Parents of the Gifted Resist a Call to Share a School Building

Good for Klein and the DOE for standing up to this nitwit NIMBY nonsense!  Gee, I wonder if the protests would be so vociferous if the new school that is going to be sharing space with NEST were filled with upper-class white kids?

According to city statistics, 52.6 percent of NEST students in the 2004-5 school year were white, compared with 15.1 percent in public school citywide. At NEST, 18.9 percent of students qualified for free lunch, compared with 57.4 percent citywide...

As part of an assignment, students wrote letters to this reporter, warning of dirty hallways, overcrowded classes and a Ross takeover of the NEST cafeteria, with its round tables and purple neon sign.

"I don't understand why she has to ruin one of the best schools in New York City," Alyse Hunt wrote...

"They're trying to destroy our school," cried Arianna Gil, 12, a NEST seventh grader, at the Cipriani rally, as she handed out gift bags embossed in silver lettering with the NEST logo and filled with publicity materials. She warned of "complete chaos" if the Ross charter school moves in.

I wish they'd at least be honest and say what they clearly think: that the low-income minority kids who are going to attend the charter school will create "chaos" and "ruin" NEST.  Here's my prediction: this will prove to be a tempest in a teapot and that years from now, the two schools will both be thriving and will probably even have a great relationship!

 

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Parents of the Gifted Resist a Call to Share a School Building

 

By ELISSA GOOTMAN

Published: June 6, 2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/06/nyregion/06school.html

There they were, parents and students from the New Explorations Into Science, Technology and Math school, banging drums and shaking maracas in front of Cipriani Wall Street to disrupt the black-tie benefit where Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein was speaking.

There they were again, hundreds representing NEST, as the school is known, passionately chanting "Save the NEST" in front of City Hall. And there they were, hoisting "Don't Tread on Our School" signs on a wooded patch of East Hampton near the Ross School, a private school founded by Courtney Sale Ross, the wealthy widow of a former Time Warner chairman.

In the two months since parents at NEST learned of the city's plans to place the Ross Global Academy, a new charter school also founded by Ms. Ross, in their building on the Lower East Side, they have filed a lawsuit, hired a publicist and printed buttons and postcards. The city has not budged.

Now the battle over NEST, which has about 730 students, has become a tale about the intersection of class, race, parents, politicians and philanthropists in the New York City public schools. It pits the mostly middle-class parents who have nurtured NEST, a kindergarten-through-12th-grade school for gifted and talented children, against Ms. Ross, a multimillionaire with homes in the Hamptons and on the Upper East Side whose supporters say she is creating a school to help the poor...