What’s all this I hear about a new middle school and high school going into the building that houses PS 282, a local elementary school on Sixth Avenue and Lincoln Place?
Two parents at PS 282 wrote a letter to Chancellor Klein and sent it to me. I don’t know the whole story but I got a very weird feeling from the email I was sent.
The Kalil Gibran International Academy will be a school for arabic middle and high schoolers (100 pupils). Debbie Alontaser, who was listed on the Park Slope 100, is slated to be principal. Here’s a description of the school in today’s New York Sun:
A new public secondary school that is to include Middle Eastern
studies in its curriculum will focus on culture, not the region’s
political conflicts, Department of Education officials said yesterday.
"The school will not be a vehicle for political ideology," a Department
of Education spokesman, David Cantor, said of the Khalil Gibran
International Academy, due to open this September in Brooklyn.
As for the sorts of topics the school will cover, the CEO of the
Office of New Schools, Garth Harries, gave as an example a math lesson
plan that would mention that an Arabic mathematician invented the
concept of zero. "It’s going to follow Department of Education
regulations," the director of the Arab-American Family Support Center,
Lena Alhusseini, who helped design the school, said. "It’s going to be
exactly like all the schools in the city, the same curriculum."
I am alarmed that at the bottom of this parent’s email to Cancellor Klein, the authors included links to the Militant Islam Monitor, which is vehemently opposing the creation of this school on the crazy grounds that it has a Jihadi agenda.
While I have heard that the PTA opposes a new school being "stuffed into" their long-standing elementary school, including links like Miltant Islam Monitor is incendiary and so off the topic — it really makes me wonder. What is the issue here, really? Is this racism or just a parent’s concerns about the future of their school. Here’s is the the email two parents sent to Chancellor Klein.
Dear Chancellor Klein,
This evening we were given, along with almost the entire PS282
community, some alarming news. What was most alarming to us however
was not the intention that you and New Visions have to open the
Khalil Gibran International Academy within our walls, it's the
arrogance with which it was done. This was the first communication
to anyone, except our principal who held back the news until the math
tests were over, and it was presented to us as if we have no choice.
When we asked Robert Hughes, president of New Visions, if he had
looked at the population of the school that he is about to invade
(yes, the parents feel it is an invasion) he told us that he hadn't
but that he had looked at the building's capacity. Both the breakdown
of the school's population and the building's capacity are on the
same report easily accessible on the DOE website!
Please know that the parents are mobilizing and organizing a protest
that will not end until this plan has been rethought. We will
contact every news outlet in the city and in the country.
Our son is in the third grade LEAD program, he and his classmates
have the highest test scores of the school, he is one of few non-
african americans in his class. He is fluently bilingual and bi-
cultural and we want him to keep an open mind, and it is for this
that we chose PS282 over other neighborhood schools, public and
private. We will not keep him in the school if he loses one piece of
the curriculum that he is presently offered or the space for that to
take place in, nor will we keep him in an educational environment
that "is an abdication of the basic principle behind public education
to set up separate schools to teach uncritically one history and one
culture."
Although the news has been public only for a short time, please read
below what a quick google search comes up with about your new
school. Why do you want to put this kind of pressure on a small,
neighborhood school in the midst of growing with such great potential?
Sincerely,
Jennifer Bacon Fossati and Filippo Fossati
parents of Paolo Fossati, class 3-209, PS282
