Plenty of Discord Over John Jay Expansion Plan
Yesterday the Brooklyn Paper wrote about the proposed expansion of Park Slope’s John Jay High School to include Manhattan’s Millennium School. And last night John Jay students protested the expansion prior to a public hearing with the Department of Ed. The school, which the Brooklyn Paper notes is mainly comprised of minority students outside of…
Yesterday the Brooklyn Paper wrote about the proposed expansion of Park Slope’s John Jay High School to include Manhattan’s Millennium School. And last night John Jay students protested the expansion prior to a public hearing with the Department of Ed. The school, which the Brooklyn Paper notes is mainly comprised of minority students outside of the neighborhood, asked for more resources and funding for the three schools already at John Jay, instead of supporting a new, fourth school (which is a largely white college prep school). Before the public hearing began students were chanting, “How do you spell racist? DOE” and “Integrate don’t segregate.” Parents, faculty, and Assemblyman Jim Brennan stressed the need for more resources, with the idea that improving the existing schools will increase enrollment from within the neighborhood. Student speakers were more blunt. One student called the school’s metal detectors, which John Jay has previously asked the DOE to remove, “a racist ritual” that discourages any Park Slope kid from attending John Jay. Another student thought the consistent lack of funding was a message that “Our school isn’t good enough for Park Slope residents,” while another said, “While Park Slope may enjoy the representation of a desirable place to live and work, that representation has never been expanded to our school.” The policy vote on whether Millennium Brooklyn will move in is scheduled for Wednesday, January 19th.
@GGG – Would you please explain how having Millennium at JJHS hurt your kids? That’s what I don’t understand – the DOE isn’t stripping your budget for the new school is it? If the 69% graduation rate for your school or one of the other schools in JJHS is true – do you expect that rate to worsen, and if so, how come?
Please be honest – is it just that you and your kids don’t want to have to compete with a potentially higher performing school that gets to select it’s students? I understand why that would be so, it would certainly be bruising to anyone’s ego to have a newcomer show up in your zone and start showing you up. Would the effect of that potential embarrassment effect your kid’s grades?
@Famous – Really you think selective schools should be done away with and all students fully integrated? How would that work?
Would every school in the city have to follow the curriculum of whichever school holds NYC’s highest performance standards (NEST, Stuyvesant, etc?), regardless of the student’s abilities?
Or would every school’s curriculum be lowered to that of NYC’s lowest ranked school?
Exactly which group of kids gets sacrificed for the greater good in your scenario – the geeky Gifted kids or the class clowns?
There is a lot of painting with a broad brush going on on both sides. Many people don’t seem to get that the three schools in the building are not all the same when it comes to student performance. There is also a suspension school that should never have been put in the building (right when the other schools were trying to attract local families) and now really needs to go. SSR has been getting some justifiably positive attention lately, and is the only one of the three that will be allowed to keep its middle school in the proposal.
However, as promising as SSR is, it still has a way to go before a larger number of higher-testing kids, from the neighborhood or not, will attend. The community and the addition of Millennium can be utilized to make this happen – it makes no sense to me that at the rallies, the point seemed to be to build even greater resentment among the students towards the community and towards a school they will be most likely sharing space with.
Right now the the three schools, SSR especially, have everyone’s ear. It would help if those speaking out for the JJ schools recognized the fact that no, there simply aren’t enough selective high schools out there for kids who are eligible – straight A kids can’t count on getting the schools of their choice, and B average kids may as well forget it entirely. Several of the most popular high school choices severely restrict the number of Brooklyn kids who attend, and there is no Brooklyn counterpart to those schools. And the person who said that any kid from the Slope (or district 15) with good grades can just go to private school…. well.
A school like Millennium in Brooklyn would be nothing but a plus, and calling parents “racist” for wanting it as a neighborhood option does not help your case. And as someone else said – if you take a look at MS 447 (the new M2 principal’s current school), it is not the lily white enclave that JJ supporters are envisioning.
People such as Heather and FSRQ who are interested in the funding of NYC schools should know that the Galaxy allocations and per pupil funding rates for each school are available in each school’s DoE portal in the stats and budget section. SCHOOLS ARE NOT ALL FUNDED EQUALLY. The Mayor’s fare school funding formula is not always applied equally and is incredibly complex to begin with. The current average per pupil rate in NYC is 17.9k and the rate at the Secondary School for Research (SSR) is 15.8k. The vast amount of money being proposed for Millennium Brooklyn is written in the proposal on the DoE’s web sight. If the per-pupil allocation proposed for Millennium were equitably applied to Research it would result in a more than 20% increase to its budget.
As far as quality goes, I agree that all parents and students should expect graduation and college should they desire it, and that 69% is a graduation rate that needs improvement. You should know that the city wide average is 63% according to the Mayor last march. http://schools.nyc.gov/Offices/mediarelations/NewsandSpeeches/2009-2010/09gradrates030910.htm
You should also know that the graduation rate at SSR in 2004 when the current Research administration took over was 35%, quite a turn around and not at all a failure. Please read Research’s most recent quality review to see that the quality of instruction and expectations are considered to be excellent. http://schools.nyc.gov/OA/SchoolReports/2009-10/Quality_Review_2010_K464.pdf
You should also note that the ELA and Social Studies departments are both being used as models for instruction with in the network. SSR’s most recent Progress Report does show areas that need improvement, but in many respects SSR is ahead of its peer schools, schools serving similar populations.
The Secondary School for Research is not “going along, sucking, business-as-usualâ€
The Principal and her constituency have been struggling to create a school to be proud of and arguing as loudly as they can for funding, the removal of scanning and equitable treatment for quite some time. It is nice to know that the media and at least some in the neighborhood are finally aware.
The Park Slope kids are going to be fine. If their parents want them to go to selective schools far away from all the “losers,” they can pay to send their kids to private schools.
Personally, I don’t think there should be “selective” public schools. Every public school needs to be integrated in every way. It isn’t fair to “dump” the neediest kids into some schools and then blame those schools for terrible graduation rates and test scores, while applauding the graduation rates and test scores of the “selective school” next door (or, as is so often the case now, in the same building).
I think Heather hit the nail on the head in the beginning of this discussion when she wrote, “I think there is increased interest in sending kids to local schools… but that some of that interest is being waylaid by new charters, expansions of existing charters, lottery schools, etc.” When it comes to their kids, progressives’ politics go out the window. They want what they want when they want it and can’t wait or work for the slow change that comes from the bottom up and results in schools like 261. Fast forward to years from now when unzoned, lottery, and charter schools are the only “choices” in Brooklyn. Bloomberg has successfully dissolved the teachers unions and can fire teachers based on test scores. Every advantaged child attends a “progressive” school that doesn’t focus on test scores (they don’t have to), while the disadvantaged attend military style charters that do nothing but test prep to stay alive.
The fact is that it doesn’t matter how many, how lucid, how convincing the opposition to Millennium, Klein and now Black want kids who test well in their system because all anyone cares about now is “data” and having these advantaged kids in public schools improves their stats.
fsrq makes some excellent points here, the most striking being this: Yeah, where were the parental organizing and protest when the school(s) were just going along, sucking, business-as-usual? If this activates current JJ parents to demand better discipline, higher academic standards, and improved infrastructure, that would be great…but they seem to have a history acceptance for a school that egregiously fails 1/3 of its students at the most fundamental metric (a diploma).
fsrg,
Just as a point of fact, the teachers and students of John Jay have been protesting for the past year. It just seems that they are getting more attention (and more numerous) now that Millennium is on the table.
I am a teacher in the building. First and foremost, I invite everyone to visit the schools in the building. In fact, I invite you to visit different classrooms in different schools across the City, and then visit the schools in the building. So many of you seem to speak with so little actual classroom experience. Yet you seem willing to make blanket statements about our students, our claims, and what’s best for us. It doesn’t take much to become informed, and it’s really not hard to visit – inside the classroom. Because you cannot make such broad judgments about the three schools that exist in the building without stepping inside the CLASSROOMS.
Our budgets have been in peril for many years, yes. But this is by far the first time we have taken action. I again invite you to communicate with the administrators of the building to find out that in fact, Fair Student Funding is anything BUT fair. Not all schools are funded equally. Know your facts before you argue otherwise.
We do not need Park Slope students in order to be a “good” school. We invite Park Slope students to come to our schools. We invite ALL students to come to our schools. We have been communicating with our students about how to receive students of the new school should the proposal be voted into place: We have been sending a message of unity – in fact that was one of the chants at the rally, and it came up several times in the comments of teachers at last night’s meeting.
We are PUBLIC educators, and we believe strongly in teaching the students we have. Everyone is entitled to a good education and that is what we try to provide. We aim to teach ALL of our students: students with learning disabilities, language limitations, poor students, emotional issues – everyone. Can it be a challenge? Sure. But we are PUBLIC school teachers. We are not saving ourselves for elite students.
I have never claimed to know what it takes to be a lawyer, a doctor, a publicist, or any other kind of professional. It has been suggested above that I am a LOSER. That I am failing at my job. Most of the professionals that I work with stress so hard over how to be better at the work that we do. How demoralizing to see that so many of you – without ever stepping foot into my classroom – feel comfortable confirming my greatest fears.
We simply feel that the fourth school being put into our building is not being done to benefit our students.
Just so you all know – there are some positive benefits of co-location:
1 – the running and maintenance of a whole school is costly, and when 2 or 3 schools are housed in the same building and share these hefty costs it has a very positive impact on all of their budgets – janitors, guards, supplies – all the full and part time, union positions, plus substantial materials, that can cost a single school hundreds of thousands out of their budgets are significantly decreased by sharing the costs.
2 – also, smaller schools have a better student retention rate and much better track records with early intervention for any number of issues that can arise for a student, simply because the administration knows all their kids and therefore knows when something is wrong and has the ability to address it more quickly and effectively.
3 – as the assistant principle of a highly successful manhattan alternative school (that is co-located in a building with 2 other schools) told me, “we here all accept the shared space and appreciate that it keeps the DOE from trying to make us expand to fill all the seats in the building – which, like all the older NY buildings, is a far higher number of seats than at any school I would want to work at, since I believe in small schools.”
Heres my take – everyone but especially the local community should be happy that a selective school is opening – cause this will at least help put some kids on a path to success; the people who are in JJ H.S. now should also be happy that a new opportunity is opening (I am sure there are some students who could test in), JJ H.S. parents/teachers/students and admin should be raving mad and protesting like crazy if they are getting an unequal funding allocation (as compared to all schools – not just one that happens to be in the building), EVERYONE should be raving mad that virtually every student is not getting at least a Regents H.S diploma after 13 years in our public schools.
The one thing I cant tell you is exactly who everyone should be mad at (i.e. who is responsible for all this failure) but i know it isnt as simple as a funding formula, racial discrimination or any of the other obvious things people instinctively love to scream about.