One Queens public school faces a permanent summer vacation after finding itself on the Department of Education’s (DOE) list of schools slated for closure.
P.S. 215 Lucretia Mott in Far Rockaway received an “F” on the most recent progress report released in September. The school is joined by 18 other schools around the city that may shut their doors for good.
“This announcement represents another stunning failure of DOE management. Rather than doing the hard work of helping struggling schools, the DOE tries to close them, making sure that the hardest-to-educate kids end up concentrated in the next school on the closure list,” said United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew. “It’s playing three-card Monte with children’s lives and education. It’s wrong, and if our attorneys find that the DOE is violating state law in this process, we’ll be seeing them in court.”
The final decision will be made by a Panel for Educational Policy vote in February.
Three other Queens schools — Law, Government and Community Service High School, P.S. 181 and Peninsula Preparatory Academy — were on the original DOE list of 47 schools at risk of closing.
Schools targeted for closure will be phased out and replaced, not closed down completely.
