Below is a list of hearings and MOREs are trying to get to as many as possible. If you have time come to one or at the very least join MORE at the Jan. 16 PEP meeting at Fashion Industries HS. If you get up to speak, just read some of the stuff below.
Hearings already passed, status to be decided at the Jan. 16 PEP:
*PS 126, 175 W 166th St. , Bronx , NY (grade truncation: losing the 6th grade)
*The High School for Environmental Studies, 850 10th Avenue , New York , NY (Consolidation of Independence High School with HS for Environmental Studies)
*Re-siting of Innovation Diploma Plus to Building M233, 601 W 183rd Street
, New York , NY ; IDP is being moved away from a site with four other
schools (145 W 84th Street). 601 W 183 currently hosts MS 346 Community Health Academy of the Heights, a grade 6 to 12 school.
Inside Colocation
The public school where I've been teaching for the last 8 years has been targeted for a "colocation" with a corporate-model charter school. Most people, including me, don't know what a colocation looks like, though we've heard bleak stories. I've started this blog to document it as best I can.
Success Academy has a “zero
noise tolerance” policy in their hallways, which they expect our
students and staff to honor. They requested that the playground be
locked after school hours so our students can’t play basketball and
handball, which they claim disrupts their teachers’ planning time.
Meanwhile, every day (weather permitting), Success Academy students
congregate in the courtyard you see here and sing and loudly play. Their
songs and shouts interrupt math and science classes in the many rooms
that overlook the courtyard. Our middle and high school students
regularly complain that it is extremely hard to focus with the noise
from outside.
The charter school recently
demanded a custodian to lock all of the basement exits after school.
Students from the upstairs public schools were still at events on campus
and to leave school they had to climb over a fence, causing an obvious
problem. For safety reasons, you can’t have exits locked. At the
building council meeting, Success Academy proposed to use the exits only
for emergencies. This proposal was voted down. However, they went ahead
and put up the signs you see above! And they continue to advocate for
our exits being locked.
The lights in the back are
the old fluorescents that most DOE schools were equipped with for years,
and are deemed unsafe for prolonged exposure. As each strip dies out,
it gets replaced with the new lights you see in the front. It’s typical
to see classrooms with a combination of old and new lights. The weekend
before school opened this September, the charter school laid out
$400,000 for a haz-mat team to install all new lights in their
classrooms. The lights installed in Success were all taken from storage
where they were scheduled to be installed in other schools over the
coming months.
AC update! When our high
school was located in the basement, each room had one to two working
ACs. We moved upstairs to rooms without ACs that were unbearably hot all
through September. While most of the second floor is not properly wired
for ACs, some rooms are wired and ready. So why weren’t our old ACs
simply moved upstairs? When the charter school’s contractors removed the
basement ACs, they let the units fall to the ground. Every AC but one
is broken! To replace all of the broken ACs will cost $100,000, and SA
is unwilling to pay up.
Success Academy, like our
school, has carpeting at its entrance. These carpets get vacuumed by our
custodial staff, who uses their equipment to clean all the schools
housed in the building. However, the industrial vacuum that custodial
uses is not functioning. SA purchased a new vacuum cleaner and a carpet
shampooer which our custodians must use to regularly clean Success’
carpet. However, despite custodial’s request, SA will not allow the
custodians to bring this vacuum upstairs. As a result, our school’s
carpets are being swept each day with a broom.
For weeks, several teachers
in Global Studies and International Studies have been unable to connect
to the internet. Two teachers said that the computer network repairman
came by to address the problem and discovered that wires had been cut in
the server room to make room for Success Academy, who needs to connect
on a different SSID than the rest of the schools, as the Department of
Education does not allow them to share the DOE internet connection. I
haven’t been able to verify this one way or another. Another teacher
pointed out that these holes were drilled through the gym to run Success
Academy’s internet wires into our building’s server, which they were
not supposed to connect to. The problems do seem to be resolved, but
only after a litany of complaints against S.A.
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