by Sharon Otterman and Jennifer Medina
Jan. 27, 2010
The New York TimesIn a contentious meeting that drew more than eight hours of public testimony, a city board voted early Wednesday morning to close 19 schools for poor performance, despite the protests from hundreds of observers who repeatedly drowned out the meeting with cheers, shouts and boos.
Protests showed up early at the hearing to express support for their children's schools.
More than 300 speakers addressed the board, the Panel for Educational Policy, beginning at 6 p.m. Tuesday at Brooklyn Technical High School in Fort Greene. By the time the panel began voting at 2:40 a.m. they had heard a litany of complaints from hundreds of parents, students, teachers and administrators and just a handful of speakers who said they supported closing the schools.
But as expected, the panel overwhelmingly approved the closures recommended by the Education Department. The votes to close the schools fell along political lines, with the appointees of the Manhattan, Queens, Bronx and Brooklyn borough presidents voting against the closings while each of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s appointees approved them without question. Nearly every school shutdown was approved on a 9 to 4 vote, with the representative for the Staten Island borough president mostly siding with the mayor’s appointees, and the audience shouting “shame on you” and “disgrace.”
The panel has been widely criticized as a rubber-stamp to the Bloomberg administration and has largely held an obscure role in education policy. But under new laws governing the mayor’s control of the school system, the panel was required to make the final approval of closures of low performing schools, a centerpiece of the mayor and Chancellor Joel I. Klein’s effort to overhaul the school system.
Read more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/nyregion/28closings.htmlWhen a school is struggling, the answer is improvement, not the wrecking ball! Clearly the parents really believe in change.
One of the schools that might be closed is Jamaica High School, alma mater of
MICHAEL SAVAGE, hate radio drone and writer for woo.