Stop

School Closings Everywhere!

School closings have become an epidemic across the United States. In New York City over one hundred schools have been closed during the Bloomberg administration, with this year another 26 schools slated for closure. Many of these schools have suffered through weak administrations, charter co-locations, budget cuts, and a lack of support from the DOE. It is time that all students, parents, educators, and community members stand together and fight against this harmful practice. The Movement of Rank and File Educators of the UFT stands in solidarity with the impacted school communities and seeks to offer support in any way that we can. The best way to fight a school closure is to organize the community, and speak out for your school. Please contact us if you are interested in joining the fight against school closures everywhere. The Mayor, chancellor, and their rubber-stamp Panel for Education Policy, show complete disregard and disdain for the students, teachers and communities affected by this policy, inflicting unconscionable harm on them and ignoring the democratic process. Our current school governance law mayoral control allows Bloomberg complete unchecked power to close any school in the city. This law must be repealed, and until that time comes communities must stand together to oppose these unjust closures. Many of the school closing decisions are based on the faulty and volatile testing data in the school progress reports, which ignore some of the most important things that happen in schools (electives, clubs, connections between teachers and students, meeting students social/emotional needs). Closing neighborhood schools has led to students traveling over an hour each way to get to school. This has divided communities and made it far more difficult for parents to get involved. School closings disproportionately affect students of color and poor students. The majority of the schools slated to close this year have student populations that are near 100% Black and Latino and 85% of the students qualifying for free or reduced lunch.

 Many of the schools slated to phase out are being replaced by charter schools. Charters choose students by lottery. They serve far fewer ELLs and children with special needs, and counsel out students they believe won't perform. Despite this, 80% of charter students perform the same or worse than students in public schools. Schools closings lead to the excessing of teachers and increase the ATR pool, where veteran, highly qualified teachers are often reduced to working as substitutes rather than having full time positions where they can best meet the needs of our students. The Department of Education should be working to properly fund and support all schools. Every student deserves access to a great school in their own neighborhood, and it is time that the DOE stops playing the shell game of closing schools and properly funds and supports every school in the city. School closings have been successfully thwarted in the past and by working together we can end them once and for all. To stop the Mayor, however, will require a citywide movement on a scale that has not yet been seen, unite students, parents communities, and teachers in a campaign that extends beyond the sham hearings and rubber stamp votes at the PEP. Just relying on lawsuits will not be sufficient to end the city's policy. And this means challenging the strategy put forward by the UFT leadership, which has led token mobilization but not organized a sustained movement. On March 11th the Panel for Educational Policy will meet at Brooklyn Technical High School at 6 PM to vote on the closure of all 26 schools. They will also vote to replace and collocate many of the schools with charters schools. It is important that there is a very strong showing of support for the schools, despite the fact that the PEP will always approve any proposal the mayor puts forth.

MORE Movement of Rank and File Educators, the social justice caucus of The United Federation of Teachers Our working conditions are our students learning conditions. morecaucusnyc.org E-mail: more@morecaucus.org, mrkearns.lehman@gmail.com