Ignoring the Voices of a Community, a Mayor Seeks to Destroy an Iconic Public School
The following is by Tony Kelso, a parent and a member of Community Education Council in District 6, Upper Manhattan.
So this is the way education works under mayoral control.
At what was billed as a public hearing to determine the fate of P.S. 132, an elementary school in New York City’s Washington Heights, speaker after speaker rose up and passionately voiced opposition to the Department of Education (DOE)’s plan to force the school to share its building with another school that would be created from scratch and opened in the fall. Not a single teacher, community leader, or parent who took the microphone was in favor of the proposal. But it won’t matter. Indeed, there was nobody even there to listen to and address the crowd’s concerns because the DOE had not bothered to send a representative to stand before the assembly and run the meeting. Instead, seated in the first row of the auditorium with their backs to the audience, two young women—one wearing a shiny silver skirt, as though