Why Success Academy-Cobble Hill shouldn't be allowed to expand: Comments to the SUNY Charter committee

There have been many charter school hearings on renewals and revisions to their charters including 11 for Success Academy charters, involving changing proposed enrollments and grade levels, sometimes in the middle of this school year. Six of them will occur on Jan. 3 and Jan 4. Parents are encouraged to attend these hearings and speak out, and/or send comments; more information at each of the links here. Below are my comments on one of these proposals.

Comments on the proposed revision of the charter

for Success Academy-Cobble Hill

by email to: charters@suny.edu
CC: Joseph Belluck, jbelluck@belluckfox.com
CEC15@schools.nyc.gov

December 22, 2017

Success Academy Cobble Hill has requested authorization from SUNY to revise its charter and allow its enrollment to 880 students and expand grade levels to 7^th grade.[1]

During the 2016-2017 school year, 284 Baltic St., Building Number K293, the current building in which the school is located, was at 92% utilization. Total enrollment stood at 1,247 students, with a capacity for the building of 1,360. [2]

If the school was to stay in this building, the proposed increase by Success Academy Cobble Hill would bring the school over capacity, subjecting students to overcrowding and likely causing class sizes to grow.

• The Boerum Hill School for International Studies currently has 633 students enrolled, according to the school’s website.
• The Digital Arts and Cinema Technology High School has a current enrollment of 206, according to the school’s website.
• Digital Arts was recently “rebranded” from Global Studies – and any authorization allowing Success to expand would constrain the growth of this school– when the DOE looks at any school below 250 as potentially unsustainable and difficult to provide students with their fair share of coursework and resources.
• We are unable to locate current enrollment data for K368 SPED, which itself was overcrowded in 2016-2017, according to the Blue Book, with 25 students and at a utilization rate of 156%.
• However, supposing that enrollment at K368 SPED remained stable compared to last year (at 25 students) that would leave only room for 496 students for Success Academy Cobble Hill – not the 880 students they are asking to be authorized to serve next year.

Now it possible that Success Academy plans to move the school to another building, but I cannot find any information about this eventuality, despite the SUNY requirements that “A material charter revision to modify enrollment to more than what was provided for in the charter agreement (charter paragraph 2.2 (a)) would require the school to submit…Explanation of how the plan fits the facility or facilities plan of the school.”[3]

In any case, the average utilization of D15 schools, according to the 2015-2016 DOE Utilization report, was at 105%, and 61% of K-8 schools in the district overcrowded (at or above 100% target utilization). About 74% or nearly 20,000 K-8 students were in overcrowded schools, and 94 cluster rooms were missing from these schools. according to DOE’s utilization formula.[4]

Meanwhile the student population is growing fast. Housing starts data posted by DOE in March 2017 multiplied by the City Planning ratio, projects more than 4,700 additional K-8 seats will be needed in D15 by 2019.[5]

At the same time, the DOE five-year capital plan has only funded about 50 % of the D15 seats necessary, according to the DOE figures.[6] Our estimates are that the real need for seats in D15 is even greater, given current overcrowding and enrollment growth.

If it is true, as cited in the letter from the Community Education Council in District 15, that many of the students at the Success Academy Cobble Hill do not reside in the district, that means that any expansion of this school would increasingly crowd out districts students in the future, and thus should not be allowed.[7]

We also oppose allowing the expansion of any Success Academy charter school, given the huge number of civil rights violations and abuses that children enrolled in these schools and their families are subjected to, as well as repeated violations of student privacy rights.[8]

Finally, we have real doubts as to the legality of the request to authorize any change in a charter school’s enrollment in the middle of the current school year, as Success Academy – Cobble Hill is proposing, from 558 students in grades K-6, to 686 students in in 2017-2018.[9]

In short, I urge you to reject this proposal.

Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Leonie@classsizematters.org
917-435-9329

[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DEN1PI8ZWjNtvtnOJ3Yj_u0QUdmdKFA_/view

[2] NYC Dept. of Education, Enrollment, Capacity & Utilization Report, 2016 – 2017 School Year, at: Https://Dnnhh5cc1.Blob.Core.Windows.Net/Portals/0/Capital_Plan/Utilization_Reports/Blue%20book%202016-2017.Pdf?Sr=B&Si=Dnnfilemanagerpolicy&Sig=G7ezjxloaazfmxphd0cfojryifbrvwf8d5mf9ifcspa%3d

[3] http://www.newyorkcharters.org/revisions/

[4] https://www.classsizematters.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/District-15-updated.pptx

[5] Housing start data here: http://www.nycsca.org/Community/Capital-Plan-Reports-Data#Housing-Projections-70 City Planning public school ratio here: https://dnnhh5cc1.blob.core.windows.net/portals/0/Capital_Plan/Housing_Projections/NewHousingMultiplier.pdf?sr=b&si=DNNFileManagerPolicy&sig=P2ZgFKQmkXqjy%2BYz0G8WR5IXjzii3Z7IDJSSWJcm0e4%3D

[6] School Construction Authority Five-year Capital plan, p. 21 at https://dnnhh5cc1.blob.core.windows.net/portals/0/Capital_Plan/Capital_plans/11162017_15_19_CapitalPlan.pdf?sr=b&si=DNNFileManagerPolicy&sig=6ZUDr4YoMGig5oWw5%2F%2BCYdMy8CV09qjwltkO3KZ0QkU%3D , Nov. 2017.

[7] Community Education Council District 15, Letter to SUNY board, SUNY Charter School Institute and Chancellor Farina, dated Dec. 20, 2017.

[8] https://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2015/10/ferpa-complaint-from-fatima-geidi-to.html and http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2015/10/success_academies_eva_moskowitz_published_a_student_s_disciplinary_record.html

See also the recent violation of FERPA in the school’s response to a lawsuit about a child’s illegal suspension here: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/brooklyn/sucess-academy-student-family-sues-lengthy-suspension-article-1.3698772 See also the various lawsuits and civil rights complaints against this charter chain noted here: https://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2017/09/why-emily-kim-former-attorney-for.html

[9] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DEN1PI8ZWjNtvtnOJ3Yj_u0QUdmdKFA_/view See also CEC2 letter about this issue in regards the request to revise enrollment figures in the middle of the current school year, at Success Academy- Union Square and Success Academy- Hells Kitchen at http://files.constantcontact.com/9348a5e4301/af78ba42-c0ed-4b48-8184-857f80ef142c.pdf

The growing storm around Success Academy

On Friday morning, the NY Times ran a story and posted the video above, a minute and 16 seconds of a teacher berating a first grade child at the Cobble Hill Success charter school in Brooklyn, ripping up her page of math work, and sending her to sit on the “calm down” chair.  This video has gone viral, with an apparently greater impact than all the news articles, complaints, and lawsuits filed against Success charters in the past few years.  

There have been so many documented instances of students unfairly treated and pushed out of Success charter schools that it is difficult to know where to start.   One of the first parents to tell her story of how her special needs son was pushed out of a Success charter school in Kindergarten within a few weeks of the beginning of the school year was Karen Sprowal, in a Michael Winerip column in  the NY Times in July 2011 – nearly five years ago.  We followed up with Karen’s own account on our blog here.

Over the years, Juan Gonzalez of the Daily News has repeatedly chronicled the many documented instances of young children repeatedly suspended and ejected from Success Charters.  For the first time, the NY Times started critically covering the school last spring, describing their high-pressured test prep tactics and severe disciplinary practices for the purpose of achieving high scores on the state exams.

This fall, PBS ran a segment about the suspensions of young children at the Success Academy Charter Schools. You can see the segment here.  Fatima Geidi spoke about the way the school had repeatedly suspended her first grade son for minor infractions, and refused to provide him with the special education services he was entitled to.  While the reporter, John Merrow, attested to the fact that many other parents and teachers confirmed these system-wide practices, they told him they were afraid to appear on camera. 

Eva Moskowitz subsequently retaliated against Fatima and her son, by posting a falsified record of his disciplinary infractions, and sharing it with the media.  Fatima filed a FERPA complaint to the federal government, pointing out how this violated his federal privacy rights.  Months later, this falsified list of infractions was taken down from the Success website. 

Shortly after the PBS program ran, the NY Times published  an October 29 article on the “Got to Go list,” composed by the principal at the Fort Greene Success charter school targeting certain students, and explaining that their parents had to be persuaded to take them out of the school.

After that, a petition to the US Department of Education was posted online by Alliance for Quality Education and Color of Change, asking for a federal investigation and that the US Department of Education withhold any more federal funds from the school until the investigation was complete.  The petition pointed out that the US Department of Education had given Success Academy charters more than $37 million dollars since 2010, and nearly three million dollars in 2015 alone.  The petition received over 35,000 signatures.

On December 10, 2015, four parents whose children were on the “Got to Go list” at the Fort Greene Success Academy filed a 27-page lawsuit in federal court, seeking $2 million in damages. On January 4, the NY Times reported that the principal of that school had taken a “personal leave of absence” (though it was later revealed that he is now teaching at another Success charter school in Harlem.)

On January 18, the NY Post wrote that SUNY Charter Institute, the main authorizer of Success charters, was finally launching its own investigation into the practices of these schools.  In a longer story published January 20, Schoolbook revealed that the SUNY Charter Institute had sent a letter five days before to the board chairman of Success Academy, noting “allegations of improper use of student discipline practices to encourage students to dis-enroll, especially at the Fort Greene school.”

On the same date, January 20, a class action complaint to the Office of Civil Rights of the US Department of Education was brought by thirteen parents on behalf of their children with disabilities at eight different Success Academy charter schools in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Bronx.  The complaint highlighted “systemic policies” that violated these students’ federal rights, including harassing and publicly shaming them, refusing to provide them with appropriate services, calling 911 to take them to the hospital when they allegedly misbehaved, and repeatedly suspending them without reporting these actions as suspensions, and without providing them with due process or alternative instruction as required by law.

This class action complaint was joined by City Council Education Danny Dromm and Letitia James, the New York City Public Advocate. You can read the full complaint here.  More recently, another lawsuit was filed by NY Lawyers for Public Interest on behalf of a parent of a former Kindergarten student with disabilities at Fort Greene Success Academy charter school, who was successfully pushed out of the school.  

Yet none of these documented news accounts or lawsuits has had the same impact on the public consciousness as this minute and sixteen second video.  Is it the power of video in the digital age?  The ability to see with your own eyes and viscerally experience the abusive treatment that these young children were forced to suffer through, week after week, year after year?  Whatever the reason, let’s hope that this brings a wider public awareness not only about the practices of this particular chain of charters, but about all the “no excuses” charters that may produce better test scores, but at a very large human cost.