Lower East Side parents: No room in our schools for charter

Parents at district schools on the Lower East Side that may be forced to share space with an expanding charter school are telling the DOE to look elsewhere.

Girls Prep Charter School has requested building space from the DOE in order to expand its middle school program, which launched this year with one class of fifth-graders. The charter school currently shares a building with P.S. 188 and P.S. 94, a school serving disabled students, and cannot expand further in the space it occupies there.

DOE officials have three ideas for how to accommodate the new middle school, which they plan to present at tomorrow evening’s District 1 Community Education Council meeting.

In one scenario, P.S. 94 would move out of the district, allowing Girls Prep to expand in its current location. To compensate for the loss of P.S. 94, a new program for disabled students would open, sharing space with PS. 184, the Shuang Wen school.

Another suggestion would have the Girls Prep middle school open in a building currently shared by three secondary schools: the School for Global Leaders, the Marta Valle Secondary School and the Lower East Side Preparatory High School. The School for Global Leaders would then move into P.S. 20. This plan would also allow P.S. 94 to expand in the building it shares with P.S. 188 and the Girls Prep elementary school.

The third proposal would have the Girls Prep middle school share a building with P.S. 20.  (The full memo from the Office of Portfolio Planning outlining the three scenarios is below the jump.)

Some parents at schools that could see their space allotments altered under any of these plans are saying that there is no room for change.

Troy Robinson, a parent of three Shuang Wen students and a member of the School Leadership Team, said that he first learned that his school might be affected by the Girls Prep expansion at a DOE walk-through of the school a week ago. During the walk-through, department officials determined that Shuang Wen’s building currently has nine rooms not used as classrooms that could be available for a new school in the building.

But Robinson said that any plan to move a new school into those rooms, currently used as resource rooms, ignores the fact that Shuang Wen’s space needs are also expanding rapidly. The school has added another kindergarten class, he said, and currently has four third grade classes but only two fourth grade sections. Shuang Wen could easily need an additional six or seven classrooms in just a few years, he said.

“It’s not even five years down the road, it’s two years,” he said. “We’re at the point where soon we’re going to come to the DOE ourselves and ask for more space.”

The president of P.S. 20’s parent association, Monica Harris, said that her school also added a kindergarten class this year. She predicted that the addition of another school to the building would cost P.S. 20 resource rooms for their English Language Learners.

Harris, who also serves in a variety of parent leadership roles including the Chancellor’s Parental Advisory Council, emphasized that she does not oppose charter schools. But she said that their spread in District 1 and around the city was hurting district schools.

“It just seems like Christopher Columbus discovering America, but the natives are already here,” she said.

Harris and Robinson are part of a team of parents organizing to respond to the DOE’s scenarios at the CEC meeting tomorrow and at a separate press conference beforehand.  Shuang Wen parents have also launched a website to protest any possible changes.

The DOE is asking for feedback on the recommendation, with a deadline of December 10.  Parents’ responses will be used to create a final proposal and educational impact statement for the affected schools, according to the memo outlining the proposals.

Lisa Donlan, president of the CEC, said that in a district with several expanding schools and no more space, no solution would be perfect. But she said she wants the council’s meeting to move beyond assertions that there is no room to grow. That is true for all Lower East Side schools, she said, so the conversation should be focused on finding the best solution for accommodating growing programs.

“How do we do that in a way that hurts the fewest number of kids for the shortest period of time?” Donlan said.

Julie Chin, the mother of second-grader at Shuang Wen, said that she feels that the DOE’s approach of squeezing more programs into a finite amount of space pits schools against each other unfairly.

“Are you really creating something, or are you just squeezing in and squeezing out?” she asked. “When you open a new school it seems like you would start from scratch. There’s no scratch here, you’re just moving them in and out.”

“It’s almost as if you want the schools to fight with each other, and we don’t want that,” she added.

CEC members and charter school operators in District 1 have repeatedly expressed their desire to avoid the rancorous fights that sometimes characterize charter school sitings in the city.

“I do not want it to be a slug fest; I don’t want us to be divided as a community,” Donlan said. “It’s really about engaging respectfully and constructively around this common problem that the DOE has created for us.”

Here is the memo from the Office of Portfolio Planning outlining the proposed scenarios to accommodate Girls Prep’s middle school expansion:

UPDATE: An earlier version of this post implied that the nine rooms in Shuang Wen listed as “available” by the DOE were not currently used by the school. It has been updated to clarify that the rooms are currently used as resource rooms. The original version of the post also incorrectly attributed a quotation from Julie Chin to Ann Lupardi and has been updated to correct the error.