Legislators, civic leaders and education officials gathered outside Queens Borough Hall this week to call on the city to halt all plans to co-locate schools. Anna Gustafson/The Forum Newsgroup
Final attempts by Mayor Bloomberg’s administration to push through last-minute co-locations in Queens schools before he leaves office come January will wreak havoc on the borough’s educational system that has been cracking after years of policies focused on standardized testing and closing large neighborhood high schools, borough legislators and educational leaders said Tuesday.
Gathering outside Queens Borough Hall Tuesday afternoon, legislators from all corners of the borough – as well as representatives of various Community Education Councils and civic leaders – denounced the city Department of Education’s proposal to green-light 23 co-locations for Queens schools. Additionally, those at Tuesday’s press conference called on Bloomberg and the DOE to halt all co-locations until the new mayor’s administration has come into power.
“This is an opportunity for the Department of Education to usurp the next administration,” said Councilman Leroy Comrie (D-St. Albans), who organized Tuesday’s event. “They want to make it next to impossible for the next administration to clean their mess up.”
Of the 23 co-locations proposed for Queens, the city Panel for Educational Policy – a decision-making board often referred to as a rubber stamp for Bloomberg because it is dominated by mayoral appointees – will vote on seven of the co-locations at its Oct. 30 meeting. One of the plans for South Queens’ District 27 would co-locate a new district high school, known as 27Q314, which would serve students in grades nine through 12, in building Q226, located at 121-10 Rockaway Blvd. beginning in the 2014-15 school year. The high school would be co-located with the existing schools, JHS 226, a middle school with students in sixth- through eighth-grades, and JHS 297, a new middle school that opened in September 2013 and will ultimately serve pupils in sixth- through eighth-grades when it reaches capacity.
The DOE defended its co-location policy, which results in two or more schools being set up in the same physical building, saying that the new schools that have opened in Queens – and citywide – have been successful. According to the DOE, graduation rates for new schools in Queens are 83.5 percent – an increase over the borough-wide average of 67.6 percent.
“A decade ago, we inherited a broken school system that, for decades, failed to graduate even half of its students,” DOE spokesman Harry Hartfield said. “Since then, we’ve delivered historic highs in graduation rates, lowered drop-out rates by half, and given parents more school options than ever before in city history. A once broken system has been transformed with new, high-performing schools – and those additional options have delivered extraordinary outcomes for children. Our strategy has worked, and with these proposed new schools in Queens, that progress will continue.”
City Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott – a Cambria Heights resident and Francis Lewis High School alumnus – recently testified before the City Council’s Education Committee that by housing two or more small schools inside a single building, the city is able to be more inventive. For example, he said they can create more niche schools that focus on specific areas of interest, such as architecture or television production.
“Instead of focusing on, for example, 3,000 students, a principal can now focus on 300,” Walcott said.
However, every legislator, education representative and civic leader who spoke Tuesday said the co-locations have resulted in disastrously unequal scenarios in which the DOE favors students in the new, small schools and gives few resources to pupils and teachers in the school that was originally housed in the building. A number of legislators cited Jamaica High School as an example. After the city decided to close the century-old Jamaica High School, it started operating four smaller schools in it – and, elected officials said, purposely slashed its budget so Jamaica High School could no longer offer any honors or advanced placement courses.
“At Jamaica High School, they shut out 1,200 children who wanted to learn but weren’t given the tools to learn,” Councilwoman Karen Koslowitz (D-Forest Hills) said at Tuesday’s press conference.
Former Assemblyman Rory Lancman, a Democratic candidate for term-limited Councilman Jim Gennaro’s (D-Fresh Meadows) seat representing the 24th Council District, said the co-location process at Jamaica High School resulted in students being treated like “second-class citizens.”
Deputy Borough President Barry Grodenchik said the smaller schools also add mass layers of bureaucracy, with each small school having a principal, assistant principals and other layers of managerial officials.
Melinda Katz, the Democratic candidate for Queens borough president, stressed that it was unfair of the Bloomberg administration to make sweeping last-minute changes that could not be easily undone by the next mayor.
“I’m not an advocate for co-location, but if you’re a believer in these policies, you can wait two and a half months,” Katz said.
The co-locations are, Councilman Mark Weprin (D-Oakland Gardens said, representative of Bloomberg’s policies that have landed the mayor in hot water with many of the borough’s legislators – and parent organizations.
“They are frustrated by the Bloomberg administration and what they’ve done to our public schools – how they’ve limited learning by focusing on standardized tests,” said Weprin, a Jamaica High School graduate who has three children in the public school system.
“For them to saddle us with these schools that won’t help our students is ridiculous,” Weprin said in reference to the co-located institutions.
By Anna Gustafson
