GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

The Academy of American Studies in Long Island City bought folding chairs to manage overcrowding.

There are no extra desks at a Queens high school where overcrowding has prompted the principal to buy folding chairs to accommodate students.

The Academy of American Studies, a selective high school in Long Island City, shares space with Newcomers High School, and leases a small building across the street.

“It looks like a deli,” said Mir Niaz, a tenth grade student at the Academy.

Niaz said last year’s incoming freshman class had 110 students, but this year’s class has 180, and the sudden increase has overwhelmed the already-cramped space the school has to work with. Now, some students have to sit in folding chairs, which they pull up next to their luckier classmates who have desks and share writing space.

“We got more freshmen than we expected this year,” said the school’s parent coordinator, Jean Mendler. “It’s a temporary solution.” (more…)

There’s something wrong if one school is severely overcrowded and another, just two miles away, is cutting services because of declining enrollment, writes teacher Arthur Goldstein in his latest entry in the community section. In “A Tale of Two Queens High Schools,” Goldstein suggests that the city promote a symbiotic relationship between the two schools, instead of a competitive one.

He writes:

I’m in one of the most overcrowded schools in the city, Francis Lewis High School. Our building is designed for 1,800 kids, and last year we were up to 4,450. This year we hit 4,700, and the sky’s the limit. Where the extra kids will go I have no idea. …

On the other hand, James Eterno, chapter leader at Jamaica High School, has a completely different problem. Not enough kids are enrolling in his school. Could we help one another?

Overcrowding in Manhattan schools seems to be more acute than usual this year. But in the rest of the city, Manhattan’s overcrowding story isn’t news: For years, many schools in the outer boroughs haven’t been able to accommodate all of the children who live near them for years.

So writes Jeff Coplon in next week’s New York Magazine: 

The DOE perennially “caps” the enrollments of dozens of schools in the Bronx and Queens and Brooklyn, busing hundreds of kindergartners out of places like Elmhurst or Norwood. In the northwest corner of the Bronx, the poorest urban county in the nation, District 10 leads the city in capped schools-seven by the count of the DOE, nine by that of Marvin Shelton, the president of the district’s Community Education Council. (The crush can only worsen this fall, given the closure of kindergartens at city-run day-care centers: more than 3,000 of the city’s least-advantaged 5-year-olds, thrown into the DOE’s Mixmaster.) The children are bused miles east to west in rush-hour traffic and arrive home so exhausted they take two-hour naps. More than a dozen other schools dodge formal caps by shunting students to annexes blocks away or hauling makeshift “mini-schools” or double-wides onto their properties.

Coplon’s report jives with data made available online last week by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, which show that Manhattan is far from having the most crowded schools.

An exercise activity schedule from the DOE's learning guide.

The Department of Education doesn’t want healthy children who attend the as-of-now 19 schools closed because of swine flu fears to sit idly while they stay home. To keep them occupied, the DOE has made available optional “learn at home” activity guides, and Chancellor Joel Klein is urging everyone to participate.

The guides were compiled in short order by the DOE’s teaching and learning department and can be picked up in four locations or downloaded from the department’s Web site. Updated guides and a packet of work for high school students will be posted as soon as tonight, according to a DOE spokeswoman.

Chancellor Klein told reporters yesterday that he would like students who are able to complete the voluntary schoolwork. “I hope this is not viewed as a holiday,” he said.

The guides include daily schedules that break down four hours of learning into small blocks: 45 minutes each for English and math and half an hour each for vocabulary and science. Another hour and a half is divided evenly among fitness and health, arts and sampling educational television shows (one suggestion is Animal Planet’s “Meerkat Manor”) and Web sites. (more…)

Amid concerns about its swine flu precautions, the city added three more schools to its list of those shuttered by swine flu suspicions today. Four other private and charter schools also announced that they would close after experiencing higher-than-normal rates of students reporting flu-like symptoms.

The schools included one public school on the Lower East Side and the Horace Mann School, a top-flight private school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. Both Manhattan and the Bronx had not seen any swine flu-related school closures before today.

The other schools that the Department of Education decided today to close are PS 130 in Manhattan, PS 35 in Queens, and Merrick Academy Charter School, located in Jamaica, Queens. Several non-DOE schools decided independently to close, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein told reporters earlier today. Those schools were Horace Mann; St Joseph’s School in Astoria, Queens; Holy Family School in Flushing, Queens; and three sites of South Bronx Charter School. 

Yesterday’s Panel for Educational Policy meeting was unusually spirited as panel members questioned Klein about the department’s swine flu policy. (more…)

The city principals’ union just passed along these details for the funeral of Mitchell Weiner, the assistant principal at IS 238 who died yesterday from complications of the H1N1 or swine flu.

Wednesday, May 20th at 2 p.m.

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Here’s an excerpt from a Daily News story on Wiener that ran a few days before he died:

When a teenage neighbor in need of math tutoring knocked on the door of his Queens apartment 28 years ago, Mitchell Wiener immediately dropped everything he was doing.

The young math teacher spent hours coaching Melissa Lipsky that day in 1981. Over the next several weeks, Wiener met with Melissa numerous times, guiding her through her eighth-grade arithmetic lessons. … (more…)

A day after a Queens assistant principal died from swine flu, the teachers union says it is monitoring 40 schools where higher-than-normal numbers of children are calling in sick. The United Federation of Teachers said today it is launching a hotline to keep track of the disease. 

The union’s watch list doubled in size over the weekend, spokesman Ron Davis told GothamSchools. At least four more schools were closed today, bringing the total number of closed schools up to 14, according to the Department of Education. Davis said the list of 40 schools includes some that have already been closed.

The union is using its hotline as an information source for people to call in and learn which schools are closed in their district. Union chapter leaders will report to the hotline daily about absentee numbers for students and teachers at their schools. (Each district in Queens, where the epidemic appears to be centered, has its own number; the other boroughs have one number each.)  

The UFT gave the Department of Education and the Department of Health the list of at-risk schools today, Davis said. The two city agencies decide together which schools should close.

Davis said teachers are remaining calm. “There are teachers out there who are obviously concerned but our teachers as a rule don’t panic,” he said.

The mayor addressed the disease’s spread in a press conference today, saying that it’s possible more schools could close this week.

Spurred by a series of meetings held by Queens’ borough president, charter school administrators, parents and students are gathering at The Renaissance Charter School in Queens to dispel “misinformation” about their schools in a discussion on Wednesday night. Queens is far from the center of the city’s charter school debate, which has been raging in Manhattan and Brooklyn, but with the opening of two new charters in as many years, and increased attention to the issue city-wide, some parents and elected officials have voiced their opposition to the schools.

Nicholas Tishuk, the Director of Programs and Accountability at Renaissance and the organizer of the event, said that the discussion is the beginning of an “information campaign” targeted at charter school critics. Principals of two other Queens’ charter schools, VOICE and OWN, will participate in the panel.

Tishuk has been attending Queens Borough President Helen Marshall’s monthly Advisory Board meetings, where he said charter schools dominate the conversation. (Marshall said in February she has ” fought against charter schools.”) He invited some of the most outspoken critics at Marshall’s meetings to Wednesday’s discussion, hoping to show them that charter schools  aren’t “this big bad thing.”

“We’re all mom and pop schools here,” Tishuk said. “We’re all single-standing schools that are not ‘invading’ communities.” Tishuk wants to address complaints that charter schools take away funding from regular schools, aren’t connected to communities, and counsel out “problem kids”—none of which apply to Queens’ schools, he says.

Queens will have six charter schools next fall, including the city’s biggest, Our World Neighborhood Charter School. VOICE charter school started in 2008, and Growing Up Green, in Long Island City, opens this fall. VOICE is using a Department of Education school location for now, while the borough’s other charter schools occupy their own space. In Brooklyn and Manhattan, charter schools taking over public school space is a hot-button issue, one that has mostly been avoided in Queens. (more…)

Renaissance students organized a protest against the freeze in their budget. (Lisette Lopez, Renaissance junior)

Staff at a Queens charter school that is represented by several city labor unions are growing frustrated with the unions, which they worry sat quietly by while state lawmakers slashed charter school budgets two weeks ago.

The school, Renaissance Charter School in Jackson Heights, is expecting a cut of between $500,000 and $600,000 from what was projected for next year after state lawmakers froze planned funding increases to charter schools two weeks ago.

Charter school activists have said that they’re hopeful that Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith, who founded another unionized charter school in Queens, will yet restore the extra funds to charter schools, but no deal has been struck yet.

That leaves teachers at Renaissance planning for possible teacher layoffs and big program cuts. (The $500,000 cut from the increase the school was expecting is especially hard to shoulder given that pension costs are skyrocketing by $300,000 next year and teacher salaries are slated to go up.)

A main frustration, a Renaissance administrator said, is that the unions to which Renaissance’s staff belong did not give them a heads up about the cuts — even though staff repeatedly asked union leaders if they should expect a cut. “Our members here feel shafted,” Nicholas Tishuk, Renaissance’s director of programs and accountability, said. “We were told that this charter school cut was mentioned two months ago, and it hasn’t been on anyone’s lips. And then we find out the Sunday night before the vote on Tuesday that not only was it on everyone’s lips; it’s actually happening.”

Most charter schools in New York City are not represented by teachers unions, since the schools operate outside of the Department of Education and therefore do not see their staffs unionize automatically. But the union has fought to bring charter schools teachers into its fold. Their slow but steady inclusion has put the union in the tricky position of on the one hand lobbying for limits on charter schools, while, on the other hand, representing some charter school staff. (more…)

When results of the Department of Education’s screening for gifted and talented programs came out last year, parents of qualifying children had two major complaints: that the ultra-elite programs were all located in Manhattan, and that some districts didn’t have gifted kindergarten classes.

Today, the department revealed the locations of three new programs reserved for the highest-scoring children throughout the city; All three are in Brooklyn and Queens. And back in October, before screening for the programs even started, the DOE announced that all district gifted programs would now begin in kindergarten.

I became familiar with parents’ complaints last year because I was then blogging at Insideschools.org, the site that many parents use to research schools. My posts about gifted and talented admissions got hundreds of comments, such as this one:

The three programs announced today could double the number of seats in citywide gifted programs, depending on whether families choose to enroll in them. But that would still mean that fewer than half of the children qualifying for the programs last year could be accommodated. (more…)