Admissions Quota Proposed in Brooklyn School Rezoning
Responding to concerns that a plan to redraw two Brooklyn school zoneswould fill an elementary school with affluent white children that currently serves mostly low-income minority children, Education Department staff members said on Monday that students receiving free or reduced-price lunches would be given admissions priority for half the seats in each class at the school.
The department has said it wants to rezone the Dumbo and Vinegar Hill neighborhoods, where apartments sell for millions of dollars, so that children now zoned for Public School 8 in Brooklyn Heights, which is overcrowded and has a mostly white student body, would be zoned for Public School 307, which serves a public-housing project, educates mostly black and Hispanic children and has room to spare.
The proposal to set aside half the school’s seats came during a presentation of the rezoning plan to the community education council covering P.S. 307, the locally elected body responsible for voting on zone lines. Some parents at the school had asked the department for such set-asides to prevent the school population from becoming largely white.
Whether preserving a portion of seats for students with lower incomes ultimately accomplishes those parents’ goal would depend on how many students in the redrawn zone want to attend P.S. 307. Families living in the zone would have priority over students from outside the zone, even those who qualified for subsidized lunch.
The Education Department said its current projections assume that the school would eventually have enough capacity for 30 percent of its students to come from outside the zone. The department also said that, though its plans call for the rezoning to take effect in 2016, it would not put the admissions plan in place until at least the following year, so as not to risk violating the terms of a federal grant.
Faraji Hannah-Jones, co-president of the P.S. 307 parent-teacher association, expressed displeasure with the department’s proposal. (Mr. Hannah-Jones’s wife, Nikole Hannah-Jones, is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine.)
“When we said 50 percent, we didn’t say 50 percent with conditions,” he said. “We said 50 percent, period.”
He added: “We don’t want P.S. 307 to become P.S. 8.”
The rezoning plan has drawn objections from current P.S. 307 parents, as well as parents who would fall into the expanded P.S. 307 zone. The Education Department originally planned to meet with the P.S. 307 council in September, but held off in order to hold a series of meetings with parents, teachers and neighborhood organizations. After hearing the department’s presentation on Monday, the council has 45 days to vote on it. The council will vote only on the proposed new zone lines, not on the idea of setting aside half the school’s seats for low-income families.
The Education Department recently abandoned a similar rezoning proposal on the Upper West Side of Manhattan amid intense controversy. Under that proposal, several blocks were to be moved from a zone serving a Admissions Quota Proposed in Brooklyn School Rezoning - The New York Times: