PS 19, Brooklyn: Battling for survival

PS 19 teachers Donna Campisi, Helene Boxer, Kimberly Faraci and Patricia Tambakis, the chapter leader, with UFT District 14 Representative Iradies Munet at the rally.

Students, parents and teachers from PS 19 rally outside the school on Nov. 17.

They rallied and marched, but to no avail: the Department of Education announced on Dec. 8 that, despite teacher and community cries to “save our school,” it intends to shutter Williamsburg’s PS 19 by 2015.

Educators at the K-5 school first found out that they could be at risk for closure when the city placed them on a list of 47 “failing” schools earlier in the fall. The school community did not take that news lightly, rallying against it at a “Save Our School” demonstration outside the school building on Nov. 17.

But the most recent news — that PS 19 is on the short list for closure and will have its fate decided at a Feb. 9 vote by the city’s Panel for Educational Policy — came as an even greater shock to the school’s already angry parents, teachers and students.

Teachers at the school, which just three years ago received a B on its progress report and was described by the DOE as “proficient with well-developed features,” felt that the initial decision to target them “came out of nowhere,” said Patricia Tambakis, the school’s UFT chapter leader. “Next thing we know, the city is voting to close us.”

Tambakis, who has taught at the school for 26 years, noted that the school serves a disproportionate number of English language learners — one-third of its students are ELLs from Williamsburg’s underserved and often overlooked Latino community — and special education students, and pointed her finger at what she considers the real culprit behind her school’s decline: budget cuts.

“We have no reading specialist, we have no math specialist, we have no Academic Intervention Services,” Tambakis said, describing conditions at PS 19, which has also had to cut its bilingual program. “So how are we supposed to succeed? The DOE didn’t intervene in any way to help us.”

While Tambakis acknowledged that the school has struggled academically in recent years, she pointed out that the rapid decline in its progress reports — from a B for the 2008-2009 school year to a D for 2009-2010 and then an F for 2010-2011 — was due in no small part to the state’s recalibration of student test scores, which caused many schools to slip.

— Micah Landau