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By: Ellen Cans
Critics are slamming New York City educrats, accusing them of thwarting academic success by denying more space to a thriving charter high school. As reported by the NY Post, at the Success Academy Charter High School of the Liberal Arts on Manhattan’s East Side, choir students rehearse in a hallway staircase. “A lot of the time, people can’t all fit in the actual staircase,” lamented Georgia Williams, an 18-year-old senior at the school. “So we have to like, clump up in the back,” the student told The Post.
“And also we have songs where we move and clap … and we have to like, bend down, clap diagonally, snap, sway — it’s really difficult next to all the people.”
Under state law, the city Department of Education is either required to provide charter schools space in their public buildings or pay for their leases in private facilities. The law, however, does not stipulate how much space is to be given. Per the Post, the charter high school shares space in a building on 111 East 33rd Street in Murray Hill with three other traditional public high schools: Murray Hill Academy, Manhattan Academy for the Arts & Language and the Unity Center for Urban Technologies.
The charter school, which opened in 2014, has close to 900 students. Meanwhile, each of the other three schools in the building has less than 300 students. Despite its larger population, however, the charter has been allocated significantly less space. It is currently operating at nearly 100% capacity in its space. By comparison, Murray Hill Academy is at 39% capacity, Manhattan Academy of Arts and Language 61% and Unity HS for Urban Technologies 74%, as per city data. Because of this, the average class size for the charter school is at 26 to 27 students, while the other schools in the building have some average class sizes of around 16, Success Academy said.
The charter school has only one science lab for its hundreds of students, and needless to say it doesn’t boast space for extracurricular activities. A charter-school student was recently seen crammed in a small storage room — the size of a janitor’s closet — for a make-up test, a supervising teacher told the Post. Nearby, in a separate storage closet, a student was seen practicing on a trombone. The charter school even uses a classroom, retrofitted as a makeshift gym. “Really, that’s a testament to our teachers’ flexibility day to day and what they’re able to do,” the charter school’s principal, Kenneth Zhang, told The Post during its visit on Friday. “As we continue to grow, the class sizes have gotten larger,” Zhang added.
In the meantime, the school, which is part of the Success Academies network of 57-publicly funded, privately managed charter schools, has achieved academic acclaim. According to Success of the Liberal Arts, last year, 95% of its seniors scored 3 or higher
on at least one Advanced Placement Exam during high school — matching the highly prestigious public Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. Each of its seven graduating classes has seen 100% of students accepted to four-year colleges —with 51% being accepted to selective institutions or programs, the school boasts.
Parents at the charter school have launched a petition, which currently has 259 signatures, calling on the DOE “to fairly allocate space to us in the building we share with three other high schools.”
