Help Save A School From Overcrowding

On my way home from work, I saw a group of protesters – penned in I should add – who were exercising their 1st Amendment rights of assembly and free speech to protest an act of brilliance by NYC Chancellor Joel Klein.  What struck me is the hands-on lesson in civics and the Constitution.  I saw grade schoolers learning first-hand how to stand up for their rights.  I have posted the text of the school’s homepage for review.  Any school that is willing to do this gets my vote.  Screw textbooks and the Regents exam.  What I saw was a living, breathing history/civics class.

Of course, I still disagree with the b.s. way that protesters are put in pens nowadays.  Safety my ass.  It’s demeaning and anathema to the intent of the framers of the Constitution.  This 21st century practice needs to stop.  Free speech and free assembly should be free.

From www.savethenest.org

Evidently, Chancellor Joel Klein’s chose to house an experimental charter school into one of the city’s public school buildings which already had a school in it. Klein, who is the honoree of the event, has demonstrated no concrete plan for how the two schools can share already occupied space, but has instead insisted that NEST+m “figure it out.”

NEST+m (New Explorations into Science, Techniology and Math), now in its fifth year, is New York City’s first and only K-12 public school, with its students achieving perfect or near perfect scores on every standardized test at every grade level* and a 100 percent graduation rate in its high school, which subsequently has had students admitted to Columbia, UPenn, Wesleyan, Yale and other outstanding post-secondary schools.

The rally to defend the educational excellence enjoyed by NEST+m’s extraordinarily diverse student population, which speaks 29 different languages and represents nearly every ethnic group in New York City will be held on Wednesday, May 24th at 5:30 pm. The PTA of NEST+m has filed a lawsuit against the NYS Board of Regents and the Department of Education (DOE) in response to Chancellor Klein’s move to squeeze the educationally unsound Ross Global Academy Charter School into NEST+m’s already crowded public school building.

The DOE’s plan to invade NEST+m’s space, which it hatched in concert with the Hamptons-based Ross Institute and New York University, has been in the works for two years. NEST+m only learned of it on March 28th due to a leak to the NEST+m Parent-Teacher Association. Since then NEST+m representatives, with the support of State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, have met with Chancellor Klein, and DOE officials and, using the actual 2006-07 NEST+m enrollment figures and architectural diagrams, demonstrated that NEST+m – and any incoming school – would be seriously compromised by cramming the two into the building.

Nest+m administrators have argued that, in order to accommodate the charter school’s needs as “calculated” by the DOE, NEST+m’s high school would have to eliminate its honors, Regents, language and Advanced Placement classes, as well as electives and SAT prep, while increasing its class size from 20 to 35. The college preparatory school’s students would not be left with a skeletal program of core classes – rather they would be left lacking the courses required for admission to the sort of post-secondary schools for which they came to NEST+m to ready themselves. Klein and Harries, meanwhile, have insisted that this move will not adversely affect NEST+m, yet how can a college preparatory high school exist if it can’t offer the very classes that will ensure its students consideration for college placement?

Not only will the Ross thereby adversely affect NEST+m, but it will do so while “double dipping” into public funds. Ross claims in its Charter application that it is able to cap its class size at 20 (rather than 24) as a result of the savings garnered at the rate of $1.00 per year in rent it intends to pay the DOE for use of NEST+m’s physical plant, facilities, custodians, electricity, etc. as well as the $600,000 worth of facility renovations which NEST+m parents paid for, while Ross still collects funds from the Charter School Payments Act intended to cover these services. The Charter application also indicates that Ross is actually able to pay for a market rate lease, but that this will require increasing class size to 24 – a hardship indeed, while their unwillingness to compromise eliminates critical classes for our high school and pushes NEST+m’s class size to 35.

Meanwhile, NEST+m parents and students continue to urge their community and its leaders to take action to convince the Ross Global Academy Charter School that it would be best for all concerned if Ross were able to incubate in a place where it can do just that – incubate, not overtake. After all, how can a “Global” school make its very first act a Colonial takeover? How does one fit that into the curriculum?