Corinne Kaufman has been a math teacher for 25 years at IS 96 Seth Low in Bensonhurst and counts at least 10 teachers who have been at the school for 20 to 30 years. “We are really a great team here, a real family,” said Kaufman, the school’s acting chapter leader. “It’s very stable.”

That stable community is facing an unprecedented threat from the city’s plan to co-locate a Success Academy charter school in its building next fall. Under the co-location, Success Academy would take 27 out of IS 96’s 62 classrooms — almost half the school. The DOE proposes to turn over an entire floor to the charter school.

About 400 parents, educators, local state and city elected officials and State Assembly members and students filled the IS 96 auditorium to protest the plan at a Sept. 30 hearing after holding a spirited demonstration outside the school.

Parent leaders said the co-location ignores the genuine needs of Districts 20 and 21, both of which have excellent elementary schools that feed into IS 96. “We don’t need another elementary school,” said Laurie Windsor, the president of the District 20 Community Education Council. “We need junior high school seats.”

The proposed co-location disrupts IS 96’s own reorganization plan: Three years ago, IS 96 placed academies devoted to math and science on different floors, each with its own dean and assistant principal, and has more academies planned. Sharing the building with the 150 K-4 students expected to enroll next September undermines the new structure and reduces access to the auditorium, gym and lunchroom ­— all space that would have to be shared with the younger charter pupils.

“They want to take a floor when our programs are just starting to take off,” Kaufman said. “They’re not giving us a chance to make it work.”

Other speakers at the hearing made the point that IS 96 serves all students; charter schools have been accused of cherry-picking students and discouraging special needs students from attending, even those who win admission in a lottery.

One in three students at Seth Low receive some kind of remediation, whether occupational or physical therapy or English as a second language. Kaufman said she knows of three students at IS 96 who said they had been encouraged to leave a charter school.

“Unlike charter schools, we don’t turn students away,” said special education teacher Howard Ryback in his prepared remarks at the hearing, which he later shared with New York Teacher. He blamed the creep of corporate culture into the school system: “Wall Street is taking over Main Street, which includes our public schools,” he said. “It’s gradually weakening our democratic principles.”

The state requires the Community Education Councils to host an introductory forum for the charter school when a co-location is planned. But no representatives from the state or Success Academy, founded by Eva Moskowitz, showed up for the forum in mid-September.