Joyce Szuflita, who runs NYC School Help, attended a Meet and Greet with Chancellor Klein sponsored by the District 15 Community Education Council on October 26th. Parents asked why students from Brooklyn were no longer being accepted at Millenium High School in Lower Manhattan. Here is an excerpt from her recap of that meeting. You can read the rest on Inside Schools.

Last night, schools chancellor Joel I. Klein participated in a town hall style meeting sponsored by District 15’s Community Education Council. The large crowd of parents, students and teachers that gathered inside Sunset Park Prep Academy’s auditorium grilled the chancellor on a range of topics affecting District 15 families and those citywide.

Klein opened with a brief PowerPoint presentation demonstrating rising test scores and a shrinking achievement gap. His conclusions invited considerable dissent by CEC members over how to interpret the test results. Klein also told the crowd that 2162 new seats were created recently in District 15. Both CEC members and parents questioned why District 2 has small, selective high schools that give priority to District 2 residents (Manhattan has no zoned options for high school), while in other parts of the city there are  few small, screened programs that offer in-district priority.  Some spoke of the heartbreak felt by many Brooklyn students over not being admitted to Millennium High School last year.  In previous years, Millennium, also a District 2 school, routinely accepted Brooklyn students despite its policy of giving top priority to residents of lower Manhattan.

Klein responded that the schools were zoned by the old District 2 School Board long before his tenure and that Millennium was built after 9/11 to support and revitalize the downtown neighborhoods. He voiced his interest in providing schools that are open to students citywide.

Funding was on the minds of teachers who asked where Race to the Top money was being spent, and if “high priced consultants” and charter schools had their budgets slashed as much as DOE schools.

Klein said that most funding cuts happened at central office and administrative levels and that charter programs are funded at a lower level per student than DOE schools…