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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. (more…)