Success Academy families and educators are continuing their fight to create a new SA Lafayette Middle School next year, despite the city’s recent decision to scuttle the plan and scatter about 70 SA fifth-graders to current SA middle schools throughout the borough next year.
Success Academy has been operating a K-4 school at P.S. 25 787 Lafayette Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant for two years and wants to convert the space to serve middle school grades. The conversion would require no additional classroom space, and the co-located school, P.S. 25, would not lose a single square foot.
The new facility would be a feeder middle school taking in fifth-grade students from other Brooklyn SA schools next year including Cobble Hill, Williamsburg, Bed-Stuy 1, Bed-Stuy 2, Crown Heights, Prospect Heights, Fort Greene and Bensonhurst. It then will add new fifth grade students the year after and so on until it fills up to a roughly 450-student 5th thru 8th grade middle school within four years.
The Department of Education (DOE) agreed to the plan, but notified SA Founder and CEO Eva Moskowitz in a June 11 letter that they had to back out of the plan because of a litigation brought from current P.S. 25 parents that wanted to keep their co-location open.
“The Panel for Educational Policy (PEP) unanimously voted to approve the closure of P.S. 25 at a public meeting on February 28, 2018. Success Academy requested additional rooms in K025 for the 2018-2019 school year to serve fifth grade students from Success Academy Cobble Hill. The DOE agreed to this request, for one year only, under the assumption that Success Academy Bed-Stuy 3 would be the only other school operating in K025 during the 2018-2019,” the DOE wrote.
“A lawsuit contesting the closure of P.S. 25 commenced shortly after the vote. As part of the litigation, DOE has been stayed from closing P.S. 25, which has the effect of staying the siting of any other school there. In addition, Success Academy notified families—though not the DOE—that it would close Bed-Stuy 3 at the end of this school year, leaving no PEP approved Success Academy school in the building,” the letter added.
Then at a Sunset Park Town hall last night, Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza reiterated his view that current SA schools have room for 2,000 seats in total throughout the borough and that the fifth-graders hoping to attend the new middle schools would be scattered where these seats were available.
“Success Academy is projected to have over 2,100 seats available for use within a four mile radius of the K025 building in SY 2018-2019 and we have assured them that there’s ample space for all families who want a middle school seat at a Success Academy in Brooklyn to have one. There is capacity to serve all students this fall and we’ll continue working with Success Academy to address their space requests,” said DOE spokesperson Toya Holness.
But SA parents and educators insist there remains more than enough seats at PS 25 for the new middle school the city had promised them. They also argue the new middle school directly addresses one of the city’s thorniest problems – diversity.
SA schools are among the best in the state in testing. The proposed middle school has sizable shares of African American, white, and Hispanic students. Additionally, as a group, SA Lafayette students are among the highest-performing in the entire city; 99% of these students passed the state math exam and 96% passed the English exam.
“It seems so hypocritical for the de Blasio administration to talk about diversity at the specialized high schools, and then to pull the rug out from under Success Academy‘s middle school in Bed-Stuy. We have 70 families signed up for this school, and they’re a mix of incomes and races (63% black, 16% Hispanic, 16% white and 5% multiracial/other),” said SA Spokeswoman Anne Michaud in an email.
