Panel Meets In Prospect Heights
The fate of 26 city schools, including eight Queens high schools, will be determined at 6 p.m. at the Panel for Educational Policy’s Thursday, Apr. 26 meeting at the Prospect Heights Campus in Brooklyn.
According to the city Department of Education (DOE), the meeting will begin with an update from Chancellor Dennis Walcott, followed by a vote on whether to switch 26 schools to a “turnaround” model, in which the schools would be closed and new ones opened in the same locations to take their place.
The schools on this list include Flushing High School, Bryant High School in Woodside, Long Island City High School, Newtown High School in Elmhurst, Grover Cleveland High School in Ridgewood, August Martin High School in Jamaica, Richmond Hill High School and John Adams High School in Ozone Park.
Bushwick Community High School in Brooklyn is also on the list.
The panel will also vote on a pro- posal put forth by Dmytro Fedkowskyj, the Queens Borough President’s representative to the panel, calling for the city to “impose a moratorium on all school ‘turnaround’ proposals until public presentations are made in every borough reflecting on how this method will raise student achievement in lieu of existing models.”
In his resolution, he claims that “it has become clear that NYC DOE’s sudden shift in school improvement strategy may de-stabilize thousands of students in primarily large, comprehensive high schools, and-by mandating the replacement of teachers and principals according to rigid and fundamentally arbitrary criteria without offering ample professional development opportunities-penalize the very people who have made significant improvements in several of the high schools now subject to ‘turnaround.'”
After the vote, the panel will vote to approve contracts with various vendors throughout the city, followed by a public comment period. Residents can sign up to comment starting at 5:30 p.m. at the door and ending at 6:30 p.m. Each speaker will be allowed two minutes to speak.
The Prospect Heights Campus is located at 883 Classon Ave. in Brooklyn, near the Franklin Avenue 2/3/4/5 station. Interpretation services will be provided in Spanish or American Sign Language by reservation only; call 1-212-374-4946 or e-mail panel@schools.nyc.gov to request assistance.
