Cobble Hill parents rally against "Success"
Update Monday, Oct. 31: GothamSchools reports that Eva Moskowitz cut her presentation short on Saturday after parents protests disrupted the meeting. Opponents of the plan outnumbered parents who had come to learn about the proposed new school, Cobble Hill Success. The DOE proposed that the school would be housed in a building shared by two 6-12 schools: The School for International Studies and the Brooklyn School for Global Studies. A new Success school in Bedford-Stuyvesant would be housed in PS 59. The Panel for Educational Policy must approve the school openings and locations.
Friday's post: Eva Moskowitz, head of the Success charter network, will outline her plans for the new Cobble Hill Success Academy, at noon on Saturday at the Carroll Gardens Library. And, just like last year on the Upper West Side, she'll be confronted by neighborhood parents protesting the siting of a charter school in their neighborhood of largely high-performing schools serving a mostly middle class population.
A poll of 500 Cobble Hill residents conducted by the Success Network in September showed that 63% of residents supported “opening a new Success Academy charter school that will serve grades K through 8.” Other residents disagree, citing concerns that the charter school will take resources away from local public schools. They plan an 11 a.m. protest to "stop the co-location of charter schools in neighborhood schools".
Parent coordinators from area schools circulated a "fact sheet" to families charging, among other things, that public schools lose precious gym, library, cafeteria and other space when new schools move into the building and that some special needs programs in particular will suffer if Cobble Hill Success moves in.
Two schools in neighborhood school buildings that are considered to have extra space, and therefore seen as target locations for Cobble Hill Success -- MS 447, PS 32 -- have highly regarded programs for children with autism. Parents are concerned that a new school would eliminate classrooms and space for support services. MS 447 already shares a building with Brooklyn High School of the Arts, and PS 32 shares with New Horizons, a middle school that also serves many children with special needs.
Harlem Success originally targeted high need neighborhoods for its schools but last year, amid opposition, it opened a new elementary school on the Upper West Side where many highly regarded schools are over-crowded. In a recent press release about the new schools planned for Brooklyn, Moskowitz said that the "great" public schools in Cobble Hill are now too "bursting at the seams" and that "even families in middle class neighborhoods desire more and better public school options."
Read more about neighborhood reaction to the plan on CarrollGardensPatch.
Harlem Success, which already operates nine schools in the city, also plans to open schools in Williamsburg and in Bed-Stuy next year.
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