Mayor Bloomberg's relentless rush to shutter some neighborhood schools has parents baffled, upset

Ken Goldfield/(Ken Goldfield for Ny Daily News

The Young Leaders Elementary School in the South Bronx.

Love Andujar was leading the small group of parents and children picketing outside the entrance to the Young Leaders Elementary School in the South Bronx.

Next to Andujar was her autistic 7-year-old son Aaron. The boy held high a placard scribbled with a big letter ?D? and the word ?determination.?

This was Thursday afternoon, around the same time that Mayor Bloomberg was over on Staten Island giving President Obama a glimpse of the devastation Hurricane Sandy left behind.

Luckily, hurricane damage to the South Bronx was slight. But Andujar and the other parents are confronting another kind of threat.

The same kind that thousands of school parents all over this city have faced during the Bloomberg era.

They are facing the mayor?s relentless rush to shutter neighborhood schools that his educrats deem to be failing.

The Young Leaders Elementary School (PS 369) is on the city?s most recent list of 36 public schools slated for possible closing because of poor academic performance. It received three consecutive D?s from the Department of Education?s almost inscrutable system of measuring performance.

?This was a school Bloomberg created back in 2008 to replace another failing school,? Andujar said. ?Now they say we?re failing, even though they never gave us the resources and help to succeed.?

Back in 2008, the Department of Education closed the old PS 220 in the same building because of poor academic performance.

Officials brought in a new principal and some new teachers and changed the school's name. And before PS 220, back in the 1990s, there had been another school in the building, IS 40.

?A lot of the families are from Mexico, and the parents themselves aren?t educated enough or know the language to help their kids,? said Teresa Hamilton, who has a daughter in kindergarten.

Department of Education records show 38% of the pupils in PS 369 are English-language learners and 24% receive special education. Both figures are much higher than the average for city public schools.

?We?ve made improvements the past few years, but not enough to please the city,? Andujar said.

For vulnerable special-education students like her son, she notes, sudden changes in teachers and staff can mean a setback in their learning process.

Moreover, many of the new schools Bloomberg?s people create are often worse than the ones they replace.

A recent Daily News investigation found that of the 154 schools opened under Bloomberg, nearly 60% had passing rates on reading tests that were lower than those at older schools of similar poverty level.

To the bean-counters at Tweed, shutting down a school and reopening it under new management is just good business practice.

But to parents, teachers and students, our local schools are the anchors to our neighborhoods. They are part of the fabric of community life. The local art or gym teacher is known by and appreciated by everyone. If a school is underperforming, you add an after-school program. If there are many English-language learners, you increase language instruction.

And that is why Andujar and the parents picked up their signs and marched.

jgonzalez@nydailynews.com

Source: http://feeds.nydailynews.com/~r/nydnrss/news/columnists/~3/Vy6B4ijP1TY/story01.htm

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