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Angry showdown doesn’t stop school closure vote

by Jim Callaghan

Feb 3, 2010 4:25 PM

PEP votes to shutter 19 schools after nine-hour meeting

Nearly 3,000 outraged parents, students, community leaders and educators packed the Brooklyn Technical HS auditorium on Jan. 26, where they urged the Panel for Educational Policy to reject the Department of Education’s proposal to close 19 schools.

The 13-member panel, which is composed of eight appointees of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and one appointee from each borough president — ultimately voted for the closures, but not until after nearly nine hours of impassioned and emotional pleas from some 300 speakers, almost all of whom wanted the schools to remain open.

Shouts of “puppets,” “dictators,” “sellouts,” “shame” and “disgraceful” could be heard from the crowd throughout the meeting while PEP members listened mostly in silence.

The PEP members decided the fate of each school one by one. In all but two cases, the vote was 9 to 4 to close the school. The eight mayoral appointees and the Staten Island borough president’s appointee voted yes. The representatives for the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan borough presidents, saying they had considered the research and the overwhelming public sentiment, voted against the DOE’s plan.

In the other two votes, on the closings of PAVE Academy in Brooklyn and New Day Academy in the Bronx, mayoral appointee Linda Lausell Bryant recused herself from voting without explanation.

The votes ended up taking place after 3 a.m. As the roll call proceeded, shouts were heard after each one: “puppet” aimed at each voting yes and “leader” for each voting no.

The new state governance law requires certain public processes before a school is closed, including public hearings and a vote by the PEP.
During his allotted speaking time, UFT President Michael Mulgrew stood up for the school communities in jeopardy and urged the panel members to do the same. He also raised questions about the DOE’s process.

“If we find that the governance law is not being followed, we will see you in court,” Mulgrew said. [See story page 2.]

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer challenged the legality of the meeting because his representative on the panel had not been given the documents he requested.

There were also mentions of lawsuits by speakers representing several chapters of the NAACP, one of whom — retired teacher Helen Settles — compared the panel’s actions to the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case in 1954, which found that separate and unequal schools were unconstitutional.

Dave Curran, UFT delegate for W.E.B. DuBois Academic HS in Brooklyn, said DOE should stand for “Department of Euthanasia.”

One of the most heartfelt pleas, and there were hundreds, came from David John, a 10th-grade student at the threatened Academy of Environmental Science in Manhattan, who told the panel members, “My dream is to become president of the United States. You have failed across the board.”

The 97-grade-point-average student said the vote to close his school was also “ruining” his dream of going to Harvard.

One after another, high school students from four boroughs lined up to speak, incensed at being labeled failures.

“If my school isn’t working, and you failed, why am I being punished?” one student asked.

Another young woman said: “I am not a failure and I will never be a failure.”

At one point, when a student made a point of asking the chancellor to listen to what she had to say, Klein picked up his phone and walked away from his chair.

There were a few speakers who spoke for the closings including Spencer Robertson, who has been given free space in Brooklyn’s PS 15 for the PAVE Academy charter he founded.

Robertson, whose billionaire father Julian Robertson has donated $10 million to some of Klein’s educational reform efforts, refused to speak to the New York Teacher. He did claim that everyone gets along in the building, a statement contradicted by PS 15 teacher Livia Pantuliano. She said a PAVE administrator reported to Pantuliano’s principal that the teacher was on the “wrong side” of the building with her students.

To highlight the fact that taxpayer-subsidized PAVE has new laptops and SmartBoards, Pantuliano asked Klein: “Can I have 50 bucks for pencils?”

George Altomare, the UFT director of worker education and a graduate of Brooklyn Tech, said of the meeting, “Since we founded the union in 1960, I have never seen anything like this anger and passion.”

Cheryl Ackerman, a teacher at Norman Thomas HS, called Klein’s actions a “Groissen Shandeh” — Yiddish for “a terrible shame.” Others called the vote a “new form of segregation.”

That theme was sounded by many speakers who claimed that privately owned charter schools, described by one teacher as being run by “billionaire profiteers,” were getting more resources than district public schools. Many parents and students said the closings were a direct hit on people of color, low-income students, immigrants and students with special needs such as English language learners and students with disabilities.

At about 11:30 p.m., Gbubemi Okotieuro, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz’s PEP representative, called for the school closure vote to be postponed. Brought to a vote, all of the mayor’s appointees voted not to postpone, while the borough president representatives voted for postponement.

Just before 3 a.m., when Patrick Sullivan, Stringer’s appointee on the PEP, asked his fellow panel members to defend their support of the school closing plans, all of them sat mute.

The repeated claims that the panel members were rubber stamps for Bloomberg reminded one attendee of an old one-liner: “At least a rubber stamp leaves an impression.”