Success Charter School Meets Opposition
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By Karl Benson
Opponents and supporters of a new charter school that the city wants to locate in the same building as Middle School 50 clashed last month at an emotional public hearing.
In December, the Department of Education announced plans to move Young Writers Academy, a high school that currently shares space with JHS 50, to East New York. Young Writers would be replaced in the building with Success Academy Williamsburg, an elementary school that would eventually expand to also include a middle school.
The plan awaits the approval of the Panel for Educational Policy, a body mostly appointed by Mayor Bloomberg, at the panel’s March meeting.
The school is part of the well-known citywide network of charter schools run by Eva Moskowitz, the former chair of the City Council’s Education Committee and a well-known figure of the charter school movement.
The school will start out with 190 seats for Kindergarten and 1st grade next year, and add an additional grade each year. Plans call for the school to expand eventually to 8th grade, although the JHS 50 building would not be able to accommodate the full expansion.
The announcement has not gone over well with many community members. A large coalition of Southside stakeholders – including community organizations El Puente and Los Sures, the District 14 Community Education Council, and politicians like Councilwoman Diana Reyna and Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez – have expressed opposition to the school.
These opponents – who have coalesced into a group called the Southside Community Schools Coalition – point to the fact that there are already four elementary schools on the Southside within walking distance of the school, all of which have low enrollment. (Those schools are PS 16, PS 17, PS 19, and PS 84.) Meanwhile, there is a dearth of high performing high schools in District 14.
“When it comes to high school, a majority of kids leave the district,” Tesa Wilson, President of the District 14 CEC, told Greenline last month. “To take away a high school and give us another elementary school defies logic.”
But what many community leaders find more objectionable is Success Acadmy’s marketing campaign, which they say disproportionally targets Northside residents instead of Southside residents. They point to the blanketing of ads of the Bedford Avenue L train station – in the mostly white, middle class Northside – while no other area subway stations have seen any.
“It’s clear that they’re targeting their advertisements to basically the white, upper-middle class community,” said Luis Garden Acosta, founder and President of the El Puente community organization.
“They didn’t place their ads on the J-line, which is what our community uses. If you’re really as interested, as they purport to be, in reaching people of color, then you would naturally think that if you’re gonna spend thousands and thousands of dollars in subway stations, you’d do it in the ones that people of color use. Instead, they did the exact opposite,” he added.
Days before last month’s meeting, unknown opponents of the school vandalized the Bedford Avenue station ads by placing stickers on the ads in the shape of comic-book speech bubbles. The children pictured in the ads were depicted as saying disparaging things about the school, including remarking on its alleged emphasis on testing and pointing out its $1.6 million marketing budget.
A Brooklyn Paper article about the signs spawned an extended and often contentious comment thread that turned out to be a preview of a community meeting the next night. The themes on display in the comment thread resurfaced the next night at the meeting, in the JHS 50 auditorium: Opponents of Success Academy claimed that District 14 schools need more support instead of having resources go to a charter school. Supporters of Success Academy argued that the status quo of area schools is not working, and that a charter school would give parents choice.
These tensions quickly ignited before the meeting even started. A press conference started by supporters of the school was interrupted by opponents, and then devolved into a shouting match between both sides.
Inside the auditorium, community residents railed against what many depicted as the Department of Education’s attempt to force the charter school into a neighborhood whose leaders do not want one.
“Such a decision, without the proactive support of the community, is more regrettable, and flies in the face of our community’s unique and successful history of creating and leading excellent centers for learning and development,” said Frances Lucerna, Principal of El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice, and Executive Director of the El Puente Community Organization.
Added local Councilwoman Diana Reyna, who opposes the school, “The decision by the Department of Education to support Success Charter further perpetuates social inequalities that our community has struggled with for decades.”
But supporters said that the school is good potential alternative considering the chronically low test scores of the four nearby public schools.
“My choice is to put them in a failing, non-performing school or move to the suburbs,” said Henry Mazurek, a Williamsburg resident with a young child who will soon attend school.
“But our society is so class-segregated, and I want to put my kids in schools where there are Latinos, and African-American kids. It’s part of the great diversity of this neighborhood.”
Added Paula Notari, another local parent, “There’s an inherent bias in public schools that says that poor children can’t learn. Well, that’s not true of the Success schools – those kids are kicking butt.”
Success Academy currently runs nine charter schools in the city, with 3,500 students. Students are selected on the basis of a lottery; in the case of the proposed Success Academy Williamsburg, preference will be given to residents of District 14. Additionally, 20 percent of the seats will be reserved for English Language Learners.
Test scores for Success Academy students routinely far exceed citywide averages. Last year, 95 percent of Success Academy students passed the state math exam, and 81 percent passed the state English exam, compared to a respective 62 and 51 percent of citywide students.
kbenson @ February 4, 2012
Recent Incidents Against Women Alarm Residents
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Reported Rapes Triple in North Bk in 2011
By Stacy Manuel
A tripling of reported rapes from 2010 to 2011, along with two violent incidents against women on January 1 of this year, have stoked fears about safety on local streets.
At 4 AM on January 1, a woman who was walking from the L train along Maspeth Avenue near Kingsland was dragged into an open parking garage by a man, who then forced her to perform a sex act.
The suspect in this case is between the ages of 20 and 25, standing 5-foot-8 and weighing 150 pounds, with a thin build, police said.
That night, a woman entering her building on Withers Street between Humboldt and Woodpoint was struck in the head with a stick by a man who then tried to take her pocketbook. A struggle ensued, and eventually, the suspect ran away.
Cops described the incident as an attempted mugging, but Tish Cianciotta of the Concerned Citizen of Withers Street said, “We feel it was more than an assault. We feel it was probably a sexual assault.”
She credited a man named Anthony, who heard the woman screaming and ran out to scare away the perpetrator.
These incidents against women followed a troubling trend in 2011, when reported rapes nearly tripled in North Brooklyn’s 90th and 94th Precincts. There were a combined 26 reported rapes in 2011 in these precincts, compared to nine the previous year.
However, in both precincts, overall crime was down slightly in 2011 from 2010.
Public concern about these incidents compelled the 90th and 94th precincts to host a joint meeting last month at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church (N. 8th and Havemeyer).
Cianciotta reflected the widespread community sentiment when she said, “We don’t want any more rapes, we don’t want to see any more people getting hurt, we’d like to see the neighborhood have a lot more security, and that’s why we’re here.”
In particular, the focus of the meeting was the area east of Graham Avenue and north of Metropolitan. That area is home to a men’s homeless shelter, and several blocks are dimly lit, including a large stretch of Maspeth around Kingsland, where the January 1 sexual assault took place.
“People always say the homeless shelter. Then they say it’s coming from [the] Cooper Park houses. We can’t distinguish who these people are, but we need more protection,” said Cianciotta.
District Leader Lincoln Restler attended the meeting. He said that, “Nothing destabilizes a community or our own sense of security quite like a sexual assault.”
He encouraged community residents to reach out to him about dimly lit blocks so that he can work with the Department of Transportation on procuring street lights.
In October 2011, community concern about this area compelled residents to hold a meeting, teaming up with the local community organization, St. Nicks Alliance. In a particularly horrific incident at the end of June, a teenaged girl was attacked by a mob of people directly in front of the Olive Park condo building on Olive and Maspeth.
“I was on my balcony. I just saw her getting kicked and punched. I tried to pick her up and I got chased back into the condo,” said Michael Arcati, a resident of the Olive Park condo, in a November interview with Greenline.
Arcati said cops from the 94th Precinct eventually arrived, but when he called to follow up the next day, neither the 94th or 90th had any record of the incident.
This incident re-ignited concerns about how cops respond to calls along the border between the 90th and the 94th Precincts (the border is Maspeth Avenue). Making things more confusing is the fact that the Cooper Park Houses (94th) and Cooper Park (90th) are in separate precincts.
At last month’s meeting, Deputy Inspector Terrence Hurston addressed these concerns.
“Our cops work on the same radio frequency. Things that happen on the border, we respond to jointly,” he said.
Arcati’s experience with the missing police report seems to point to an issue that has drawn scrutiny in recent weeks: The inconsistency with which city cops file formal complaints. Many have alleged that there is a systematic disincentive to file reports because of pressure to keep crime statistics low.
In January, after several published articles on the subject, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly issued a memo spelling out a protocol for officers to take complaints. The memo itself came under scrutiny.
“Kelly’s memo underscores the giant hole in the cornerstone of supposed NYPD successes in lowering crime over the past decade,” wrote Leonard Levitt, a retired Newsday police reporter who writes about the NYPD on his blog, NYPDConfidential.com.
“It indicates that for the past eight years Kelly has refused to tackle a widespread, systemic problem, one that some say he himself encouraged by promoting only commanders who produced low crime statistics.”
Police spokesman Paul Browne characterized the memo as a routine operational order.
“We use operations to periodically remind personnel of proper procedures,” Browne told the Daily News.
kbenson @ February 4, 2012
City Council Aims to Make HPD More Transparent
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Amplified Locally by Mysterious GP Hospital Decision
By Karl Benson
The City Council is considering a bill that would greatly increase transparency on affordable housing projects that use public financing.
Under the bill, the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) would be required to make certain information public about projects that receive a city subsidy of more than $100,000, thereby affecting almost all affordable housing development and rehabilitation projects in the city.
Among the information HPD would have to make public are the manner in which developers for projects are selected, if selected developers are the high bidder or not, and if the chosen developer has a history of violations.
This law resonates among local affordable housing advocates because of the city’s mysterious decision in 2010 to award site control of a large parcel of the former Greenpoint Hospital campus to a for-profit developer. In so doing, they bypassed a proposal put together by a non-profit coalition that had the unanimous support of Community Board 1.
It was later revealed that the city had taken the unprecedented and unlawful step of “coaching” the private developer’s application in the middle of the process to improve it sufficiently. After that, it was revealed that the private developer – TNS/Great American – had cheated its workers out of fair pay on other development projects.
The bill also follows the October arrest of HPD Assistant Commissioner Wendell Walters, who is alleged to have accepted $600,000 bribes from developers in exchange for HPD contracts.
kbenson @ February 4, 2012
St. Nicks Workforce Development Trains NYCHA Residents for Jobs for the Future
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By Karl Benson
At a moving ceremony last month that celebrated the potential people have if only given a chance, 23 New York City public housing residents graduated from a training program that will enable them to become certified pest control technicians.
The training program was operated by St. Nicks Alliance Workforce Development, which was funded with federal stimulus money by Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez. Having graduated the six-week, 173-hour training program, they are now en route to be certified and placed in NYCHA development as pest control technicians.
In an eloquent and emotional address to her classmates, Dana Hylton, a graduate of the program, quoted a maxim of Donald Smith, the program’s workplace success trainer: “For every day that you’re not here taking advantage of these opportunities, you’re cheating yourself.”
Robert Orange, another graduate, quipped about how much he had learned in the program, saying, “I didn’t know anything about pest control – I bought Raid.”
According to a report by the Community Service Society published last October, the unemployment rate among NYCHA residents is 27 percent, more than triple the citywide average. The report found that an estimated 30,000 to 34,000 public housing residents were unemployed, up from 13,000 in 2008, before the economy crashed.
Velazquez told the graduates, saying, “It’s a wonderful and beautiful thing for children to watch their parents wake up and go to work, and put bread and butter on the table. Congratulations to you 23, because you made it against the odds.”
By federal law, NYCHA and other public housing authorities are required to fill at least 30 percent of their full-time jobs on public housing development projects with NYCHA residents “to the greatest extent possible,” according to the language of the law. But this caveat creates wiggle room, which has historically led to many authorities hiring fewer than 30 percent.
Velazquez addressed this directly at the graduation, saying, “My message to NYCHA is this: If you want contracts, we require that you employ 30 percent of your workforce in public housing. That is the law. I’m not asking for special treatment, I’m just asking for NYCHA to honor the law of the land.”
Referring to the 20,000 unemployed NYCHA residents in New York, Velazquez said, “As long as we have 20,000 who live in public housing, this has to happen.”
She added that between 2008 and 2018, the pest control industry sector is predicted to expand by 15 percent.
Lydia Woodson, Resident Training Academy Manager at NYCHA, said, “I’m excited about welcoming you to NYCHA [New York City Housing Authority] as an employee,” said Lydia Woodson.
The ceremony concluded with remarks from Tania Beaubrun, Deputy Director for Skills Programs at Workforce Development.
“This was not an easy road – this took a lot of hard work from all of us,” Beaubrun said.
“Today isn’t the final day of this. It’s your celebration, but it’s also the first day of your new career. I want you to celebrate everything, but remember that there are always hurdles, because that’s life.”
kbenson @ February 4, 2012
Levin Secures $1 Mil for McCarren Drainage, No More ‘Hipster Lake’
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Local Councilman Stephen Levin has allocated $930,000 to rebuild paths and add drainage to the middle of McCarren Park, which floods frequently after heavy rainstorms.
That will hopefully spell the end of the so-called “Hipster Lake,” which causes park denizens to go out of their way while traversing the park or else encounter the fetid water.
kbenson @ February 4, 2012
New Study Seeks Community Input for Arts@Renaissance
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Underwritten by Joan Mitchell Foundation
By Karl Benson
Arts@Renaissance, the community arts component of St. Nicks Alliance, received a $10,000 grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation for a study assessing the various needs for creative space in North Brooklyn.
The study was launched in September and will end in February. It includes detailed interviews with a diverse range of local stakeholders, intensive case studies of 20 established community arts organizations with similar missions and objectives, and a qualitative community survey.
It centers around two questions: What role should the arts play in North Brooklyn, and how can Arts@Renaissance help make this a reality?
Arts@Renaissance will use the study to develop a programming plan for its space on the garden level of 2 Kingsland Avenue. This programming plan will inform an architectural plan for the space. After that, organizers hope to draw up a capital plan to raise funds for any needed renovations, giving East Williamsburg a high-caliber, community-based arts space.
“This gives us a chance to create a viable plan for the space, with input from a multitude of community sources,” said Chris Henderson, Program Manager at Arts@Renaissance.
He added, “Community-based art unites North Brooklyn’s artists with its longer-term residents around shared values and initiatives to build upon the vibrancy of this neighborhood.”
Chloe Bass, co-organizer of Arts in Bushwick and a member of the Arts@Renaissance Advisory Committee, is conducting interviews for the study. She said that many artists had expressed a desire for a portion of the Arts@Renaissance space to be used as a shared workspace for artists.
Bass laid out a vision of “a convivial work environment for people that don’t have 9-to-5 jobs. Ideally, you’d have a co-working space used every day.”
Other things that have been discussed were collaborative arts projects, a media lab, and partnerships between artists and the communities, like teaching classes in return for studio space. Most want to see programming that is both relevant to the community and of high-quality.
“Everyone talks about the space and the amazing asset Arts@Renaissance is. It’s very rare to come by a space like this,” Bass said.
The study also includes two panel discussions with artists and community members about the proper role for arts in North Brooklyn. One of those discussions took place last month, and another one will take place towards the end of this month.
“This all underscores the need to both create and consume great artwork,” said Henderson.
Teresa Gonzalez, a local resident and a member of the Arts@Renaissance Advisory Committee, said that “ongoing discussion with community members will help us carve out a vision for the space. There’s a great need for space, and we’re excited to make this an arts space for all segments of the community: Artists, non-artists, and people who have lived here for a long time.”
kbenson @ February 4, 2012
Why do Illegal Billboards Dominate BQE?
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By Brad Nelson
An 20-feet by 60-feet billboard fell on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in the middle of the day on January 13. The collapsed billboard blocked the westbound lane of the highway for a day, damaged a building and a car, and severed a gas line. But it injured nobody.
The billboard had been mounted atop a one-story building at Meeker Avenue, between Manhattan and Graham, before it collapsed.
It was also illegal, according to the Department of Buildings.
Technically, advertising on billboards has been illegal since 1940. However, companies routinely flouted the law without repercussion until 2009, when a federal judge ruled against six companies suing to prevent the city from forcing them to remove ads. Since then, enforcement has been ramped up.
However, there are several loopholes, like the fact that billboards for non-commercial use are still allowed. The side of the billboard that collapsed that faced the BQE advertised the lottery, so that side complied with the law. But the other side contains an ad for Dunkin’ Donuts, rendering it illegal.
“It’s always been in the law; it’s just that the Buildings Department wasn’t enforcing it,” Vanessa Gruen, former director of special projects for the Municipal Art Society, told the New York Times earlier this month.
A Buildings Department spokesperson said the bolts that attached the signpost to its foundation failed somehow. The billboard was twelve years old. That spokesman said the DOB plans to inspect other signs along highways for structural damage.
The owner of the billboard – to whom the lottery paid $13,000 a month to advertise – will be fined violating the ban on commercial ads, for failing to maintain the structure in a safe and lawful manner, and for not registering the sign since 2007.
kbenson @ February 4, 2012
Cyclist’s Death: Investigation ‘Unprofessional’
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By Brad Nelson
Under pressure after being sued by the family of Mathieu Lefevre, the 30-year old Williamsburg artist who was killed in October by a truck on the corner of Meserole Street and Morgan Avenue, the NYPD released Lefevre’s case file late last month.
The file, which included surveillance video of the accident, contradict several statements police had made about the accident and lend credibility to the claims Lefevre’s family and their lawyer have made: that the investigation was conducted sloppily.
Shortly after the accident, which occurred when the truck made a right turn at onto Meserole, a police source told the website Gothamist that Lefevre had run a red light. But the video shows that Lefevre didn’t run a red light. Instead, it reveals that the truck made a right hand turn without signaling.
After Lefevre was hit, the truck dragged his body for 40 feet. The truck continued to drag the bike for another 130 feet before it came loose as the truck drove away from the scene. The driver said at the time that he was unaware of the accident, and the police took his word for it.
But according to the accident report, the truck had blood and bike paint marks on the front part of the truck, consistent with the truck rear-ending Lefevre.
“Common sense tells us that the driver of a vehicle involved in such a collision must be aware that a collision has occurred,” wrote Steve Vaccaro, the lawyer for the Lefevre family, in a letter to the NYPD.
But the file contains no photographs of the truck or the accident scene, both of which could have validated the family’s and Vaccaro’s claims about the blood and paint. The file seems to indicate that they didn’t have photographs because the camera was not working properly.
“We are appalled by this and other plainly unprofessional aspects of the NYPD investigation. NYPD should take its responsibility to investigate crashes more seriously,” Ericka Lefevre, Mathieu’s mother, told reporters.
One thing the file did contain was photographs of Ericka Lefevre and Vaccaro themselves.
“That’s not something I’ve encountered before,” said Vaccaro. “It’s certainly not routine.”
kbenson @ February 4, 2012
PS 19: Community Demands a Voice in Future
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By Karl Benson
Last month, Southside residents sent an emphatic message to the Department of Education: They demand a voice in the fate of PS 19, the S. 3rd Street School that is one of twelve schools citywide the DOE is considering closing.
The school has seen its Progress Report grade drop from a B in 2009 to a D last year to an F this year. Only 22 percent of its students read and do math at a grade level.
The DOE plans to phase out the school by 2015, and start another school, PS 414, in its place. That school would start next year and have a new staff and faculty. This plan awaits a vote in March by the Panel for Educational Policy, a body appointed mostly by the Mayor.
But Luis Garden Acosta of El Puente, one of the lead organizers of the newly-created Southside Community Schools Coalition, an advocacy group comprised of a broad base of Southside stakeholders, said the DOE must respond to community concerns about the school
“There’s a consensus in the community that the school needs an immediate and total transformation. But our position, emphatically, is that was must drive that transformation. We can be partners with the DOE, but we have to drive this,” he said.
To that end, the SCSC has outlined a series of demands to the DOE. Among them are that the SCSC be formally recognized as an advisory body for decisions about school’s fate; that the DOE re-issue the RFP for the transformation to expand the range of proposals for any new school; that the new school leader be bilingual in both Spanish and English; that the school have a dual-language, Spanish and English program, and that the school retain the moniker of, “The Roberto Clemente School.”
Many community residents blame the school’s poor recent performance on DOE budget cuts and neglect. Budget cuts have forced the school to go without a librarian, an academic intervention staff, a math coach, or a reading coach.
Local Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, in a strongly-worded letter, wrote that the school’s poor progress report score “was caused by a shockingly poor commitment [by the DOE] to PS 19’s performance.”
“In essence, this indifference has choked off the success of PS 19… During the last five years, the school has annually decreased the number of teachers on staff and failed to fill key positions.”
She said the decline in enrollment – from 1,200 students ten years ago to just 350 today – “was a self-fulfilling prophecy – if you withhold critical resources, the school will wither on the vine.”
But some say the school’s declining performance stemmed from poor leadership.
Tesa Wilson, President of the District 14 CEC, said, “Basically, it was a failure of administration. When I went to the hearing at the school, you had parents demanding the principal be fired or step down. In my seven years on the CEC, I’ve never seen this happen.”
Tony Hunter, the father of a fourth grader, said, “I’m for a transformation. It’s like they don’t care over there. I’m not for the school closing, but if that’s what it takes, then that’s what it takes. Something definitely needs to be done.”
kbenson @ February 4, 2012
PS 84 Hosts Afternoon of Thanks for Military
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PS 84 (250 Berry Street) hosted members of the United States military last month to give thanks to the brave men and women who serve our country.
The ceremony featured the pledge of allegiance, stirring renditions of the Star Spangled Banner and God Bless America, along with guest speakers from several soldiers. The guest speakers were followed by an extensive question and answer session.
PS 84 thanks all the members of the military, but particularly those who came to the school last month: Captain Christina Mouradjian, Staff Sergeant Patrick Dickens, and Private Anthony Duncan.
kbenson @ February 4, 2012
