By Melinda Martinez, Daily News
Over the past few months, parents in my corner of Brooklyn have felt suddenly under assault. Despite having what we consider excellent public schools — and a successful community-based approach to educating our young people — we are fending off an unwanted charter school in Cobble Hill. So far, our concerns seem to have fallen on deaf ears.
Wednesday night, the citywide Panel for Educational Policy is expected to vote to allow the charter school to share the K293 building where my four daughters go to school.
I’m not against parents having options, but I’m against giving valuable space to charter schools in a way that makes life harder for traditional district schools. I fear that is what’s happening here.
In this community, we are proud to have very strong public schools that perform well, mostly aren’t overcrowded and do a better job than most other city schools of teaching black and Latino students on a level that’s closer to their white peers.
It seems to me that if it isn’t broke, you shouldn’t fix it. Yet the city Education Department is paving the way to allow Success Charter Network to put a privately operated public school in the building — in space that was targeted by many in the community for early-childhood education.
According to the Education Department, there are 670 seats available in the building. I don’t know how they could have reached such a high number. I walk through the hallways almost daily, and based on what I see, every classroom is utilized.
The charter’s proposal would take 15 classrooms in the first year, growing to 29 rooms within four years. Where will they come from? Will they come from the new computer lab at the School for Global Studies or the teaching kitchen in the School for International Studies?
According to the Education Department’s own documents, at maximum enrollment for all the schools in the building, including the charter, the site will boast up to 1,750 students. That means we’ll be at 108% capacity by the 2016-17 school year.
But the only school being given room to grow during that period is the charter.
It gets worse. Under the plan, the cafeteria would have to start serving lunch as early as 10:50 a.m., ending as late as 2:30 p.m. Gym class sizes for existing students in middle and high school will explode because the charter’s gym class sizes — for kindergarten through grade 5 — are legally required to be smaller.
Finally, there is a fear among parents that the Success Charter Network in particular will not serve certain types of high-needs students as well as existing schools do. One of my daughters entered International as a struggling special-education student. Four years later, she is an honor roll student looking at Columbia University for college.
I doubt she would have succeeded as well in a Success Charter Network school.
As reported in The New York Times this year, every district public school co-located with one of the Success network’s schools serves a greater proportion of special-education students and English-language learners than does the respective charter.
In fact, all four of my girls went from mediocre students to honor students because they were given the chance to succeed. I know dozens of parents who would tell you the same thing about their kids.
Success Charter Network says it gets great results with kids. I don’t begrudge them their opinion, although I and others question their willingness to teach the highest-needs students. But I don’t want their growth to interfere with our success.
That is why our parents associations, our Community Education Council, our assemblywoman and our City Council members are against the charter proposal.
I urge parents and other city leaders to think very carefully about what’s happening here — and preserve and protect public schools that work.
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