The following post is by Nicole Krieger and Janine DiLorenzo, parents at The Children's School, a very special inclusion school in Brooklyn that has been asking DOE for years for more space to expand into the middle grades. Too often the folks at Portfolio Office seem eager to find space for charters over the needs of even our most successful public schools. Please lend your support to this campaign.
Parents’ Committee for The Children’s School Expansion has
begun a campaign to garner wide community and political support for the
school’s most recent application to the NYC DOE Division of Portfolio Planning
to expand The Children’s School through the 8th Grade.
A unique collaborative effort between District 15 and the
city-wide District 75 (that oversees special education programs), the
Children’s School covers all of District 15, which includes Park Slope, Windsor
Terrace, Kensington, Sunset Park, Red Hook, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Boerum
Hill and parts of Ft. Greene. The School currently consists of two sites. There
is an all inclusion (ICT/Integrated Co-Teaching) elementary school in the
Gowanus, in which ALL classrooms have a general education teacher and a special
education teacher jointly providing instruction to a class that includes both
students with and students without disabilities to meet the diverse learning
needs of all students in a class. In addition, there is a very well-regarded
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) site in Ft. Green.
In fall of 2011, The Children's School was granted Portfolio
Approval for Instructional Capacity by the NYC DOE Division of Portfolio
Planning, which should have led to a space being allocated enabling the middle
school grades to begin serving students for the 2012/2013 school year.
Unfortunately, The Children’s School was not allocated space because the NYC
DOE Division of Portfolio Planning stated they were unable to locate an
appropriate space for the expansion. Therefore, the expansion could not proceed
as planned. It was astonishing to The Children's School community, staff and
parents, as well as the wider District 15 community, that other schools,
including some which faced local opposition, such as Cobble Hill Success
Charter, were granted space during the last portfolio approval cycle while The
Children’s School, with a 20 year record of providing quality education to both
general education and special needs children, was not.
This is the THIRD TIME (2005, 2008, and 2011) that The Children's
School has been granted Approval for Instructional Capacity to expand through
the eighth grade. On all three occasions, the NYC DOE Division of Portfolio
Planning did not allocate appropriate space, but was able to allocate space to
other schools. The goal now is to acquire a site so that The Children's School
grade expansion can take place in fall 2013. In order to attain our goal in the
2012/2013 planning cycle, we have launched a campaign to make the community and
our local politicians aware of this issue by creating a petition and website.
Our website provides access to our petition, information about the campaign, a brief snapshot of the mission, curriculum and philosophy of the middle school grades and links to our Facebook page: and Twitter feed: Our petition can also be accessed here.
Our website provides access to our petition, information about the campaign, a brief snapshot of the mission, curriculum and philosophy of the middle school grades and links to our Facebook page: and Twitter feed: Our petition can also be accessed here.
The
addition of middle school grades within The Children’s School will provide much
needed quality middle school spots to District 15 in Brooklyn. This has been a
long standing problem [i]. It is poised to get even larger as the current
enormous elementary school cohort, which has caused elementary schools to
resort to kindergarten waiting lists for zoned students [ii]. moves up to the
middle school level. The difficulty in getting an appropriate middle school
spot has historically been even more challenging for children who have special
needs [iii].
The new middle school classes will be unique among all middle
schools in New York City. Often classes in middle school in New York City have
as many as 35 students in a class with one teacher, whereas the middle school
grades in The Children’s School will be all inclusion classes with classes
capped at 24 students with two teachers and a paraprofessional. In addition,
the middle school will maintain The Children’s School’s mission of respecting
differences in all people. The school will continue to foster a community where
students of varying abilities and multiple intelligences collaborate,
cooperate, and respectfully support and challenge each other to succeed both
academically and socially.
The Children’s School has been a pioneer in this model of teaching
and learning since 1992 and has been extremely successful. This success is
demonstrated by recent data collected by the NYC DOE. In 2009-2010 The
Children’s School was ranked first in District 75, and third overall in NYC on
the Chancellor’s List of Best Schools (based on the citywide school Progress
Report). In 2009-2010, 78% of students scored a level 3 or 4 in ELA, and 79%
scored a level 3 or 4 in math on the NYS standardized tests.5 In 2010, NY1 ran a story about The Children's School because it was ranked #3 overall among all
elementary and middle schools in the city.
This success provides evidence of the need for the school’s
expansion. The staff, parents and students at The Children’s School
wholeheartedly embrace and support our school’s philosophy of inclusion. Seats
at our school are highly coveted and an expansion will provide current and new
students with the same foundation to succeed as they further their education
into the middle school years and beyond.
[i]
http://articles.nydailynews.com/2005-03-21/local/18303152_1_middle-schools-standardized-tests-last-year-high-performing-students
2 comments:
The Children's School already has expanded into middle school. K442 (The New Horizons School) was created as a middle school feeder for The Children's School........
Maybe just not the "right" type of kids go there??
We are not trying to create a feeder school for The Children's School. We are trying to expand the school and it's inclusion model to include grades 6-8. It would not be a separate school.
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