New York, NY —
Public Advocate Bill de Blasio wants the city to stop closing schools until it gives parents a bigger say in the process.
On Friday, a judge blocked the city from phasing out 19 failing schools including Jamaica High in Queens and Columbus High in the Bronx. She said the city didn't thoroughly assess the impact the closings would have on other schools, in violation of state law. She singled out a lack of community involvement, and criticized the city for using “boilerplate” language for each of the affected schools without any details about where local students would go instead.
The public advocate says he agrees with that ruling. That’s why he’s sending parents at the affected schools a survey asking them what they thought of the Department of Education's process for closing schools.
“We want to do the input process the right way and use this survey to show D.O.E. how you actually should reach out to parents and then listen to them and adjust your plans accordingly,” de Blasio says.
The public advocate says his office will rely on its own small staff, as well as community groups and its website, to survey about 10 percent of parents at the affected schools starting in mid-April.
But the city’s Department of Education stands by its methods. A spokesman says the city is committed to creating better schools for all children and that it will continue engaging parents and community leaders. The Department of Education is appealing the judge’s ruling and says it will go ahead with plans to open new small schools and charter schools that were supposed to gradually replace the schools it wanted to close, even if it has to site them in other facilities.
Meanwhile, other groups are using Friday’s ruling to challenge the city’s process for awarding space to charter schools in regular public school buildings. Harlem Assemblyman Keith Wright and some neighborhood parents complained to the state education department about the Harlem Success network of charters run by former City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz. They accused the city of giving Moskowitz’s network special treatment because its schools have been allowed to grow, taking more and more children, while remaining housed inside other schools.
A spokeswoman for the Harlem Success network insisted the allegations are not true. “The record shows that most of Eva Moskowitz’s requests of the Department of Education are not fulfilled,” she stated. “Despite the claims, charter schools not only do not receive preferential treatment, they receive fewer dollars to do the same work as their traditional counterparts.”
On Monday, another complaint to the state was filed against the expansion of the Girls Prep charter school on the Lower East Side. A group of parents claim that allowing Girls Prep to remain inside a regular public school will hurt the two other schools in the building, P.S. 188 and a program for autistic children called P94. The group says the Department of Education didn’t do a thorough assessment of the impact. The department disagrees and says there’s room for all three of the schools.