Six New Charter Schools To Open in Brooklyn
At least six new charter schools are expected to open in Brooklyn within the next two years. Park Slope’s Brooklyn Prospect Charter School has already been reported by the Daily News, but applications for four other K – 8 charter schools were approved by SUNY on the same day, all to be managed by Uncommon…
At least six new charter schools are expected to open in Brooklyn within the next two years. Park Slope’s Brooklyn Prospect Charter School has already been reported by the Daily News, but applications for four other K – 8 charter schools were approved by SUNY on the same day, all to be managed by Uncommon Schools. Mini “scholars” at the four schools can expect rigorous instruction from 7:30 a.m. until 4 p.m. Excellence Charter School for Girls, in the Bed-Stuy school district, and Leadership Preparatory East New York are scheduled to open this fall. Leadership Preparatory Flatbush and Brownsville are scheduled to open the following school year. Uncommon Schools also announced plans for their first charter high school in Crown Heights, located at 1485 Pacific Street at Kingston Avenue. Uncommon Schools spokeswoman Megan Zug said the organization purposefully chooses low-income neighborhoods “to close the achievement gap between low-income and high-income students.”
The private and publicly-funded high school designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects would have “four floors of brand new classrooms, science labs, art studios, a library, a technology center, a thousand-seat ‘cafetorium,’ several full-size gymnasiums, and a rooftop playfield,” according to the announcement. Up to 1,600 students from four existing charter middle schools would attend. One of those schools, the Excellence Charter School for Boys in Bed-Stuy (pictured), had SUNY’s third-largest difference from its local district in proficiency on the standardized English Language Arts exam, at 94 percent proficient versus 48 percent. In Math, 100 percent of the students passed versus 72.1 percent in the district, according to a SUNY annual report. Almost all charter schools fared better than their local district counterparts in the report, which detailed some pretty crisis-level proficiency rates. Do you think charter schools the solution to this crisis? What about the long days for elementary and middle school kids? Are they necessary, or should the kids be getting more downtime?
New Brookyln Charter School Recruiting Students for Fall ’09 Opening [Daily News]
Teaching Boys and Girls Separately [NY Times]
“for 1mm you can buy a very nice place in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn Heights or Park Slope — all with excellent public schools.”
Listing of home big enough for family please.
“if you can afford a million dollar home, you are NOT middle class, sorry. Avg household income in NYC is under 50k. Get a grip.”
You need to get a grip. What do you want to call the people who cannot afford a neighborhood with good public schools like park slope or cobble hill, but do not qualify for public assistance. People in these areas are the middle class. You can call them whatever you want, but they cannot afford private schools and shouldn’t have to. They pay their taxes and should get to send their kids to decent public schools.
if you can afford a million dollar home, you are NOT middle class, sorry. Avg household income in NYC is under 50k. Get a grip.
I don’t understand 12:03. You can afford private, you plan on private … what is the problem?
Where’s the park slope school going to be?
for 1mm you can buy a very nice place in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn Heights or Park Slope — all with excellent public schools.
What if you only have 1M and not the 3M you need for a home in an area with a good school? Are you supposed to move into the worst neighborhood so you can get your kid into one of these schools? It’s the middle class people whose kids get screwed.
You can’t say that a school gives preference to kids from the neighborhood and also say it doesn’t exclude kids from others. Yes, the kids from the middle class neighborhoods can apply for the lottery but that’s how they have to try to get in – by chance. So kids from the middle class have a lottery chance at a good education.
11:41-Your “war zone” comment is very disrepectful. “Middle neighborhoods” like Fort Green, PLG, and prospect heights are to some, “Low neighborhoods”.
Like 11:55 said if you have the money to pay for those 1mil + homes, pay another couple of K’s for private schools and stop whining.
“I’ve never understood why parents with school-age kids or soon-to-be-school-age kids would move to an area with bad zoned schools — unless you can afford private. I mean, this was the FIRST thing I looked for in a home.”
We chose a less expensive house precisely for that reason, so we could afford private schools which we prefer no matter what neighborhood we’re in, and very importantly could afford college later. We weren’t going to pay a huge mortgage and a college tuition at the same time. Who wants to do that. Travel abroad is important to us too. If we were house poor we couldn’t do that.
Everybody’s choices are different. Because you were asking 11:55 (and making assumptions and judgements) I felt compelled to share why we made our choices.
You do not have to be poor to attend a charter school. All you have to do is take your kid to the school and get an application. If you live in the school district where the charter school is located you get an automatic preference for a seat. If there are more applicants than there are seats a lottery is held. The lotter still requires the preference to be upheld for school district children and siblings, so its possible that for really popular schools, classes of incoming students will only be filled from those two groups.
CHARTER SCHOOLS ARE PUBLIC SCHOOLS! The only difference is that they are given LESS money than other NYS public schools and they are run by folks that are not part of the DOE. They still must meet all Education Law requirements, testing requirements, etc. And they can and will be shut down if they fail to do so.
Before you start bitching about how this is yet another way white folks are getting screwed, do a little bit of research. There are plenty of folks trying to open new school. Why not ask them to come into your neighborhood, instead of complaining about how little Sophie might have to go to school in “the war zones” of Bed Stuy and Crown Heights. Help them find buildings that could house a school. Work with them to get neighborhood support. Charters are supposed to be driven by local needs and desire. A lot of that is changing, because only large corporations that have the economies of scale can support the tremendous undertaking that is required to get a new charter. Brooklyn Prospect Charter School is going to be located in PS and is bucking that trend and there are plenty of others out there that are trying to do the same thing. Find them, and work with them and stop complaining.