Talk Bronx New York

City officials said Monday that they were scrapping a controversial plan to replace some vocational programs at a Bronx high school with a troubled 18-month-old charter school.

The decision, a rare instance of the city changing course on a proposal to place a charter school in a public school, was made after a meeting last Wednesday between Joel I. Klein, the schools chancellor, and construction industry representatives. The construction executives expressed concern that the charter school would not be able to replicate the construction trades programs at the high school, Alfred E. Smith Career and Technical Education High School, said Gregg B. Betheil, who is in charge of the city’s vocational educational programs.

The city still plans to close Smith’s construction trade programs — in heating and ventilation, plumbing, electrical installation, carpentry and architectural engineering — because of low graduation rates. But instead of moving the charter school, the New York City Charter School for Architecture, Engineering and Construction Industries, into the space, the Department of Education will work with industry representatives to develop an appropriate replacement school, which may be a city-run school or a charter, Mr. Betheil said. Read more..

(No Ratings Yet)
 Loading ...
 Email This Post

P.S. 178 parent Naomi Gonzalez suspended her lawsuit against the city Department of Education and School Construction Authority on Tuesday, January 19 as the DOE promised the federal Environmental Protection Agency that it would perform a million dollar pilot study of air, soil and caulk at five schools and develop a plan to address PCB contamination.

“The end goal is a safe school environment…for kids across the city,” said Gonzalez, who described the January 19 agreement as a “step in the right direction.”

The DOE and EPA entered negotiations in 2009 when New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI) helped Gonzalez spotlight the toxic caulk issue. PCBs – Polychlorinated Biphenyls – are heat and fire-resistant compounds that leak toxins when they break down. Read more..

(No Ratings Yet)
 Loading ...
 Email This Post

Angry parents protest the closing of schools at a Department of Education hearing at Brooklyn Tech High School.

 Over the objections of thousands of protesters, the city Education Department’s panel voted early Wednesday morning to close 19 failing city schools.

After more than eight hours of testimony, the Panel for Educational Policy gave the go-ahead shortly after 3:00 a.m.

The four panel members representing the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan voted against most of the closings.

Mayor Bloomberg’s eight appointees along with the representative from Staten Island supported the decision.

At the beginning of the hearing, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein defended the proposals.

“The sad reality is that the schools we must close tonight are not meeting the standards,” he said, barely audible over boos from the crowd.

At one point he left the stage for several minutes, and the crowd interrupted testimony, repeatedly chanting, “Where is Klein?”

Only after he returned did the crowd allow testimony to continue.

Renee Donaldson holds up a sign as she yells against the closing of schools. Read more..

(No Ratings Yet)
 Loading ...
 Email This Post

Students from Christopher Columbus High School and Global Enterprise Academy marched to protest the scheduled closing of their schools  The boos cascaded over the auditorium as a city education official read out the case against Christopher Columbus High School, one of the last remaining large high schools in the Bronx.

Columbus has had “long history of sustained academic failure” and “chronically poor performance and low demand,” Santiago Taveras, a deputy chancellor, told the standing-room crowd. As a result, he said, it should be closed.

But the frustrated teachers, soft-spoken students and former football players who stood up at the hearing said otherwise. They described a school that had served some students well, despite the difficult circumstances faced by many. They told of a school that, even after the city identified it as struggling, continued to receive ever-growing proportions of the city’s most demanding students — the very students that needed the most help.

“And now that they have found a home here, and have been welcomed with open arms to our family, you want to take that away from them, too,” said Jaime Allen, a special education teacher.

Closing schools for poor performance, especially large high schools, has been one of the most controversial hallmarks of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s control of the school system. And it is taking on a new urgency, both in New York and around the country, with the Obama administration putting a premium on “school turnaround” policies in its nationwide competition, called Race to the Top, for billions of dollars in federal education grants. Read more..

(No Ratings Yet)
 Loading ...
 Email This Post

Dane Martinez is the program manager of school leadership development for the city’s Department of Education.

 Hoping for a career in television sports news, the Bronx-born Dane Martinez did an about-face after 9/11. After graduating from Syracuse University, he came home and taught under the Teach for America program. Now 29, he is the program manager of school leadership development for the city’s Department of Education.

Decoding the job title: It means that I do a lot of content and design of school leadership stuff to develop the principals, the assistant principals and the aspiring principals across the city. The office is relatively new, in general. It was only created in 2007.

Before that? Achievement First Bushwick Middle School — I was the dean of the students. I was basically the person in charge of culture, discipline, student investment, student incentives, parent groups. The whole theme of the school, as at all Achievement First schools, is to strive to go to college. The fifth grade wasn’t known as the fifth grade, it was known as the class of 2019, because that would be the year that they would go to college. Read more..

(No Ratings Yet)
 Loading ...
 Email This Post