Panel votes to close 10 schools

Miller Photography

Miller Photography

Jeremy Sawyer, school psychologist at PS 120/368 in Brooklyn, is cheered as he addresses the panel.

Despite overwhelming opposition from parents, teachers and students, the city’s Panel for Educational Policy early on Feb. 2 in its first of two meetings voted to shutter 10 struggling New York City public schools.

The 13-member panel’s vote — considered a foregone conclusion since the mayor appoints eight of its members — capped a raucous, six-hour public hearing that drew approximately 2,000 people to the auditorium at Brooklyn Technical HS and saw some 300 testify.

In his testimony, UFT President Michael Mulgrew blasted the proposed closures, citing an internal Department of Education report that he said demonstrates that the DOE had intentionally set up many of the large comprehensive high schools now facing the axe to fail by concentrating special-needs students in them in overwhelming numbers.

On average, 18 percent of the students in the schools targeted for closure have special needs.

“We will call for an official investigation,” Mulgrew said to loud applause. “The job of the Department of Education is to make sure that every child in New York City has a great education.”

Mulgrew also said that the union has closely followed the process on all school closures and promised that if the DOE has made a single misstep “we will see you all in court.” The UFT and the NAACP won a lawsuit last year reversing the panel’s decision to close 19 schools on the grounds that it had not followed the proper procedures.
“Where was the DOE when these schools first started to have a problem? Why was there no intervention?” asked Annie Martin, the president of the New York branch of the NAACP. “Educating children is challenging and demanding. There are no shortcuts and closing schools is wrong.”

Students, teachers and parents from the closing schools spoke passionately about the impact the proposed closures will have on them and their communities.

James Eterno, a teacher and the UFT chapter leader at Jamaica HS in Queens, wanted to know what will happen to future special needs students after schools serving this population are closed.
“So where does the next generation of special needs students go?” he asked. “To the next school you want to close?”

Paul Robeson HS math teacher Lowena Howard said the DOE has starved her school of resources and personnel.
“You claim the DOE has given us what we need. Yet you haven’t even given us the teachers we need for our special education students,” she said.

Also from Robeson, student Daekwon Hughes pleaded with the panel to save his school, asking where the DOE was while Robeson struggled.

“The DOE is trying to take away my school,” Hughes said. “They’re trying to take away the great teachers, great experiences and great education at my school.”

The panel met again on Feb. 3 to vote on closing another 12 schools.