Scores of parents and teachers from Harlem’s long-embattled P 811 and PS/MS 149 together with elected officials and community allies rallied outside Department of Education headquarters on April 8 to protest a renewed effort to co-locate a second Success Academy charter school inside their shared school building.

The school, seemingly saved by the new mayor’s actions in February, is back fending off the incursion of Success Academy’s Harlem Central and its nearly 200 students thanks to the governor and Albany lawmakers.

“No matter what anyone else tells you in their expensive television ads, this is not fair,” said P 811 science teacher Mindy Rosier, referring to the recent – and very costly – advertising blitz in favor of charter schools funded by well-heeled allies of Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz.

Rosier said P 811, a District 75 school serving students with severe disabilities, had lost classroom space as well as its music, art and technology rooms when the first Success Academy moved in and the impending co-location will cost the school its speech and occupational/physical therapy rooms as well as its conflict-resolution room and more classroom space.

PS/MS 149 and P 811 have already lost too much space to Success Academy, said parent Shaquana Ward, who has a 1st-grader with learning disabilities at P 811.

“My son likes to run, but they don’t have their gym room anymore, so all their exercise is done in the classroom,” she said. “His grades are down. He’s running out of the classroom. He’s running up and down the hallways because they don’t have anywhere to run.”

This is the second time around for the P 811 and PS 149 school communities.

The two schools were originally targeted by ex-mayor Michael Bloomberg when he pushed through 49 co-location proposals during his final months in office. In late February, Mayor Bill de Blasio rejected the co-location of the second Success Academy in the Harlem building as part of a larger review of those last-minute Bloomberg co-location plans on the grounds that the school’s special-needs students would be displaced. An April 1 state budget deal brokered by Gov. Andrew Cuomo overturned de Blasio’s decision.

Despite the action by Albany, City Councilman Daniel Dromm, the chair of the City Council’s education committee, said change is on the horizon.

“Governor Cuomo’s education policies end here,” he said. “Parents all across the city are saying no to these kinds of co-location policies.”

Noting the considerable political and financial forces arrayed against them, Dr. Hazel Dukes, the president of the New York State NAACP, offered these words of encouragement.

Martin Luther King and other civil rights activists “didn’t have any money, but they had the will. We can give our bodies and our souls for our children,” Dukes said.