Panel approves co-locations despite outpouring of protest

Bruce Cotler

Bruce Cotler

UFT Vice President for Elementary Schools Karen Alford told the panel, "We want all children to be winners, but you have created a system with winners and losers."

Despite an outpouring of protest from district school parents, teachers and students, the city’s Panel for Educational Policy on June 27 voted to move forward with all 18 of the charter school co-locations before it.

The protestors chanted spiritedly “Integrate, don’t segregate” as the proceedings got under way at Prospect Heights HS.

The hearing, which many teachers and parents labeled a “sham,” came hot on the heels of a pro-charter school rally called earlier in the day outside the UFT’s Manhattan headquarters by Success Charter Network CEO Eva Moskowitz. The former councilmember and her supporters want the UFT and the NAACP to drop the lawsuit they filed jointly with others in May to prevent school closings and inequitable charter co-locations.

The 18 co-locations approved at the meeting had previously been voted on by the panel but were reintroduced at the June 27 meeting with amendments in an attempt to address building utilization issues raised in the lawsuit.

UFT Vice President for Elementary Schools Karen Alford called on the members of the panel to visit the district schools before they co-locate or expand charter schools inside their buildings to ascertain whether there is, in fact, sufficient space.

“We want all children to be winners,” Alford told the panelists. “But you have created a system with winners and losers.”

Also speaking before the panel, Khem Irby, a newly elected member of District 13’s Community Education Council, warned that a co-location at PS 368 will have devastating effects on that school’s autistic students.

“Why are all of our meetings about co-locations and not education?” Irby asked, expressing the thoughts of many in the audience.

Another parent, Noah Gotbaum, the outspoken president of Community Education Council for District 3, decried the cramped conditions in the schools in his Manhattan school district, which has the highest concentration of co-located schools in the city and country.

“If you want community input, you’ve got it,” Gotbaum said, before listing the many prominent individuals and groups in District 3 opposed to more co-locations there. Every elected official from the Upper West Side and Harlem, at all levels of government, is opposed to the proposed co-location of Success Academy 8 on the Brandeis campus, he said.

“Do your job. Protect our kids,” Gotbaum challenged the panel.

Mary Jackson, a 5th-grade teacher at PS/IS 308 in Canarsie, Brooklyn, said she has 31 students in her class crammed into a small classroom with only one closet for them to share. There is only one book for every two children, she said.

“Can you imagine what that does to the mindset of the children?” Jackson asked. “They try to cope, but it’s a struggle.”

The city wants to co-locate the Teaching Firms of America charter school inside the already overcrowded school next September.

Jackson said she wasn’t surprised that the panel voted to move forward with all of the co-locations before them.

“I do not feel that they are listening to us,” she said. “They’re just going through the motions. But I don’t want to give up the fight.”