A student expresses her concerns to the standing-room-only crowd at the April 16 hearing on the proposed co-location of a Success Academy charter school in a building shared by three struggling middle schools.
One of the signs posted on the fence outside the school on the day of the hearing.
It was a ray of hope.
Three struggling schools sharing one building in the Morrisania section of the Bronx — JHS 145, MS 325 and MS 328 — learned last fall that the city had selected all three for its Renewal Schools program.
The schools would become community schools, providing a web of educational and health services to the students and their families living in one of the poorest congressional districts in the nation. They would have three years to improve student achievement, following an infusion of funding and the introduction of after-school programs, an extra hour of instruction and more professional development.
“There would be a clinic to service the health needs of the immediate community, and more arts and music,” said Walquiris Garo-Marte, the chapter leader at MS 325. “And our parents would get services to help them help their children.”
All the plans have now been thrown up into the air with the planned co-location in their building of a Success Academy charter school, which will claim 15 classrooms for its own purposes.
“They’re giving us resources with one hand and taking them away with the other,” said Jim Donohue, an 8th-grade English teacher at JHS 145. “It’s so wrong on so many levels.”
Six hundred people packed a hearing on April 16 at JHS 145 to voice their opposition to the plan.
“We’re not against charters,” said Natalie Dexter, the JHS 145 chapter leader, discussing the meeting five days later. “We’re all for school choice. But not on the backs of our children.”
In his 2014 budget, Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered the city to provide space rent-free to charter schools. The subsidy comes even though hedge-fund investors have sunk millions of dollars into the chain founded by Eva Moskowitz.
A recent fundraiser added $9.3 million to her network’s bulging coffers. All but three of the 32 Success Academies in New York City are co-located in public schools and do not pay a penny for space.
Garo-Marte said she had hoped that MS 325’s teams would be able to compete in soccer and basketball in District 9 next year. “That will become impossible if Success Academy comes here” because the three schools will have to share their gym with the charter school, she said.
Ray Nazario, a JHS 145 social studies teacher, was also concerned about how the middle school students — at a crucial stage in their physical and emotional development — would handle being confined to fewer classes. “They need to move around,” he said.
Nazario said he believed that the co-location would make it harder to prove the school had improved under the Renewal program. “You’re changing a variable in the experiment,” he said. “You can’t compare it to what was.”
The Panel for Educational Policy was scheduled to vote on the co-location on April 29.