Over 400 people showed up, screamed and hollered at the public hearing on the closing of PS 14- some were standing outside and were shut out! Unheard of from sleepy Staten Island. The UFT boro rep, Emil Pietromonaco, did an amazing job in organizing staff from all over the island. -- Loretta Prisco, ICE
Report from the island: UFT leaders did their job. Some people think PS 14 SI was chosen because of criticism of Tweed for leaving SI schools off closing lists for political reasons since SI politicians support Tweed and the SI PEP rep always votes with them. Maybe they are worried about future lawsuits on school closings charging them with racial discrimination. Who knows what lurks in the minds of Tweedies? Other than how to parlay their position so they can get a job with the ed deform movement when they leave Tweed.
Here is a statement from Loretta Prisco from the Independent Community of Educators (ICE).
The Advance asked if the children in the doomed PS 14, already deemed a failure, are going to be relegated to a lower tier in DOE’s eyes?No crystal ball is needed. PS 14, the students and staff will follow the same path as other phase out schools - not a rosy one. The good intentions of the Superintendent, staff, parents and CEC will not keep it from traveling this inevitable path, worn down from so many phasing out schools.Parents will get a letter stating that the school is being “phased out" - which should be more aptly labeled, “going through a slow and painful death” – and they will given the opportunity to transfer out.The children of the parents who can negotiate the system, usually test higher, and will transfer out. The children left behind will be the lower achieving, traditionally have poorer attendance, and have parents who are the least connected to school, though not necessarily the least caring. As the population diminishes, so will the resources. Those with low scores who transfer will be seen as piranhas as they take their low scores with them to the receiving schools that will be held accountable for them. To the DOE, these children are - “throw aways”.The teachers will know that their days are numbered, and those who can, will understandably leave to secure jobs and avoid the death sentence of becoming an ATR.
The remaining staff will be completely demoralized and lack the resources needed to teach. The principal, whether the current or newly appointed, will know this is a short time assignment.The new school will get lots of extra money-classrooms will be newly painted, given lots of equipment, computers, Smartboards, resources, support staff and a renewed sense of mission - which is not a bad thing – for those children. But the children in the old school will suffer terribly. Differences will be stark - and all will be painfully aware of it. There will be turf fights and the “old PS 14” will inevitably lose. They will be shortchanged on the use of the gym, library and cafeteria - less learning and further demoralization.The new school will not have test scores for years and will remain off the failing lists. The DOE will send special education children elsewhere. So the number of failing schools will drop citywide and the Mayor will look good. Perhaps the DOE might be trying to build up the nearby charter school or may even be making room for a new charter since building charters is their mission.The staff and children have not failed. The failure falls squarely on the shoulders of the captains of the ship - Bloom,Klein,Black &Walcott for 10 years of mismanagement, incompetency, poor leadership and lack of support.One thing that we can count on is this decision is not being made in the best interest of children.
Here is the Schoolbook article:
http://www.nytimes.com/schoolbook/2012/01/25/a-staten-island-school-blames-its-problems-on-location/
A Staten Island School Blames Its Problems on Location
Sriyantha Walpola for SchoolBook
Jan. 25, 2012, 11:20 a.m.
9:28 p.m. | Updated
The announcements came year after year. Eight schools to shut down in
Manhattan. Ten in the Bronx. Six in Brooklyn. Two in Queens. None on
Staten Island.
It was hard for Staten Islanders not to develop a degree of superiority when it came to school closings.
Since 2002, the year Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg gained control of the system, the city has shut down 117 schools, leaving the borough untouched — until now.
“Staten Islanders thought they were impervious,” said Anne Marie Caminiti, an education advocate who until recently worked for Parent to Parent of New York State. “Schools here tend to operate better than many schools around the city.”
But one of them has finally been singled out.
Public School 14 Cornelius Vanderbilt in the Stapleton area of Staten Island is among 19 schools the city has marked to be closed, with the final judgment to come on Feb. 9 in a vote by the Panel for Educational Policy.
At a raucous hearing at P.S. 14 on Wednesday night, about 400 parents, students and teachers filled the auditorium as an overflow crowd sat in a cafeteria down the hall. About 20 minutes into the meeting, people in the audience began shouting questions about the school’s future at officials for the city’s Education Department and criticizing the plans to close the school.
It is no secret that the school, serving more than 660 students in prekindergarten through fifth grade, has been struggling. In recent years, its grade on its progress report card dropped from an A to a C to a D.
P.S. 14 ranked in the bottom 4 percent of elementary schools in the city in mathematics and English language arts proficiency last year. About 31 percent of students met state standards on the math exam, while just 23 percent passed the English exam.
Still, none of that is new, leaving the community to wonder, Why now?
“This is entirely political,” said Sean Rotkowitz, a Staten Island representative for the United Federation of Teachers. “There hasn’t been any school closed on Staten Island, so they needed to go find a school and, I guess according to the Board of Education, P.S. 14 fits the bill.”
The school’s principal, Nancy Hargett, said: “This is just devastating. We were on a journey of improvement. We thought this was going to be the year we earned an ‘A.’ I don’t understand why they chose us. I just don’t have the energy for the politics.”
Two other schools on Staten Island also saw their progress report grades drop from an A to a C to a D in recent years: P.S. 52 John C. Thompson and P.S. 60 Alice Austen. P.S. 54 Charles W. Leng went from a B to a C to a D.
A spokesman for the city’s Education Department said the decision to close P.S. 14 was rooted in performance.
“Our goal is to ensure that every student has access to an excellent school, and despite our support, P.S. 14 has been failing to provide high-quality education for its students year after year, consistently scoring near the bottom of schools citywide,” the spokesman, Frank Thomas, said in a statement. “The decision to propose the school for phase out is not easy, but it is our responsibility to give this community a better option.”
The Education Department’s plan would involve phasing out P.S. 14 while opening a new school, Public School 78, in the same building. (In the time that the city has closed 117 schools, it has also opened 535 new ones.) As P.S. 14’s students graduate, P.S. 78 will grow to accept children from the neighborhood.
Residents in the area say the plan amounts to much more than a name change. They say it would strip the school of more than 100 years of history and take away generational legacies shared by families in which grandparents, parents and children all attended the same school.
“This is my community school — I’ve been living here for the past 12 years,” said Wasila Amin, 34, a member of the School Leadership Team. Her children, one in fourth grade and one in first, would be split between P.S. 14 and P.S. 78 next year under the plan. “My children love the school. Their teachers have helped them so much.”
Deborah Rose, a city councilwoman who represents Staten Island’s North Shore, which includes Stapleton, said P.S. 14’s neighborhood was poor. The borough’s largest New York City Housing Authority complex is down the block from P.S. 14, and long lines frequently form at a food pantry across the street.
Ninety percent of students at P.S. 14 qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and 19 percent are entitled to special-education services.
“This is a community that really needs stability,” Ms. Rose said. “It needs mental health services, organizations that can come in and provide support services. If you don’t address the issues of the community, nothing will change.”
Harold Williams, a technology teacher at P.S. 14, said many of his students were exposed to drug abuse, alcoholism and crime. Before the staff members can even begin to teach, he said, they have to become secondary parents and earn the students’ trust.
In 2009, the school was on the state’s list of persistently dangerous schools, but it came off a year later, aided by a series of staff and student workshops, the presence of an additional security officer and efforts to better the school culture, said Mr. Williams, who is also the teachers’ union representative at the school.
New reading and math curriculums have been implemented, despite budget cuts, and math and English test scores have gone up, albeit slightly. Mr. Williams said the staff had been striving for an A or a B in the next progress report.
“The D.O.E. claims they gave us support, but me personally, I never got any support,” he said. “They came and gave us a 44-page PowerPoint presentation on dealing with very simple problems. They said, ‘Put your hand on Johnny’s shoulder; try to tell Johnny he can do it.’ That’s not the kind of stuff we’re dealing with. We have serious issues here. Johnny wants to kill Mary. Johnny wants to beat up the teacher. Johnny wants to attack you.”
Mr. Thomas, the Education Department spokesman, said the community’s challenges were all the more reason for the city to step in.
“We don’t believe students in those kinds of neighborhoods deserve to be languishing in a low-quality school,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that a lot of these schools are in low-income areas. Frankly, those are the students we need to help the most.”
A former principal at the school, Frank Carpenito, said it had always been difficult to get help from the city.
Mr. Carpenito, who worked as a teacher, an assistant principal and a principal at the school for a combined 34 years, said things had only gotten worse since he left. He said citywide changes in district organization had left few school leaders with the kind of close relationship he once had with P.S. 14′s superintendent.
“He knew me personally,” he said. “He knew my school. He lived on Staten Island. He knew the neighborhood we were in.”
Even then, he said, it was common for P.S. 14 to be ranked toward the bottom of Staten Island schools, in large part because of the low-income community.
He recalled the time he met a 34-year-old woman who had just enrolled her grandson at the school and an instance when he spoke with a student who didn’t know his own name, only his nickname, “Boo Boo.”
“Closing the school, changing the administration, I think that’s just an excuse to put the blame on someone else: the city doesn’t have to say it’s them,” Mr. Carpenito said. “I think the principal there is doing a wonderful job. I know when I was there, the teachers gave out of their own pockets, out of their own hearts.”
It was hard for Staten Islanders not to develop a degree of superiority when it came to school closings.
Since 2002, the year Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg gained control of the system, the city has shut down 117 schools, leaving the borough untouched — until now.
“Staten Islanders thought they were impervious,” said Anne Marie Caminiti, an education advocate who until recently worked for Parent to Parent of New York State. “Schools here tend to operate better than many schools around the city.”
But one of them has finally been singled out.
Public School 14 Cornelius Vanderbilt in the Stapleton area of Staten Island is among 19 schools the city has marked to be closed, with the final judgment to come on Feb. 9 in a vote by the Panel for Educational Policy.
At a raucous hearing at P.S. 14 on Wednesday night, about 400 parents, students and teachers filled the auditorium as an overflow crowd sat in a cafeteria down the hall. About 20 minutes into the meeting, people in the audience began shouting questions about the school’s future at officials for the city’s Education Department and criticizing the plans to close the school.
It is no secret that the school, serving more than 660 students in prekindergarten through fifth grade, has been struggling. In recent years, its grade on its progress report card dropped from an A to a C to a D.
P.S. 14 ranked in the bottom 4 percent of elementary schools in the city in mathematics and English language arts proficiency last year. About 31 percent of students met state standards on the math exam, while just 23 percent passed the English exam.
Still, none of that is new, leaving the community to wonder, Why now?
“This is entirely political,” said Sean Rotkowitz, a Staten Island representative for the United Federation of Teachers. “There hasn’t been any school closed on Staten Island, so they needed to go find a school and, I guess according to the Board of Education, P.S. 14 fits the bill.”
The school’s principal, Nancy Hargett, said: “This is just devastating. We were on a journey of improvement. We thought this was going to be the year we earned an ‘A.’ I don’t understand why they chose us. I just don’t have the energy for the politics.”
Two other schools on Staten Island also saw their progress report grades drop from an A to a C to a D in recent years: P.S. 52 John C. Thompson and P.S. 60 Alice Austen. P.S. 54 Charles W. Leng went from a B to a C to a D.
A spokesman for the city’s Education Department said the decision to close P.S. 14 was rooted in performance.
“Our goal is to ensure that every student has access to an excellent school, and despite our support, P.S. 14 has been failing to provide high-quality education for its students year after year, consistently scoring near the bottom of schools citywide,” the spokesman, Frank Thomas, said in a statement. “The decision to propose the school for phase out is not easy, but it is our responsibility to give this community a better option.”
The Education Department’s plan would involve phasing out P.S. 14 while opening a new school, Public School 78, in the same building. (In the time that the city has closed 117 schools, it has also opened 535 new ones.) As P.S. 14’s students graduate, P.S. 78 will grow to accept children from the neighborhood.
Residents in the area say the plan amounts to much more than a name change. They say it would strip the school of more than 100 years of history and take away generational legacies shared by families in which grandparents, parents and children all attended the same school.
“This is my community school — I’ve been living here for the past 12 years,” said Wasila Amin, 34, a member of the School Leadership Team. Her children, one in fourth grade and one in first, would be split between P.S. 14 and P.S. 78 next year under the plan. “My children love the school. Their teachers have helped them so much.”
Deborah Rose, a city councilwoman who represents Staten Island’s North Shore, which includes Stapleton, said P.S. 14’s neighborhood was poor. The borough’s largest New York City Housing Authority complex is down the block from P.S. 14, and long lines frequently form at a food pantry across the street.
Ninety percent of students at P.S. 14 qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and 19 percent are entitled to special-education services.
“This is a community that really needs stability,” Ms. Rose said. “It needs mental health services, organizations that can come in and provide support services. If you don’t address the issues of the community, nothing will change.”
Harold Williams, a technology teacher at P.S. 14, said many of his students were exposed to drug abuse, alcoholism and crime. Before the staff members can even begin to teach, he said, they have to become secondary parents and earn the students’ trust.
In 2009, the school was on the state’s list of persistently dangerous schools, but it came off a year later, aided by a series of staff and student workshops, the presence of an additional security officer and efforts to better the school culture, said Mr. Williams, who is also the teachers’ union representative at the school.
New reading and math curriculums have been implemented, despite budget cuts, and math and English test scores have gone up, albeit slightly. Mr. Williams said the staff had been striving for an A or a B in the next progress report.
“The D.O.E. claims they gave us support, but me personally, I never got any support,” he said. “They came and gave us a 44-page PowerPoint presentation on dealing with very simple problems. They said, ‘Put your hand on Johnny’s shoulder; try to tell Johnny he can do it.’ That’s not the kind of stuff we’re dealing with. We have serious issues here. Johnny wants to kill Mary. Johnny wants to beat up the teacher. Johnny wants to attack you.”
Mr. Thomas, the Education Department spokesman, said the community’s challenges were all the more reason for the city to step in.
“We don’t believe students in those kinds of neighborhoods deserve to be languishing in a low-quality school,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that a lot of these schools are in low-income areas. Frankly, those are the students we need to help the most.”
A former principal at the school, Frank Carpenito, said it had always been difficult to get help from the city.
Mr. Carpenito, who worked as a teacher, an assistant principal and a principal at the school for a combined 34 years, said things had only gotten worse since he left. He said citywide changes in district organization had left few school leaders with the kind of close relationship he once had with P.S. 14′s superintendent.
“He knew me personally,” he said. “He knew my school. He lived on Staten Island. He knew the neighborhood we were in.”
Even then, he said, it was common for P.S. 14 to be ranked toward the bottom of Staten Island schools, in large part because of the low-income community.
He recalled the time he met a 34-year-old woman who had just enrolled her grandson at the school and an instance when he spoke with a student who didn’t know his own name, only his nickname, “Boo Boo.”
“Closing the school, changing the administration, I think that’s just an excuse to put the blame on someone else: the city doesn’t have to say it’s them,” Mr. Carpenito said. “I think the principal there is doing a wonderful job. I know when I was there, the teachers gave out of their own pockets, out of their own hearts.”
Amy Padnani is a Web producer for The New York Times and SchoolBook contributor.
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