With middle school applications due on Friday, Dec. 17,  and the kindergarten admissions season beginning in January, the Department of Education is proposing changes in location or grade level at several high profile schools around the city. Among the schools affected are PS 151 on the Upper East Side, the Richard Green High School of Teaching, and two secondary schools  in the old John Jay building in Park Slope. Public hearings about the changes are set for early January and the Panel for Educational Policy will vote on the recommendations at their January 19meeting.  Some changes would take place as early as Fall 2011, others are several years away.

Here's a rundown of the proposed changes.

Brooklyn

In Brooklyn, to make way for a replication of the popular Millennium High School to open in September 2011, the DOE is proposing truncating two of the three 6-12 schools located there, lopping off the middle schools of both the Secondary School for Journalism and the Secondary School for Law. According to the Department of Education, very few students in District 15 rank either of the two schools on their middle school applications. Current middle school students would be allowed to stay but no incoming sixth-graders would be accepted. (The third school now in the building, the Secondary School for Research, will apparently keep their middle grades.)    Millennium is a highly-sought after small selective high school, and there is a dearth of such schools for  "academically gifted" and "high-achieving" students," in Brooklyn, according to the DOE's "educational impact statement" about Millennium Brooklyn. It will also offer a specialized program called Nest, for students with Autism Spectrum Disorders; the principal comes from MS 447, a popular Middle School in Boerum Hill.

Manhattan

In Manhattan,PS 151, a long shuttered school which reopened in a Catholic school building in 2009, will get a permanent home in the elementary school building which houses theRichard R. Green High School of Teaching. The new location proposed for Richard Green is 26 Broadway, in a downtown building shared by the Lower Manhattan Community Middle School and theUrban Assembly School of Business for Young Women. Two years ago, there  were charges of racism when the DOE planned to move Richard Green to Harlem, to share space with IS 45 in Harlem, to make way for PS 151.  Green's population is largely black and Hispanic; PS 151 enrolls a more diverse population.<!--more-->

The Bronx

Two District 10 schools in the Bronx, PS 226 and PS 396,  would grow to become a K-5 schools (currently they only go through fourth grade.) MS 390, a 5-8 school, would become a 6-8 school, to help standardize middle school admissions in the district.

Queens

PS 78, a relatively new school on the waterfront in Long Island City,  Queens will grow to be a K-8 school and move to a new, yet to be determined location, by the 2014-2015 school year.  Its current building has no gym or auditorium or room to expand to include middle school grades.

PS 182, an early childhood school in District 28 would become a K-5 school, beginning with the addition of third-graders in 2011. PS 86, now a -3-6 school, would also serve grades K-5 by 2013.

For more details, and to comment on the proposals before, see the DOE's website.

And, stay tuned, more changes and co-locations, including decisions about  the 26 schools that the DOE would like to close or revamp, are upcoming at the Feb. 1 PEP meeting.