Bowing to community pressure for the second time in as many months, the city has withdrawn a plan to cram a center for suspended students into Fort Greene’s highly regarded MS 113 — opting instead for the school to house a smaller general equivalency diploma program.
“Basically, we found an alternative site that had more space,” said Dina Paul Parks, though she would not reveal which school had been selected to house the controversial suspension center.
This is the second time the city has announced — and then rescinded — plans for a suspension center in a Fort Greene or Clinton Hill school.
In July, the city tried to foist a center for disciplined students on JHS 265, on Park Avenue, between Cumberland Street and Carlton Avenue. The plan was later withdrawn.
Councilwoman Letitia James (D–Fort Greene), a fierce opponent of both plans, said the agency should have known from the beginning that 80 additional students could not fit inside MS 113, which is on Adelphi Street, between DeKalb and Lafayette avenues.
“They had no idea about the number of children who attend 113,” said James, after a meeting with Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott, Department of Education officials, and the principals of 113 and the suspension center. “We had numbers. And, because of the closing of [two nearby schools], even more children will now go to 113.”
The GED program will only occupy one classroom in MS 113, rather than up to three.
But space was never the sole cause of controversy.
School parents and area residents worried that an influx of up to 80 students with disciplinary problems would undermine the existing school program and increase crime in the surrounding neighborhood.
Those concerns were exacerbated by recent incidents in which gangs harassed students on their way to and from school. Officials said suspended students would not mix with the rest of the school population, but few parents believed them.
“I heard the nonsense,” said James Harris, a PTA member whose son was attacked in May. “What will [the city] do, helicopter them in and out?”
On Friday, Harris crowed, “The battle has been won.”
But the battle has presumably just begun for whatever neighborhood is now chosen to host the center. The Department of Education intends to open 28 such Alternative Learning Centers citywide this fall, allowing suspended students to stay closer to their own schools.
