FEBRUARY 2008 UPDATE: In January, Holly Reichert became Khalil Gibran's permanent principal. She has mentored ESL teachers in New York City and taught English in Bahrain, an Arabic-speaking country. The school will be moving from its Dean Street location for the fall of 2008, possibly to the PS 287 building in Fort Greene.

AUGUST 2007 REVIEW: Khalil Gibran will be the city's first school to focus on Arabic language and culture, a fact that has garnered it a lot of attention since the Department of Education announced in February 2007 that it would open in Brooklyn with a 6th grade the following September.

Named after an early-20th-century Christian Lebanese poet, the school will offer Arabic language classes and focus on Arabic culture in other academic classes. Eventually, according to press reports, the school will offer half of all instruction in Arabic. The Tannenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding will run conflict resolution and diversity classes, according to the New York Sun. School leaders aim to recruit a student body that is half Arab. The school's lead partner, the Brooklyn-based Arab American Family Support Center, offers a variety of services to Arab immigrants and receives funding from the U.S. government and from other support organizations, including the American Jewish World Service.

Founding principal Debbie Almontaser, a longtime teacher at PS 261, has been a spokesperson for tolerance toward Islam and Arab culture since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, which sparked some violence against Arabs in the city. She resigned in August after being attacked in the press for her explanation of the word "intifada," which appeared on a shirt produced by a group on whose board she sits. Her replacement, Danielle Salzberg, was on the school's founding team and was an assistant principal at Millennium High School. She does not speak Arabic.

Although the school is not terribly different from other schools around the city that organize studies around a particular region or language, it has been the target of intense criticism because of its focus on Middle Eastern culture. A columnist in the Fort Greene Courier suggested that the school could be "a public madrassa," referring to Islamic fundamentalist schools in the Middle East, and right-wing news networks nationwide have been abuzz with news about a "public 'jihad'" school. DOE and school officials have reiterated many times that the school will focus on culture, not politics that are fraught with controversy. "The school will not be a vehicle for political ideology," a DOE spokesman told the Sun.

Perhaps as a result of this mixed press, Khalil Gibran had a hard time finding a location. After abandoning plans to locate Khalil Gibran at PS 282 in Park Slope, the DOE announced that the school will share space in its first year with two Boerum Hill schools that already share a building. Those schools, the Brooklyn High School of the Arts and MS 447, will give up three classrooms and let Khalil Gibran's 60 students use the building's cafeteria and gym.

Admission: Open to 6th graders. Contact the school for details. (Philissa Cramer, August 2007)