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State Education Commissioner David Steiner has given the Department of Education's space planners a case of the jitters. On March 31, Steiner overturned the city’s plan to move Brooklyn East Collegiate Charter School into the building of  Brooklyn's PS 9 and phasing-out MS 571 for this coming fall. Steiner ruled that the DOE had failed to show that it had equitably allocated space and facilities among the three schools. Barely a week later, DOE has restarted its effort, issuing a new proposal that re-allocates use of the facilities. (For a full recap of the story, see Michael Winerip's April 11 New York Times column, A City School's Uphill Fight over Sharing Space With a Charter.)

The PS 9 decision was the second time in a year that Steiner threw out a city charter school siting because the city had failed to adequately ensure that it would treat fairly all students in each affected school. Last summer, he nixed the city’s plan to expand Girls Prep Charter School in its existing building.

Steiner's ruling has pushed DOE to rework other co-location proposals as well.  It will revise its proposal to have an expanded Community Roots Charter School share space with PS 67 and postponed an April 11 public hearing. In Manhattan, a public hearing slated for April 12 regarding moving grades K-3 of KIPP S.T.A.R. into PS 115, was postponed and a revised proposal will be posted. An April 5  public hearing regarding the siting of Explore Charter School in MS 2 in Brooklyn, was also postponed. The DOE's letter to the affected schools states: "After receiving public input, the DOE has decided to re-examine the proposal to co-locate Explore Charter School at MS 002." A revised proposal will be issued. A proposal to move Coney Island Preparatory Public Charter School into a building shared by IS 303 and Rachel Carson High School for Coastal Studies was also revised.

The Panel for Educational Policy will be voting on a number of school co-location proposals at its April 28 and May 18 meetings. Now is the time that parents and community members can comment on proposals.

Will DOE's spate of quick rewrites prolong resistance to these charter sitings, or reduce it?  Stay tuned.

This week PS 9 in Brooklyn became a landmark in the turf struggles over siting charter schools, when State Education Commissioner David Steiner overturned the city's plan to move Brooklyn East Collegiate Charter School into PS 9’s building this coming fall. For the second time in a year, Steiner threw out a city charter school siting because the city had failed to adequately ensure that it would treat fairly all students in each affected school. (Last summer, he nixed the city's plan to expand Girls Prep Charter School in its existing building.)

PS 9, which my two children attend, is an ethnically diverse school in a gentrifying, kid-friendly neighborhood in Prospect Heights. It has many good teachers and a lot of warmth, but also an uncertain status in the neighborhood, as many well-to-do parents have fled to schools in other neighborhoods or lunged to find spots via lotteries. I have two neighbors who have paid, in the form of extra rent, a year’s worth of private school tuition to place their kids in PS 321 in Park Slope. A community survey of Prospect Heights residents in 2004 showed that public schools were the number one negative about the neighborhood.

Is PS 9 second-rate or on the move? Over the past three years, PS 9 parents designed and raised funds for the school building’s brand-new library. The school is getting a new playground this summer. Brownstoner-dreams of a increasingly resource-rich yet diverse school have been bubbling: almost 200 students have enrolled for next year’s kindergarten.

In December, the city Department of Education proposed phasing-out MS 571, a low-performing middle school which shares the PS 9 building, while moving in the charter school. It seemed to many PS 9 parents that the DOE hadn’t planned a workable co-location involving three schools in an elementary-sized building so much as figured everything would work out.

To oppose it, many of us turned our daily routines inside out for weeks or even months. We confronted a massive learning curve in campaigning against it. Living inside the DOE, administrators have a native advantage against parents who want to stop the department’s actions. DOE staff deal daily with school statistics, arcane processes, elected officials and complaints. We were lucky to have some parents who are public relations professionals, graphic designers, teachers, lawyers, and that some of us had enough flexibility to devote time. But so many of the tasks, starting with decoding DOE’s documents, were foreign.

So Steiner’s ruling stupefied us last night: did we just beat the Man? We had fought hard against DOE for weeks on end. We scored some points (gaining media attention, rousing speeches by elected officials, a split vote by the Panel on Educational Policy). But the Man won, as he almost always does. We took comfort that even our losing campaign had helped bring out the PS 9 parent community. It helped show us that we had the resources to build up the school in other ways.

Steiner’s decision provides no certainty that the co-location is finished. The DOE may well appeal the decision. If so, PS 9 parents will try to mobilize again. Many of us are simply astonished that we’ve spent so much time, together, working on this. Yet after all the energy expended, it helps to know, finally, that a senior education official here in New York is willing to weigh our arguments, rather than just rebut them.

Many PS 9 parent advocates are simply astonished that we’ve spent so much time, together, working on this. Yet after all the energy expended, we are pleased to know, finally, that a senior education official here in New York is willing to weigh our arguments, rather than just rebut them.

You can read Steiner's decision here.

UPDATE: In a statement from the press office on Friday evening, the Department of Education vowed to continue their efforts to locate the charter school in the PS 9 building: "We are reviewing all of our legal options and remain committed to co-locating Brooklyn East Collegiate Charter school with PS 9 and MS 571 next year."

Parents of disabled children are fearful that the city’s ambitious new plan to integrate special need students in regular classes will result in ever more confusion – and may not offer them better opportunities.

That’s the message from some 50 people -- including a girl in a wheelchair -- at a meeting of the Citywide Council on Special Education (CCSE) at MS 51 in Park Slope. They braved a tornado Thursday night, and walked around a thick tree thrown by the storm across the main entrance of the school, to hear a panel describe how the reforms might work – or not work.

These policy reforms started with the school year last week in 265 of the city’s 1,600 schools. The goal: move special education students to general-education classes, while still giving them the support and services they need to fulfill their Individualized Education Plans (IEPs).

For panelist Laura Rodriguez, the DOE officer in charge of special education, the plan offers an exciting vision. Tens of thousands of children, long segregated from their peers because of special  needs, can now join all the other kids and share a school experience. “Research shows that children who learn with general-education peers have greater success picking up skills,” she said. “Right now a lot of kids have no interaction with those other kids.” Special education students will be able to get a general education, after all.

But parents say the vision is a long way from reality. Rosalyn Sanchez described how her daughter, Ashley Santiago, who has spina bifida and uses a wheelchair, could not go to her eighth-grade class at IS 143 in Manhattan, nor receive her prescribed support services, because an elevator  has been out-of-order since July.  Lydia Bellahcene, a parent at P.S. 15 in Brooklyn, detailed how her daughter continues to receive physical therapy in a corner of a locker room.

Parents said they are confused about who is in charge of special education since the DOE dismantled school districts and replaced them with networks (which may include schools from several boroughs.) Anne Marie Caminiti, an advocate in Staten Island with Parent to Parent New York, said the recent reorganization is bound to puzzle or handcuff parents advocating for their children. “There’s 60 networks and 5 clusters,” she said. “I’m a professional, and I still don’t know who’s in the network. Or whose network is in which cluster.’

CCSE member Patricia Connelly, who moderated the meeting, said a risk exists that the school system will move children into general education classes but fail to give them the specialized services to which they are entitled by law.

Rodriguez (shown below), while not having all the answers to parents’ questions, did stay until the end of the meeting and promised to attend future CCSE meetings. “I hope in 12 months that many issues that we mentioned today we will have collectively figured out,” she said.

Do you have a story about how any of the 265 principals are implementing the special education reforms? We’d like to hear from you. Please share your story below.