Surely,
the students at this school and other Renewal schools deserve a better chance
to excel, by providing them with smaller classes, sufficient bilingual and ESL
teachers, and all the other services and programs that all children need and deserve, but
especially students with such disadvantaged backgrounds – instead of the DOE continuing
to spend millions on an army of overpaid consultants and bureaucrats.
There
are many reasons to challenge the closure of JHS 145 and other Renewal
schools. As early as December
2014, DOE promised to focus its class size reduction efforts according
to the Contract for Excellence law on these schools, writing: “To better align with the Chancellor’s priorities, C4E’s
class size reduction plan will now focus on the 94 schools in the School
Renewal program.”
DOE
repeated that promise in the 2015-16
Contract for Excellence plan and again in the C4E
plan for this school year, while closing several of these schools
without reducing class size. Indeed, there
are still classes as large as 30 at JHS 145 as well as at about 40% of the
Renewal elementary and middle schools, and nearly all the Renewal high
schools.
Of
the six schools slated for closure, only JHS
145 in District 9 is a zoned school.
Because JHS 145 is a zoned school, it is not clear to me how the DOE can
close it without a vote of Community Education Council in District 9, which has
not occurred.
According to Marilyn Espada, President of CEC 9, the JHS 145 student
population is composed of 53 percent English Language Learners, 20 percent
students with special needs, and 53 students in temporary housing. Yet there
was no ESL Teacher last year, and only one ESL Teacher for 140 ELL students
this year. There are no bilingual teachers for the 7th and 8th
graders.
In addition, many of the extra services and resources the school
was promised as part of the Renewal program never happened. The health
clinic built for the school has yet to open, and instead of gaining more
space, 17 or 18 classrooms were given
over to a Success Academy charter school
one year into the Renewal process, “scattering
students across 3 floors of a building,” and causing the school to lose its computer
room. There is no
science lab, no textbooks last year, and nearly 14
percent of teachers were teaching subjects last year in which they were not
trained or certified.
A powerful post by Leonie Haimson - an indictment of de Blasio and Farina failures akin to the BloomKlein years. When you scratch below the surface, they are basically giving justification for the DeVos/Trump assault on public schools. I mean, what exactly are we trying to defend when we have seen these types of people in charge for decades?
The egregious failure of DOE's Renewal program - and the likely illegal proposal to close JHS 145
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