Another Casualty of Co-location: SAVE Rooms

This was sent by a Manhattan teacher in a co-located school that has been ravaged by an invading charter. What, no SAVE rooms? Charters don't need no stinck'n SAVE rooms since they toss kids who might need a SAVE room right back to the public school.

Look where they hid the SAVE room!

In addition to all the negatives we hear, an unrecognized degrading aspect of charter co-locations that has hitherto seemed to slip under the radar: the impossibility of maintaining a SAVE room in co-located schools despite the fact that schools are legally mandated to do just that.

From the UFT website:

It is very important that all members are familiar with the SAVE legislation that governs safety and orderliness in New York's public schools. SAVE stands for Schools Against Violence in Education and is the legislation that mandates school safety plans. These plans must incorporate all of the components of the SAVE legislation including normal procedures, emergency procedures, student removal processes, and detailed processes for handling students who are significantly disruptive and interfering with the education of their peers.
http://www.uft.org/our-rights/save-legislation

Increasingly my school is deals with suspended students and students who need to be removed by warehousing them in other teacher's rooms, an offense to the warehoused student, the teacher who’s forced to warehouse him other and the other students in the class. In effect, classrooms become suspension centers. But where to put them? The law states there must be a SAVE room or an equivalent but how do you do so when a charter school has been granted every room it can grab?

Where and how are you to implement legislation when there is no room to do so? So, along with music, art, ESL and more, charter schools are robbing DOE schools of the ability to follow the law and (again) provide needy kids with meaningful instruction. It seems to me that the loss of the SAVE room should added to the litany of legitimate grievances we already have against charters and brought to the attentions of the author of the bill in Albany. Both students and teachers deserve nothing less.

A Manhattan Teacher