Mayor Orders Six Failing Schools To Close Their Doors
Mayor Bloomberg is making good on his promise to punish schools for poor report card grades, ordering six schools that scored Ds and Fs to close their doors.
City officials yesterday told parents at six schools in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx the schools will close at the end of the year because of historically dismal academic performance.
The six are just the beginning of a round of closures that is expected to rise to between 14 and 20 this year, school officials said. That number is no higher than the Bloomberg administration's closure rate in past years.
"These are not schools that any of us would want to send our children to," the chief executive of the Education Department's Office of New Schools, Garth Harries, said. "Our judgment in the end is that the best way, the most effective way to really recreate these environments is essentially to start over."
The schools set to close are EBC East New York High School for Public Safety and Law; the Business School for Entrepreneurial Studies; the Tito Puente Education Complex; P.S. 101 in Manhattan, and the middle school at the Academy of Environmental Science Secondary High School in East Harlem.
Elementary schools will shut down altogether, while middle and high schools will phase out gradually.
Two after-school coordinators at one of the closing schools, Environmental Science, criticized the decision. "Sometimes a reorganization can help, but in this particular case they're not thinking ahead to what happens," one coordinator, Judy Jerome.
A seventh-grader at the school, Michelle Lombard, said she likes her school. But a family friend who picked her up yesterday, Cynthia Burjos, said she is not impressed. "I see what kind of homework she gets, and it's not for a seventh-grader," Ms. Burjos said. "They check it correct even if her answers are wrong. They pass her just to pass her."
