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Thursday, July 1, 2010

City plans to open new schools despite ruling’s unclear impact | GothamSchools

City plans to open new schools despite ruling’s unclear impact | GothamSchools

City plans to open new schools despite ruling’s unclear impact

The city has no plans to fight an appellate court ruling that will keep open 19 schools marked for closure, Chancellor Joel Klein said today. But it does plan to open new schools in the same buildings.
That’s despite the fact that the same closure proposals that judges deemed inadequate were also used to justify opening 17 new schools in those buildings.
Whenever the city wants to shut down a school or make several schools share the same building space, state law requires city officials to prepare “educational impact statements” (or EIS’s) that examine how the changes will affect students and the surrounding community. The EIS’s that the citywide school board approved in January included, in the same documents, both the plans to close the 19 schools and replace many of them starting next year.
Today, five appellate court judges unanimously ordered the city to reissue those EIS’s with more detail than what