeal by parents at P.S. 9 parents who claimed that the city’s proposal did not include required information. Parents at the school also challenge the city’s plan because it conflicts with their own hopes for the school, which they would like to expand through the eighth grade.

Parents have even nominated one of their own, a P.S. 9 parent who is currently a dean at a Manhattan middle school, to oversee the expansion, which would require P.S. 9 to take up more space inside the building.

The Department of Education is standing by its plan. “We are pleased with P.S. 9’s progress and understand the desire of the school to expand, but in this case, the need of an entire school district strongly outweighs the need of one school,” said Marc Sternberg, deputy chancellor for portfolio planning.

Faye Rimalovski, a P.S. 9 parent, said parents are prepared to protest the plan at tomorrow’s PEP meeting. “Armed and ready,” she said.

The charter school, Brooklyn East Collegiate middle school, would replace M.S. 571, a middle school that is currently in P.S. 9′s building but is in the process of phasing out due to poor performance. Brooklyn East Collegiate, a member of the Uncommon Schools network of charter schools, opened last year in a Bedford-Stuyvesant school building with 81 fifth-graders.

At a public hearing on the proposed co-location on Friday, supporters of both schools argued about the space-sharing plan. An unlikely centerpiece arose: P.S.9′s new library.

Parents at P.S. 9, located in the increasingly middle-class neighborhood of Prospect Heights, recently spearheaded the renovation of the school’s dilapidated library. Parents with backgrounds in design and architecture drew up the plans, while others negotiated with the city and government-approved vendors to raise $500,000 for the project.

At the hearing Friday, Council member Letitia James, who represents the school’s district, said the Department of Education is claiming a space that her community developed. “The library of P.S. 9 that you are only paying a dollar for, I paid for,” she said. Parents and members of the community education council, an elected parent body, echoed her criticism.

The P.S. 9 supporters’ arguments about the library surprised Kevin Cummings, whose daughter attends Brooklyn East Collegiate. “I’m confused as to why parents are arguing over children’s access to books. We don’t plan to move them out of the library,” he said.

Also on the agenda at tomorrow’s meeting of the PEP, the current version of the school board: a proposal to close Khalil Gibran International Academy’s middle school and seven other proposed co-locations of charter school in district buildings.

Members of the Panel for Educational Policy voted to close two transfer schools — Pacific High School and the Bronx Academy High School — as well as P.S. 30, an elementary school in Queens. A spokeswoman for the city’s Department of education said that, including the decision to shutter Ross Global Charter School, 27 schools will begin closing next year.

It was Chancellor Dennis Walcott’s first panel meeting since Mayor Bloomberg named him to the post. Walcott said he hoped to change the tenor of the meetings by answering parents’ questions and publicly debating policy issues at a deeper level than his predecessors did.

Walcott began the meeting by walking down from the stage and into the crowd, where he promised parents, teachers, and students that he and his staff would respect them.

“You will never hear me be disagreeable with you,” he said. “The one thing we understand is these are emotional issues for you…the approach we’re going to take moving forward is be responsive to those issues even when we don’t agree.”

If audience members heard Walcott’s plea for civility, they betrayed no signs. The boos and catcalls that have peppered panel meetings for months reappeared last night, as did animosity between charter school supporters and the district schools they will have to share space with next year.

Wearing light blue shirts, parents and teachers from Coney Island Prep Charter School sat across the aisle from parents of students and teachers at I.S. 303, who wore orange shirts. Per tonight’s panel vote, Coney Island Prep will move into I.S. 303′s building next year, claiming classrooms that the middle school’s teachers said they need for high-needs special education students, but that city education officials have decided they can do without. Throughout the evening, parents and teachers from the two schools traded shots over which was the better school and why the charter school couldn’t move to another building.

Of the three schools that the panel voted to begin phasing out next year, Bronx Academy proved the most controversial. A large group of students, parents, and teachers attended the meeting tonight to defend the school against closure, citing its students’ improving credit accumulation and Regents passage rates.

In the last seven years, Bronx Academy has seen four principals come and go. It is currently on the state’s list of persistently low-achieving schools. Yet in September, the school began the process of transforming itself. It was given a new principal, Gary Eisinger, and it formed a partnership with Good Shepherd Services, a community-based organization that offers students counseling and support. Bronx Academy also switched from semesters to trimesters, allowing students to 18 credits a year instead of 14.

“I’ve worked in transfer schools, and I’ve never seen a principal work this hard,” said Kevin Towns, an advocate counselor with Good Shepherd. “The data you’re [the DOE] using is from the old regime. These people have been here eight months — let’s be real.”

But Department of Education officials said that they had seen enough of the school’s progress to decide that it wasn’t enough to justify keeping Bronx Academy open.

“The principal has come into a tough set of circumstances, and you do see the impact of his leadership in that school,” said Deputy Chancellor Marc Sternberg. “Even if there has been improvement, it’s well below what we expect to see. And well below what we see across transfer schools citywide.”

Senior Deputy Chancellor Shael Polakow-Suransky said that only two-thirds of Bronx Academy students were showing up to school every day and only a quarter are passing their Regents exams. Many students are still earning too few credits to graduate on time, he said.

“What I’m seeing is the culture in that school has changed and that is powerful and that is what has generated the positive energy, but the academic expectations have not changed,” Polakow-Suransky said.

Anita Batisti, who directs Fordham University’s school support organization, which oversees Bronx Academy, said she couldn’t understand why the city would want to close an improving school.

“I ask you, please give us more time,” she said.

Monica Major, the panel member appointed by the Bronx borough president, said the DOE was rushing to close a school that was just beginning to show signs of improvement. Although Major proposed that the panel table its plans to vote on the school’s closure, her motion was voted down. The panel also voted to open a new transfer school called Bronx Arena that will replace Bronx Academy.

“Marc, I’m really hoping Arena only gets eight months, the same amount of time you gave this school,” Major said to Deputy Chancellor Sternberg.

Asked after the meeting whether eight months would be enough time to judge one of the city’s 11 transformation schools — many of which have been given new principals and support after years of little progress — Walcott sidestepped the question.

“We can’t tolerate slow, incremental change,” he said.

1. Sometimes a delay is just a delay.

Forty minutes before the panel meeting was set to begin, a DOE spokesman informed reporters by email that the city was withdrawing PS 114 from closure consideration, at least for the moment. Parents and teachers from the school greeted the news with hope that the DOE was reconsidering closing their school, which suffered under the leadership of a notorious principal for years.

From 5:21 p.m.:

Just after receiving the e-mail about P.S. 114, Anna walks by a group of people holding signs that argue for keeping 114 open. “I read them the DOE’s e-mail, and they start cheering,” she reports. “They hadn’t been told they were off the list tonight.”

P.S. 114 parent Jimmy Orr tells Anna: “We’re overwhelmed. If it’s true, we’re elated. It’s a delay, but it gives us hope that we can turn things around.”

But a day later, it’s clear that the DOE doesn’t intend to reconsider closing the school. P.S. 114′s closure has been postponed until the March 1 meeting of the PEP.

A DOE spokesman, Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld, said the department delayed the vote because officials needed more time to respond to public comment, which they’re legally required to do.

“We felt like we wanted more time on this particular proposal to offer more responsive answers than we had ready,” he said. “We have a legal responsibility to make sure we’re responding to all the feedback we get.”

Asked if the city was acting out of concern it might be sued by the teachers union, Zarin-Rosenfeld said that wasn’t a consideration. Last year, the union successfully sued to keep 19 schools open after a court found that the city hadn’t followed the laws governing school closure. Though the union has taken a special interest in P.S. 114′s case, a spokesman for the United Federation of Teachers said it hadn’t threatened to sue.

2. The teachers union and charter school advocates have different ideas about how to get their points across.

On Tuesday night, Success Charter Network sent hundreds of parents to Brooklyn Tech, and many stayed until the wee hours of the morning, with sleepy young children in tow, until they could each comment publicly. Last night, the United Federation of Teachers held a rally outside the hearing and then filled the auditorium with supporters.

But just over an hour into the meeting, most of the union supporters walked out. We haven’t heard from the union with an official explanation for the walkout, but here’s an idea planted by one participant:

Anna reports passing a man walking out. He’s wearing a UFT t-shirt and waving students out of their seats.

“They don’t care about us,” he tells them. “They’re not listening.”

3. People are thinking ahead to next year.

Some of the most vocal attendees last night were a group of students from Samuel Gompers High School, which wasn’t on the chopping block at all.

From 6:14 p.m.:

One of those chanting is Dalcean Prdomo, a senior at Gompers High School, a career and technical high school in the Bronx. The school isn’t on the closure list tonight, but students from Gompers have been actively protesting closures anyway.

Anna reports running into them at a closure hearing at Columbus High School, also in the Bronx. Prdomo tells Anna he has the sense that Gompers could easily end up on the closure list next year, so he feels he should speak out against the process now.

We also heard by email from Megan Hester, a research associate at Annenberg Insitute for School Reform, which provides technical assistance to the Coalition for Educational Justice, a collection of community groups. “Gompers is on this year’s PLA list, so students there see the school as next up for closing … thus their turnout for the hearing tonight,” Hester wrote. PLA refers to the state’s list of persistently low-achieving schools.

4. Cathie Black’s leash isn’t getting any longer.

The new chancellor drew fire after mimicking the boos of some of her detractors late Tuesday night. Last night, she registered nary an emotion and barely opened her mouth.

From 9 p.m.:

The whole night, she’s been almost expressionless: sitting quietly next to a bottle of water.

WNYC’s Beth Fertig says Black did render one hint of emotion. When a woman at the microphone said her name was also Cathy, Black smiled thinly.

And while department officials told Anna at midnight that Black might speak to reporters after the hearing’s conclusion, just 40 minutes later reporters were told that Black would be “unavailable for comment.”

Last year, then-Chancellor Joel Klein huddled with reporters after the school closure Panel for Educational Policy meeting ended — and that was at 4 a.m.

5. Even when they vote for a plan, the mayor’s appointees aren’t always thrilled about it.

Philip Berry, one of the mayor’s appointees to the panel, spoke wistfully about Norman Thomas High School before saying he cast his vote for closure.

From 12:20 a.m.:

“I have watched the quality of that school decrease steadily over the years,” he says. ”On one level it pains me to see that we have to close Norman Thomas. On the other hand, we are finally taking the type of action we should be taking.”

Then, after the closure votes, the panel turned its attention to reviewing a handful of contracts. One of them, for a package of online learning services, drew raised eyebrows from mayoral appointee Lisette Nieves, who said, basically, that schools in the process of phasing out aren’t pushed to offer top-notch educations.

From our 12:51 a.m. dispatch:

“I did vote for the phase out,” Nieves says. “But there’s a difference between saying leadership is committed to providing a basic service versus an advanced servive. I just want to make sure there’s an incentive. I don’t inherently buy into the idea that there’s an incentive.”

6. Long hearings like the two this week come with a price tag.

At the end of the night, Anna snapped a picture of about a dozen School Safety Agents filing for overtime. The city has scheduled two PEP meetings for March (one on March 1, the second March 23), as well, which could mean more long nights and more overtime.

7. The following phase-outs and co-locations were approved:

These schools will be phased out:
P.S. 260
P.S. 332
M.S. 571
Frederick Douglass Academy III’s middle school
John F. Kennedy High School
Christopher Columbus High School
Global Enterprise High School
P.S. 102
Performance Conservatory High School
Norman Thomas High School
Beach Channel High School
Jamaica High School

These co-locations will move forward:
P.S. 325 with P.S. 260
New school P.S. 241 and Leadership Prep Ocean Hill with P.S. 332
Brooklyn East Collegiate with P.S. 9 and M.S. 571
New high school 11X508 in the Christopher Columbus campus
New high school 11X508 in the Christopher Columbus campus
New high school 11X511 in the Performance Conservatory High School building
New high school 27Q351 in the Beach Channel building
New high school 28Q350 in the Jamaica building