What about the dreams of this rallier?
Parents, educators and community members rally against the co-location planned for PS 149 in Harlem on March 10.
The sentiment was unanimous: Eva Moskowitz should find her own space.
“They need room? They can build a school,” said P811 grandparent Yvette Santana, whose special-needs grandson would have been evicted if Moskowitz’s Harlem Success Academy had been allowed to expand inside his school building.
“Get your own school. You have the money to do it,” agreed PS 149 parent Nancy Figueroa.
Santana and Figueroa were just two of the more than 150 parents, educators and community members from the two schools who gathered after school on March 10 for a rally backing Mayor de Blasio’s move to halt the expansion of the charter school inside their shared central Harlem school building.
The expansion not only would have put the already-overcrowded building at 135 percent of its capacity, but also would have displaced many children with special needs.
“These are disabled kids,” Santana said at the rally. “If they take them out, where are they going to go?”
For those who remained at P811, she said, the expansion would have cost them their speech and art rooms.
“They show their feelings through their painting,” Santana said. “That’s how they express themselves.”
Lynn Manuell, a theater arts teacher at the school since 2002, described the negative impact the co-location has already had.
“They came here in 2006,” she said. “They took the first floor the first year and we lost our library. They took the second floor the second year and we lost our art, technology and music rooms.”
Now, Manuell said, she teaches inside a converted office while PS 149’s physical education teacher conducts some classes in students’ classrooms rather than the building’s gym.
“The mayor has saved our children from further losing our gym, playground and auditorium, and from having occupational and physical therapy in the hallways,” Manuell said.
De Blasio’s decision to halt the expansion was part of a larger review of the 49 co-locations approved in the final months of the Bloomberg administration. The mayor also denied public school space to two of seven completely new Success Academy schools, prompting Moskowitz and other critics to declare that he is waging a “war” against charter schools. She has filed lawsuits seeking to overturn the reversals.
“No one is saying to close her schools,” shot back District 3 Community Education Council member Olaiya Deen at the rally. “We’re saying she can’t grow and take more classrooms from other children who need them.”