By any objective standard, a city plan to house an Arabic language and culture middle school within an up-and-coming Park Slope elementary school was badly handled, marked by surprise announcements and poor communication. Here’s how the plan, imposed on a neighborhood known for its multi-cultural ethos, went down in flames.
February 12, 2007
The Department of Education announces plans for the Khalil Gibran International Academy, to be located somewhere in Brooklyn. Speculation ensues as to where the school will be located.
March 12, 2007
Department of Education officials reveal that the middle-school Academy will be housed at the K–5 PS 282 on Sixth Avenue. The PTA, stunned at the news, reacts with outrage. The Brooklyn Paper covers the story.
March 13, 2007
Two parents send Schools Chancellor Joel Klein a letter complaining that the Arabic academy would “invade” PS 282 with a program that “is an abdication of the basic principle behind public education [by setting] up separate schools to teach uncritically one history and one culture.”
March 16, 2007
Dozens of parents protest in front of PS 282, while Gibran Academy principal Debbie Almontaser tours the building with her PS 282 counterpart and city officials. Almontaser does not speak publicly, further alienating the school from the Park Slope community.
April 11, 2007
The PS 282 PTA stages a protest on the steps of the Tweed Courthouse, the Manhattan headquarters of the Department of Education.
April 24, 2007
Daniel Pipes (pictured), a commentator on radical Islam, says in the New York Sun that “Arabic-language instruction is inevitably laden with pan-Arabist and Islamist baggage.”
April 30, 2007
The city announces it won’t move Khalil Gibran into PS 282, but promises that the school will open somewhere in time for the fall semester.
May 4, 2007
New York Sun columnist Alicia Colon argues that the city’s plan for an Arabic-themed school amounts to “bending over backwards to appease those sympathetic to individuals who would destroy us again. … How delighted Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda must have been to hear the news — that New York City, the site of the worst terrorist attack in our history, is bowing down in homage to accommodate and perhaps groom future radicals.”
May 9, 2007
The city announces that Khalil Gibran Academy will share space with a high school and middle school in Boerum Hill. The school will only occupy three rooms and admit 60 students, not 80.
