DOE DRASTICALLY INCREASES BUILDING
CAPACITY TO MAKE ROOM FOR INCOMING CHARTER SCHOOL?
When: 3:30 p.m. on March 19
Who: Teachers
and Students of Schomburg Satellite Academy
What: Press Conference
to announce their recent findings that the Department of Education
drastically increased the building’s student capacity.
These figures, which
increased by 47.5% in a single year, will allow “room” for the DOE
to add a new charter school to the building, despite strong opposition
by parents, students, and teachers.
ROADS 2 Charter Invading Satellite Academy: Public Hearing
ROADS II CHARTER SCHOOL
CO-LOCATION PUSHES INTO THE BRONX.
WILL DISRUPT SATELLITE
ACADEMY HIGH SCHOOL
YET NO COMMUNITY INPUT!
Another
Charter School CO-LOCATION looms for the South Bronx and immediately
threatens the very existence of our good innovative public high school,
Satellite Academy (SA).
As usual, the callous Bloomberg's
Department of Education (DOE), without any input of our parents,
students, staff and Bronx communities, moves impose the ROADS II Charter
School into the Bronx Regional High School Building complex where the
three schools already exist (i.e. Bronx Regional, GED Plus, and
Satellite Academy).
Without community input, the DOE arrogantly
claims that ROADS II Charter School will have no educational impact.
This is an insult our community's intelligence! The placement of
hundreds more high needs students will have negative consequences on all
the schools housed in the Bronx Regional High School complex. This is
simple math.
All three high schools already serve a high needs
Latino & Black student population from our least mobilized
neighborhoods. All students in the Bronx Regional Building are transfer
students -- over-age, under-credited and many formerly drop-outs.
ROADS II aims to serve the same population that SA already serves while
at the same time would take away 47% of SA's classroom space!
There
is no need for the offerings of the ROADS II charter school. Satellite
Academy already exists with a proven track record and offers a far more
superior program with an experienced staff that has successfully served
transfer students. SA implements a reputable collaborative project/
portfolio learning process that engages students, and has a
State-approved Waiver to support its non-Regents-tests-based approach.
ROADS
II CHARTER, with the private backing of an outside Wall St. profit
driven firm, Centerbridge Partners, comes from outside the Bronx
community and promises an questionable computer-based method (promising
15 students per class, ROADS II will instead host 25 students per class
where teachers work with small groups while the rest will be placated on
computers) and teach-to-test curriculum with a focus on Regents exams.
ROADS thus will provide more of the same old methods that contributed
to the alienation and pushing out of "transfer" students in the first
place. Test-driven teaching negatively impacts on learning.
By
adding more students into the Bronx Regional building and segregating
these needier students into ROADS II, what results is overcrowding and
heightened tensions between four, instead of three schools that all
already service very high need students. Instead of using available
spaces to promote smaller class sizes, this crowding can result in a
negative climate that will beg for demeaning metal detectors,
surveillance cameras and the police interventions. The co-location of
the ROADS II Charter School is an invitation for unwarranted
competition, disharmony and disruption.
The Bronx Regional campus
is extra-ordinary in that it is one of the few Bronx high school
buildings that to date has no such prison-like scanning, stop &
frisk protocols. Instead has a generally more student friendly and
welcoming atmosphere. In fact, it holds no scanning as a building-wide
policy!
SA classrooms are welcoming with rich learning and
decorated environments (a family school atmosphere rarely seen at the
high school level). Make an unannounced visit to SA and a respectful
low-volume demeanor of the staff will blow you away. The ROADS II
co-location would force the doubling-up of teachers and the dismantling
of such a wonderful model school that all students deserve.
If
more students must be placed here, the public believes that Satellite
Academy should be expanded and this fourth unnecessary competing school,
the private ROADS II CHARTER, should not be accepted. Its impact can
only be negative for all programs at the site.
