Success Academy parents Thursday rightly rejected♓ Team de Blasio’s bogus 💫offer of space for a new Queens middle school: A tour of the site showed that it falls short of the city Department 🤪of Education’s descriptions, short of what state law requires of public school buildi♒ngs and short of what the kids need.
Three years after Success first asked for the space, DOE a week ago presented𓄧 the defunct Our Lady’s Catholic Academy on Rockaway Boulevard as the solution. But it was telling outright lies.
For starters, it claimed the building can handle 500 students. In fact, it’s just 33,000 square feet — and state Education Department guidelines dictate that every pupil should get 100 square feet, so max capacity is only 330 kids — less than what Success needs starting in fﷺall 2021, let alone the 700 seats it needs the year after.
Plus, the 70-year-old school needs millions in work to meet st𝐆ate public school minimums: complete electrical and mechanical overhauls, plus repairs of water damage and restoration of all interiors and lighting.
And there’s no gym or auditorium.
Oh, the site would also force many fifth- and si꧂xth-graders into commutes of over an hour, each way, with multiple transfers.
The DOE claims it can’t offer anything better because of overcrowding in Queens. But its own records show that’s another lie — at least two public school buildi🔯ngs in the borough have 700 or more open seats, and several more have at least 500.
Plus, if Mayor Bill de Blasio’s minions continue to deny Success the space it needs, at least 100 of the net﷽work’s Queens students will be forced back to regular “zoned” public schools that are already overcrowded.
De Blasio pretends that the plainly available spaces wouldn’t work just bﷺecause Success kids would be sharing a building with regular public school students. But the leaders of hundreds of public schools across the city, charter and not, make such “co-locations” work just fine.
The truth is that the mayor simply won’t set aside his political agenda to let these Success scholars — overwhelming low-income kids of color — get their dream education. Heck, he can’t even bother to worℱk up any c🎉onvincing lies about it.