This school plan passed with flying colors!
City education officials on Wednesday approved a first-of-its-kind proposal to split a Brooklyn Heights elementary school and its corresponding Downtown middle school in order to create a new sixth-to-eighth grade learning house in the space occupied by the current middle school’s classrooms.
Members of the Panel on Education Policy unanimously green-lit the scheme that will discontinue MS 8 — where students graduating from Hicks Street’s PS 8 get priority enrollment above others in the district — and replace it with a new middle school in the same Tech Place building, which also houses four other high schools and education programs.
The new district middle school, which will be larger by one sixth grade class, will no longer prioritize those fifth graders graduating from PS 8, which is about a mile away from MS 8.
And the yet-to-be-named middle school will no longer share resources including staff and a budget with PS 8, instead receiving its own faculty and funding — which many local parents and educators said will allow both learning houses to better educate pupils at public hearings on the proposal earlier this month.
Officials also pledged to provide the new sixth-to-eighth-grade learning house with the highest possible amount of cash from the city’s so-called Fair Student Funding program — which doles out money to schools serving the five boroughs’ neediest students.
Now that the plan is approved, city educators expect to open the new Tech Place middle school in September 2019.
