De Blasio’s new co-location puzzle
Mayor Bill de Blasio is facing a new battle over school co-locations, a source of consistent controversy for the administration, as it seeks to balance space for the city’s struggling schools with the infrastructure needs of the city’s growing charter school sector.
Since January, the Department of Education’s Panel for Educational Policy (P.E.P.) has approved six proposals that site schools in the same buildings as some of the city’s lowest-performing schools which fall under de Blasio’s “Renewal Schools” program to improve failing schools.
Five of those six proposals have involved growing charter schools moving into buildings with Renewal schools, and two of the six have involved Success Academy, the city’s largest and most controversial charter school network. De Blasio announced the $150 million Renewal program in November, pledging to add academic supports and transform all 94 Renewal schools into community schools with a variety of social services.
Advocates say the space-sharing arrangements between struggling schools and charters put the already-vulnerable Renewal schools at an even greater disadvantage by reducing their space and introducing a new and potentially disruptive dynamic to the building.
“If we all agree that we want [the Renewal program] to work, and I think we do, then co-locating schools is not the way to do it,” said Zakiyah Ansari, the advocacy director of Alliance for Quality Education, an education advocacy group partially backed by teachers’ unions.
But the balancing act puts de Blasio and city schools chancellor Carmen Fariña in yet another bind involving charter schools.
Renewal schools, many of which have been struggling for years, tend to be under-enrolled, creating the extremely rare commodity of empty classrooms, which are of particular interest to charter schools as the sector continues to grow.
It is also now in the city’s financial interest to co-locate as many charters as possible, since a pro-charter state law passed last year requires the city to pay rent in private spaces for charters that cannot be accommodated in public space. That’s an expensive proposition for the city; Chalkbeat recently reported that the city could pay up to $10 million for charter school rent this year.
The administration’s bind has not quelled dissent from from advocates and parents, whose frustration came to a head over a proposed co-location of grades three through five of a Success Academy into a Bronx building housing three Renewal schools. That proposal narrowly passed the P.E.P. on Wednesday night.
The plan is an extreme example of the concerns over siting struggling schools alongside charters: All three schools in the building in question are both middle schools and Renewal schools, and about a quarter of students at two of the schools are in temporary housing. On the other side, the Success network boasts some of the highest standardized exam scores in the entire state.
Parents from the three schools, Urban Science Academy, New Millennium Business Academy, and Arturo Toscanini Junior High School, held a rally protesting the proposal last week, arguing that their children’s schools would be further jeopardized by Success’ presence.
“It’s a Renewal school—they are trying to grow and now they won’t because [the D.O.E.] is taking classes away,” Susana Arroyo, whose daughter attends New Millennium, said in an interview on Thursday.
"They are bringing third graders into our middle school," she said, adding, "These are De Blasio's new co-location puzzle | Capital New York:
