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Jamaica High School students, teachers and parents cheer a speaker at the school

For the past two weeks, education officials have spent nearly every weeknight holding public hearings at each of the 25 district schools the city wants to close next year. Seventeen of the schools are in this for the second go-around, after a union lawsuit foiled the department’s attempt to close them last year.

As a result, this year’s hearings are both formatted differently — part of an attempt to better explain the closure decisions and avoid another lawsuit — and less emotional, despite communities’ still-simmering anger and frustration.

GothamSchools reporters recently attended three of these hearings.

Jamaica High School

The group of students, teachers and parents that gathered in Jamaica High School’s auditorium was smaller than the large, boisterous crowd that packed last year’s hearing.

But, as several students pointed out, the school is also smaller this year. After the courts blocked the city from closing Jamaica and 18 other high schools last year, the size of the incoming freshman class shrunk dramatically. (more…)

For the first time on Friday, Schools Chancellor Cathie Black visited one of the schools she’s planning to close.

Black spent Friday at I.S. 195, Roberto Clemente, a Harlem middle school that the city is trying to shutter this year. She also visited KIPP Infinity, a high-performing charter middle school located in the same building.

The city plans to replace I.S. 195, whose progress report score dropped from a B to a D last year, with a new middle school. According to an internal space planning document (pdf) obtained by the New York Times, the city wants to install a new charter school in the building, possibly a replica of Democracy Prep.

I.S. 195 is the first school Black has seen that received anything lower than a C grade. Since Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced Black’s appointment in November, she has visited 28 schools, spanning every borough and grade. Of those schools, 11 were given A’s in the most recent round of progress reports. Nine of the schools received B grades and five received C’s.

Since she started visiting schools, Black has fielded questions over whether an itinerary so focused on high-performing schools has given her a realistic view of the challenges facing the school system. On her first official day as chancellor, a city spokeswoman said that while Black had not yet visited any of the city’s lowest-rated schools, she planned to.

I.S. 195 is also one of about 500 schools that Black announced will receive extra funds to tutor students who failed last year’s math and reading tests. Black’s visit to the school last week was unrelated to today’s announcement, Department of Education spokeswoman Deirdrea Miller said. (more…)

UFT President Michael Mulgrew speaks to teachers gathered outside DOE headquarters at Tweed Courthouse to protest the city's plans to close 26 schools.

In the opening shot of this year’s battle over the city’s plan to close 26 schools, teachers union chief Michael Mulgrew vowed to take the fight all the way to Albany.

State law gives the city ample leeway to close schools, and the union’s successful lawsuit that last year blocked the city from closing 19 schools was based primarily on process questions rather than a policy challenge.

This year, Mulgrew said, the union plans to fight to change the policy and will lobby for changes to the law if necessary.

In the first of what he vowed would be many protests, Mulgrew accused city officials of neglecting their responsibilities to help schools improve.

“Their job is not to sit back and monitor data,” Mulgrew said. “Their job is to come in and say, ‘what can we do?’”

Teachers from across the city rallied outside the Department of Education’s headquarters at Tweed Courthouse, with the protest beginning on Chambers Street and spilling around the corner onto Broadway.

Mulgrew criticized Mayor Michael Bloomberg for his aggressive school closure policies, which the union president characterized as “bragging” about how many schools the city has shut down. In a speech last year, the mayor promised to shutter the lowest-performing 10 percent of city schools.

“The only way to do that is to sit back and not give the schools the support they need,” Mulgrew said. (more…)

Teachers union President Michael Mulgrew is charging that the city’s new engagement strategy for schools that could face closure next year is too little, too late.

City officials said today that they plan to ramp up communication with parents and staff at 47 schools that could face closure. The move is in part a response to a successful lawsuit the union brought last year, in which two courts ruled that the city failed to meet state legal requirements for notifying schools and their communities about plans for closure.

But Mulgrew said today that the public notice and earlier meetings are not enough. Rather than helping the schools improve at the first signs of struggle, he said, the city let them get worse, until they became candidates for closure.

“Engaging the community in the process I think is a good thing,” Mulgrew said. “At the same time, if we know we have schools that are turning in the wrong direction, why are we waiting til now to reach out to them?” (more…)

The city is eyeing 47 schools for possible closure next year, including 16 that have not previously been targeted by the city or the state.

On the watch-list, which education officials released today, are 19 schools that the city tried to close last year but were saved by a successful union lawsuit. It also includes most of the 23 schools currently on the state’s list of lowest-performing schools that did not begin federally-mandated interventions this year. All 16 of the newly-identified schools are elementary and middle schools.

City officials said today they had learned lessons from last year’s thwarted closure process and are re-strategizing for this year.

The city is hoping to avoid some of the confusion and shock that marred their efforts to close schools last year by announcing their plans early and by clarifying their rationale for shuttering schools, officials said. Last year a state appeals court ruled that the city failed to meet legal requirements for notifying the community about its closure plans.

Officials have already posted their criteria for adding schools to their watch-list to the Department of Education’s website: schools were tagged if they received three consecutive C’s, or a single D or F, on their progress reports, or if they received anything below a proficient rating on their last Quality Review. (more…)

(Number of speakers at each school's public hearing taken from DOE hearing transcripts.)

School-closing-season has thus far been loud and rowdy, but certain corners of the city have been louder than others.

Though howls of protest over the Department of Education’s plans to shutter 20 city schools have come from large community schools like Columbus and Jamaica High Schools, there are schools that could close with barely a whimper. (more…)

The New York State Department of Education has singled out 34 New York City public schools, most of them large high schools, that it believes should be replaced.

Many of the schools are already on the city’s to-be-closed list and others have had poor reputations and low grades on the city’s annual report cards for years. Now that SED has designated which schools are the bottom five percent across the state, school districts will have to submit plans to Commissioner David Steiner detailing which of four federally mandated plans they intend to implement.

The plans are a menu of sorts: four options the U.S. Department of Education believe can transform “persistently low achieving” schools into success stories. Before the list came out today, state officials said they planned to replace many of the schools with charter schools, a proposal that could be severely delayed by the state legislature’s recent decision not to lift the state’s charter cap.

Long before the list came out, Chancellor of the Board of Regents Merryl Tisch said the state’s choices would not be controversial. (more…)

Parents, teachers and alumni cheer on the testimony of a Jamaica High School supporter at a public hearing on the plan to close the school last night.

From Queens to Brooklyn, hundreds of teachers, students, and alumni poured into auditoriums last night to defend their high schools from closure.

In Queens, supporters of Jamaica High School turned out in droves for the public hearing, a meeting also attended by Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott and some of the Department of Education’s top brass.

The arguments against phasing out Jamaica and replacing it with several small schools in the same building were similar to those voiced at a question-and-answer session with DOE officials held at the school last month, which also drew an angry crowd.

When one speaker pointed out Walcott’s presence in the back of the auditorium, audience members rose from their seats, turned around to face him, and chanted, “Save Jamaica High School.”

The Queens representative on the Panel for Educational Policy, Dmytro Fedkowski, asked the DOE to postpone the board’s vote on the proposals until the department releases more information about how the closure decisions were made. (more…)