Barbara Martinez with an article in the WSJ that  perfectly captures the hostility and idiocy that charter schools have to deal with, even when Klein and the DOE are on their side.  What a total disgrace!:

A girls' charter school, the city Department of Education and the parents of autistic children battled over classroom space this summer in a Lower East Side school building, but today those rooms sit empty or cluttered with boxes.

"To now see these empty classrooms, it's obvious 125 low-income public-school girls were thrown out of their school for reasons that had nothing to do with lack of space," said Ian Rowe, chief executive of Public Prep Network, the nonprofit group that runs the charter school, Girls Prep.

Six classrooms on the fifth floor of a building that houses three schools had been earmarked by the DOE for expansion of Girls Prep, which added sixth grade this year. Those rooms had previously been used by P.S. 94, a school for autistic children also in the building.

But that plan unraveled in August because of a lawsuit filed by Advocates for Children, a nonprofit group that charged the DOE's expansion of the charter school did not follow the law by failing to take into account the needs of the autistic children at P.S. 94. Advocates prevailed when the state education commissioner agreed.

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• NY SCHOOLS
• NOVEMBER 5, 2010
• http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748704805204575594824058371124.html

No Winner in Space Spat

A Battle Over Classrooms Sent Students Elsewhere and Boxes in Their Place

By BARBARA MARTINEZ