As schools' closure hearings begin, their students get a way out

Students who attend schools the city is shuttering for poor performance will be allowed to leave, under a new policy that the Department of Education is rolling out at school closure hearings that begin tonight.

For the last decade, the Department of Education has closed schools — more than 150 in all — through a phase-out process in which no new students enter but existing students stay on until they graduate, up to three years after the closure decision. By the time the schools finally close their doors, only barebones staff and program offerings remain for the final students.

“The past policy was sort of like saying, ‘We’re going to get divorced in two years but we have to live together until then.’ It was not tenable,” said Clara Hemphill, who has reported about the impact of closures on schools and students as the editor of Insideschools. “It seems only fair that children should not be trapped in a school that the DOE has deemed to be failing.”

Now, the department will give each student in phaseout schools a list of higher-performing schools to which they can apply as part of the regular transfer process. When the department decides which transfer requests to approve, students from phaseout schools will be assigned first, starting with the neediest students who are looking for a new school.

With the first crack at open seats going to students in closing schools, other students eligible under federal rules to leave their struggling schools could have a harder time getting transfers.

The policy change comes as the Bloomberg administration’s school closure policies come under increasing attack — including from mayoral candidates and legislators. It also is the latest shake up of enrollment rules since State Education Commissioner John King warned the city that its policies had created unacceptably high concentrations of needy students in low-performing schools. At many schools the city has closed, performance had fallen as populations of English language learners, poor students, low-scoring students, students with disabilities, and overage students increased, often after other nearby schools were shuttered.

“How do we ensure where there are concentrations of [high-need students], there are adequate supports?” King said last year. “If not, how do we think about the enrollment system to make sure that students have access to schools that will provide the support that they need?”

Last year, the department committed to distributing midyear enrollees, who tend to be higher-need, across a wider array of high schools. It also pushed selective schools to admit more students with disabilities. Still, the schools it proposed for closure this year have many high-need students.

King has signed off on the new transfer policy, according to Marc Sternberg, the deputy chancellor in charge of school closures and new schools. He said department officials would promote the change at closure hearings that are set to take place at more than two dozen schools over the next two weeks. “We’ve got to do our job to make families know that this is an option,” he said.

Sternberg said the department made the change “because of a moral imperative we feel to provide all families with options.” He said he had been particularly struck by speaking with the mother of a third-grader at P.S. 64 in the South Bronx, where parents have asked the department to intervene in the school’s poor performance.

“This mother and child have been zoned for a school that has not been getting it done and now she will have the opportunity to exercise her right to choose a better option,” Sternberg said.

The transfer option will be extended to all 16,000 students at the 61 schools that are in the process of phasing out or will begin phasing out if this year’s closure proposals are approved next month by the Panel for Educational Policy. (The panel has never rejected a mayoral proposal.) But Sternberg said the department could not guarantee that all transfer requests will be honored.

“We do not — despite our best efforts — have the volume of quality seats that we need,” he said. “We will do our best to accommodate as many of those applicants as we can.”

Students whose transfer requests are not approved or who do not ask to change schools will still get the support they need, Sternberg said. The department groups phaseout schools in support networks that are focused on their unique issues, and officials say performance often ticks upward in schools’ final years, as students and teachers grow more focused.

Jawaun Daniels, a ninth-grader, said he would try to leave Bread and Roses High School, one of the schools with hearings tonight, if its closure is approved — “especially if the teachers get changed,” he said.

But Jaquan Strong, a 10th-grader, said he would want to say, as did Davontay Wigfall, who said he would not want to give up Bread and Roses’s basketball team.

Mary Conway-Spiegel, an advocate who works with students in some schools that are facing closure, said she would want evidence that higher-performing students would not end up leaving most often. She also said she worried whether principals would want to take in high-need students from low-performing schools, or be able to serve those students if they did enroll.

Letting students transfer, Conway-Spiegel said, is a poor substitute for not assigning them to strong schools in the first place. “It seems like it’s too little, too late,” she said.

And Hemphill said she thought the transfer policy would be unlikely to improve conditions in the school or even for students who decamp for other environments.

“It doesn’t solve the problem,” Hemphill said. “The schools will be in a death spiral for a couple of years, there’s still going to be some kids to save, and it still causes lots of disruption for the kids — but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.”