Friday, November 29, 2013

What about reversals of the October co-locos by di Blasio or Will Evil Moskowitz Continue to be Coddled?

Lets hope Bill DB's new administration moves in quickly to deliver us from Eva and her destructive ways ASAP.... Eva can afford to rent her own buildings w/ all the philanthropy and savings she has amassed.....  Lisa Donlan, CEC1
Is there a push for reversing the co-loco charter school giveaways or are those outrageous acts of a dying administration being submerged in all the other stuff going on? One would hope that Annenberg/the Alliance for Quality Education with their gal Zakiyah Ansari on the di B transition team would make this a top-level priority.

UPDATE FROM LEONIE:
There will be legal challenges as well as political challenges to all of the October co-locations; meanwhile I suggest everyone write letters, email and get their electeds to write the transition team in opposition to the co-locations in their particular districts and communities.  Unlike Bloomberg, the de Blasio team will likely be sensitive to community and political pressure to reverse these decisions.

Leonie Haimson

Lisa Donlan points to one of the outrageous decisions favoring Evil M, who Lisa dubs the second coming of The Queen of Mean:

I really hope there will be a revisiting soon, even if it means holding hearings all over again and re issuing EIS's that actually show impact.
The only one I am intimately familiar with is the colocation of a CTE school (some form of Advertising-possibly graphic media- the ink is still not dry on this paper proposal) in a HS in D1.

The CTE school was a good fit for Murry Bergtraum for a number of reasons- HS, CTE, and relative proximity to BMCC, the CUNY college partner to this hybrid HS/AA degree program.

But Eva [Moskowitz] rejected the targeted D1 site for her new proposed downtown elementary level charter school, forcing OPM to put her in Murry Bergtraum in place of the CTE school.
I do not often agree w/ the HSA approach but they got this one right: 
The supposedly underutilized building she was offered is an old (as in 110 years old!) former elementary school building.
It has no gym.
It has no auditorium.
It has only a warming kitchen and not much of a cafeteria- the downstairs, made up of pillars and tile floors,  serves as a lobby, gym, cafeteria and auditorium!
There are only a few bathrooms, the hallways are so narrow that two teens abreast fill the space, and there is not enough electrical wiring to support air conditioner units hanging ( useless) in windows.
The roof leaks and the basement floods, the ventilation is poor and the stairwells narrow.
There is only one science lab and very little technology due to poor wiring. 

 The school, University Neighborhood High School,  is about 1/3 SWD and 1/4 ELLs, and uses rooms for a college office, for  CBO support and after school enrichment and tutoring program and mainly for pull out academic intervention/ related services. 
The rooms are 500 square feet, a space arbitrarily deemed full size by the foot print, which just a few years ago deemed half sized, resulting in a biased "underutilized" on paper diagnosis by OPM.

The school went from a D to a high B to an A by DoE's Progress reports since the pre-engagement provoked by the D grade 3 years ago. This is not a school that deserves to lose support and resources but should instead be encouraged, supported and celebrated.

The new "CTE" school (playing loose and fast w/ the terms Career and Technical since the "theme"  is hardly going to result in any technical certification for students), based on the latest and greatest untried new thing (the famous P-TECH model, only in its 3rd year of a 6 year funded program) is going to suffer to accommodate the Queen of Connections.

There is no plan (hey September is like a whole 10 months away, right?) for sufficient bathrooms, or how kids as young as 14 will get back and forth from BMCC to the heart of the LES ( google 200 Monroe Street) where the new school's students  will have to use the college for its auditoriums,  a science lab  and maybe even bathrooms!

So to accommodate the political and financial ambitions of NYC's Education Queen of Mean, DoE has set up to fail both a successful  high needs school community that is already grossly underserved in terms of infrastructure and support AND one of its own Federal funding magnet darling pilots.

Lets hope Bill DB's new administration moves in quickly to deliver us from Eva and her destructive ways ASAP.
Help UNHS and help the black and Latino males this new CTE school is targeting for careers in Advertising by re-locating the CTE Advertising school back in Murry Bergtraum HS.

Eva can afford to rent her own buildings w/ all the philanthropy and savings she has amassed.

Lisa 
CEC 1

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