CHARTERS' SPACE RACE
Tell Blas to 'make room' as clock ticks
Thousands of Success Academy charter-school parents, students and staff packed a Queens rally Thursday to demand Mayor de Blasio keep his promise to find them a middleschool space before kids are squeezed out.
“We deserve a middle school. The mayor made a promise,” the charter-school network’s founder, Eva Moskowitz, told the throngs assembled in Roy Wilkins Park in St. Albans.
“Do you think when we start kids in kindergarten they don’t grow up?”
Hizzoner, long a vocal opponent of charters, promised in 2017 that he would help students at four Success Academy schools in southeast Queens secure an additional space as they aged into middle school.
The site is supposed to be chosen by the end of 2019 and ready to open next year. But with this school year underway, Moskowitz said Success Academy hasn’t seen so much as a timeline from City Hall.
“We don’t have a lot of time, because there is no Plan B,” Moskowitz told the crowd, clad in bright orange T-shirts reading “Kids Over Politics.”
Without an additional space for middle-schoolers, 227 Queens fifth-graders-to-be will be forced to either commute to Success Academy locations in other boroughs or leave the network altogether, the group said.
The city’s foot-dragging has left parents incensed, with Thursday’s rally coming two weeks after a petition with more thann 11,000 signatures demanding the space landed onn de Blasio’s desk.
“What happened to the promise?”” asked Happiness Montgomery, mom to a Success Academy firstgrader, on Thursday. “It’s not impossible to do. Thehe space is there.” The group contends that there are several public-school buildings in the area with hundreds of empty seats that would suffice in a space-sharing arrangement.
“He can’t manage New York, so how wwas he going to run the nation?” added Montgomery, 44 in a jab at de Blasio’s aborted White House bid. The city Department oof Education insisted that despite itits slow pace, the charter kids will have a place to hang their backpacks in 2020.
“Success Academy will have the middle-school space it needs in Queens next year, either in public space or in private space with rental assistance provided under state law,” said a DOE spokesman.
“We’re working on our standard timeline — we have conversations with both district and charter-school communities in the fall, and then we present school-space proposals after the community has had a chance to give feedback.”
What will it take to get Mayor de Blasio to put ideology and special interests aside so that Queens can get another firstrate middle school?
The Success Academy charter network operates four of the top 10 elementary schools in the borough, but needs to open a second Queens middle school to handle all its rising students come next August.
It’s been asking the Department of Education for more than two years to assign space at one of the many school buildings in Southeastern Queens that has plenty room to spare. But the DOE has stonewalled — to the point where 227 kids may be forced out.
Their parents, and Queens’ wider Success community, this month delivered a petition with 12,000 signatures demanding action. On Thursday, some 4,000 turned out for a rally against the injustice.
So far, City Hall’s only response (to a Post reporter, not to the parents or Success) is a bland “Success Academy will have a middle school in Queens.”
Sorry: These parents need a specific site named now — the DOE process for actually OK’ing it takes months, while the DOE deadline for applying to regular public middle schools is Dec. 2. They need to know if the new Success location is remotely practical for them, and to have some certainty that middle school will open.
“My husband and I are so worried — we will be heartbroken if our son has to leave,” Pershemia Milliard, a Far Rockaway parent, told the crowd.
De Blasio’s just given up (for now) on his drive to junk admissions standards for the city’s top high schools. It’s time for him to end his war on Success, too — and stop trying to crush the hopes of hundreds of lowincome, mostly minority kids.
Do the right thing, Mr. Mayor.