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Parents and supporters from Girls Prep Charter School (left) faced their counterparts from P.S. 188 and 94 at a protest yesterday outside of the Lower East Side school building where the charter school wants to expand.

When Girls Prep Charter School first requested more space in the Lower East Side school building it currently calls home, its principal and the leader of the district school that shares the building said they wanted a peaceful discussion. That hasn’t happened.

Yesterday, parents from district schools squared off against their neighbors at Girls Prep, separated by a few yards of sidewalk, each trying to shout the other down.

And both sides had the same message: give our school room to grow. (more…)

Parents at district schools on the Lower East Side that may be forced to share space with an expanding charter school are telling the DOE to look elsewhere.

Girls Prep Charter School has requested building space from the DOE in order to expand its middle school program, which launched this year with one class of fifth-graders. The charter school currently shares a building with P.S. 188 and P.S. 94, a school serving disabled students, and cannot expand further in the space it occupies there.

DOE officials have three ideas for how to accommodate the new middle school, which they plan to present at tomorrow evening’s District 1 Community Education Council meeting.

In one scenario, P.S. 94 would move out of the district, allowing Girls Prep to expand in its current location. To compensate for the loss of P.S. 94, a new program for disabled students would open, sharing space with PS. 184, the Shuang Wen school.

Another suggestion would have the Girls Prep middle school open in a building currently shared by three secondary schools: the School for Global Leaders, the Marta Valle Secondary School and the Lower East Side Preparatory High School. The School for Global Leaders would then move into P.S. 20. This plan would also allow P.S. 94 to expand in the building it shares with P.S. 188 and the Girls Prep elementary school.

The third proposal would have the Girls Prep middle school share a building with P.S. 20.  (The full memo from the Office of Portfolio Planning outlining the three scenarios is below the jump.) (more…)

In the tug-of-war between charter school advocates and opponents over building space for the city’s charter schools, emotions frequently churn and bubble over; protests and shouting matches are not unheard of. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way, a team of district and charter school administrators who share a Lower East Side building said today.

Gearing up for a community meeting tonight about space issues in Manhattan’s District 1 that will feature their own building, administrators said they want to emphasize the need for a neighborly conversation.

“I’m not going to say it’s easy,” said Mary Pree, the principal of P.S. 188, which shares space with another district school and the Girls Prep Charter School. “Everyone would always like 10 extra classrooms.”

But Pree emphasized that her school’s relationship with the two schools is vibrant, and that the schools are working to develop even stronger connections between the parent associations at the school. “We’re a place where this collaboration is working,” she said. (more…)

The data on city schools’ English Language Arts scores keeps churning out. The Department of Education has just published Excel files sorting scores by school, grade level, special education status, gender, race and ethnicity, and English proficiency from 2006 to this year. A spokesman says that figures on charter schools are on the way. In the meantime, here’s a document from the state charter school lobbyists with every charter school in the city’s proficiency rates.

In New York City, charter schools out-performed traditional public schools on the test, and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein congratulated the schools on the high scores today at a press conference in Manhattan.

Among the top scorers are two charter schools we’ve followed here: Harlem Success Academy 1 in Manhattan, notable for its founder, Eva Moskowitz, who has regularly challenged the role of teachers unions, and Renaissance Charter School in Queens, notable in part because its teachers and administrators are represented by unions. (more…)