Dear Inside Schools,

This article puts forward a highly biased and factually inaccurate report about my school, the Williamsburg Charter High School.

If your organization had taken the time to learn more about our school, you would find that the chair of our Board of Trustees, Lourdes Putz-Rivera, is the director of United We Stand, a nationally-recognized, federally-funded organization that serves families of students with disabilities in Brooklyn. The percentage of IEP students in our school is far from being “a mystery” as it was published in our 2008 School Report Card. We currently serve 70 students with IEPs as well as 15 English Language Learners (ELLs), and the number of IEP students that we serve is rising. Our current freshman class is 16% IEP, a 6% increase over the other three classes enrolled in the school.

Our staff has received extensive training on supporting all types of struggling learners because the average academic levels of our incoming 9th grade students hovers around the 6th and 7th grade level. The teachers have also received consulting on differentiated lesson planning, team teaching, and differentiated assessments for IEP students. In addition to our Special Education teachers, we employ a Speech and Language pathologist and five staff members who address students’ social-emotional needs, including a full-time school psychologist and a social worker. We feel that our program design demonstrates that serving Special Education students is at the heart of our school’s mission.

It is illegal to divulge information about specific students and families such as Ms. Bellahcene and her son who were mentioned in the article, but many of the alleged facts that Ms. Witenko published in her blog article regarding this case were blatantly untrue. Not once did Ms. Witenko contact any of our school’s staff members to verify her information. It is highly unprofessional to engage in such one-sided reporting without first reaching out to the other party which is, in this case, our school and its staff.

Your article, though perhaps published with good intent, has a great deal of potential to do significant harm to schools like ours that are working in good faith to serve all of their students. Inside Schools should be cautious with these types of communications in the future. We are requesting that Ms. Witenko engage in comprehensive fact-finding regarding her assertions and that she publish another article in order to retract her incorrect accusations against our school. We would also be glad to invite any of the staff of Inside Schools to come visit our school if they would like to observe our program.

In service to students,

Ethan Mitnick

Principal

I have now run admissions lotteries for charters for five years; four for a school I worked in and one for the school I am opening with my co-founders in September. During those years, we have done the following outreach to families: 1) mailed notifications and applications to schools, churches, community organizations, agencies, afterschool programs,and daycares within a 1.5 mile radius of the schools; 2) personally contacted administrators and guidance counselors via the phone and on-site visits; 3) met personally with representatives from the Committees on Special Education and with school-level special education coordinators; and 4) run numerous informational meetings and personal tours. This type of outreach is manpower-heavy and financially burdensome, but what is evident is that we–as have other charters–HAVE reached out, rather than waiting for the families to come to us. No child has had to take an exam, write an essay, or pass an interview to enter those lotteries, unlike many of the public schools that they might want to attend.

This year, although Equality did not have a site at the time of our lottery, nearly 400 famlies applied for 132 spaces, and more applications come every day–even though people know that their child will be number 200 on the waitlist. Already, 18% of the students who have been accepted from the lottery have special education services, and one third of those middle schoolers will have the exciting opportunity to exit self-contained classrooms and join their peers in inclusion, where research proves that they will be much more successful.

Students in self-contained classes have some of the lowest graduation rates in the entire city, and we do not intend to replicate a failing system. As charters, we choose to educate, rather than abandon, these students.

In a search for adequate kindergarten programs for Fall 2009, my daughter took the G&T; entered 5 charter school lotteries; entered D3 lottery; applied to public schools by my home (NE Bronx); and paid a deposit to hold her seat at her current private school. The EASIEST application process was for the charter schools. The most EFFICIENT and TIMELY process for notification was the charter schools. Even as she is accepted to a school in D3, we must now go through another application process for consideration for their dual language program.

I, too, do not understand why many people fight the charter schools. If ALL schools were performing at the same level, this competition would NOT exist.

Let’s just bring EVERY NYC PUBLIC SCHOOL up to reputable status for the sake of our children’s future…and sanity of their parents.

Fact: My school’s population is 17% ELL, not 42% as reported by Ms. Witenko. Her actual number of 78 is accurate, but Ms. Witenko did not bother to confirm our current enrollment (468) and instead used our enrollment from 2006 (192).

Fact: My school does not duplicate services for students with disabilities and ELL students. As we use the co-teaching model to serve our students with disabilities and our ELLs, it would be ridiculous to have 3 teachers in a class of 24 students when a few of them require both special education and ESL services.

Fact: My school has a higher percentage of enrolled students with disabilities than surrounding zoned public schools (13% as compared to 11%). As I told Ms. Witenko, our lottery is random. After students are selected, we work with the parents of those accepted students to ensure that our school provides the necessary level of services that their children require. It is not in anyone’s best interest, and certainly not the students’, for them to be enrolled in a program that is not designed to adequately meet their needs.

Fact: My school often enrolls students who were not successful in their zoned schools. I told Ms. Witenko that I sometimes believe “reverse creaming” is occurring as some of our families were strongly “encouraged” to apply to our school by administrators in their previous schools. It is interesting that many of those students were scoring at level 1 on the standardized exams and/or were experiencing behavioral difficulties.

Getting a child registered in a DOE school requires finding the zoned school and showing up there in person with all required documentation for your child (immunizations, ss#, passport, etc.) To me this sounds far more complicated and difficult for a struggling person than simply filling out a form with contact information.

Charter schools frequently reach out to their populations with direct mailings, drop-off applications in large buildings, and even door-to-door solicitations in some cases.

I’m sure creaming takes place at some schools, both charter and DOE. It’s illegal and it’s wrong but I have never seen evidence that a charter application process is exclusionary. Yet this myth persists and is quoted as fact over and over.