I went to one of these "small high schools" Its complete garbage. We had 100 students in a grade, but still had class sizes of 30 on average. The previous poster is incorrect however that the students in the big high school get transferred in. What they do is phase out the school, so if your a freshman in their school now, you're the last graduating class of the school, while the new schools recruit their own freshman. Not like it matters because instead of having 1 big zone school, all the board of ed is doing is setting up 3 or 4 small zone schools.

To counteract this, what the school does is try to recruit the smarter students who otherwise would have gone to better schools in Manhattan in order to boost their numbers. In fact, I remember the school was proudly showing off that the school had accelerated students in math, but it was initially only 2 of us that they set a class up for after people started complaining on the internet. that class peaked in size to 9 btw.

Essentially, the small schools spend a lot of time competing against each other for funding. It's at the point where a school would need to use equipment that the board of ed delegated to one school rather than handing them out equally simply because the box full of stuff was on their floor, and the principle of that school will refuse to give out those material, and the principles of the other schools will be forced to ask for more taxpayer money to buy the materials they're missing. Additionally if a class is offered at another school in the building that a student needs, some principles will go out of their way to veto the child continuing their education because they're afraid that if they don't pass, then the student will lower their numbers and thus could adversely effect the school budget.

Lastly, my small school had a high teacher turn over rate. I swear to god in four years the school only had 1 original teacher left, and most went on to bigger and better things a year or two after teaching in the school. The reason for this is the red tape mindfuck I detailed in the last paragraph. Its bad enough when you have disruptive unruly children to contend with, but when you can't get the materials you need because they system won't let you because they're on another floor, its so frustrating that you honestly can't be bothered. Plus, with the way the school was structured, you had two teachers for each subject, and those two teachers would be labeled co-heads of the department. This meant that if ANYTHING bad happened in this department, IE kids didn't learn, it was their heads, not only as teachers, but as department leaders. The fact that the administration became so hands off that they essentially asked the teachers to run the school for them shows just how disorganized and chaotic the small school system is.

Really, if you have a kid and you have the misfortune of having to send them to a public high school, keep them out of the small schools. Honestly all they are now is a political ploy and a method of burying the data for issues in schools.

I like that graphic. Cute!

But hey, whattup with multiple smaller schools inside one big building? Doesn't that duplicate a lot of personnel, like office workers and such? I think it's either silly or a scam.

So taking these schools away is the best way to keep kids in schools?

Good thing Bllomie has set aside $50 million for projects like restoring a public outdoor pool for two months of use per year.

Idiot Mayor.

Why can't you independent thinkers understand that Bloomberg spend over 100 million of his money to be our mayor because he wants to serve us? Why can't you informed voters understand that he knows better than you all because he is a billionaire and you aren't. It about progress folks not politics.

This closing down big schools to make smaller ones is a load of crap. The Beach Channel student is right on. All of the same students are just assigned to the smaller school "communities" in the same frickin' building. The only thing that changes is it adds a layer of administration between the overall principal, who is the only one with the authority to hire and fire teachers and administrators and the lower administration. They stick in a small school principal that has very little authority.

Additionally, a lot of the schools that are closing down are dumping schools. Meaning they either get a lot of zoned students OR it's one of those schools that are a school of last resort for those kids who didn't have a soccer mom managing their school applications. Either way they don't have a lot of choice as to who is in their student body. Typically, they get all the kids that are failing in the first place. Hard to meet average standards when the kids in the school are all below average academically.

And don't even get me started on how all of this works within our class (eg caste) system. Working class kids get a working class school. Upper Middle class kids get an upper middle class school. Period. End of discussion.

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