After months of intense debate, a citywide education panel voted Wednesday night to close a Brooklyn school with dwindling enrollment and open a new one for struggling readers in its place.

The city’s Panel for Educational Policy nearly unanimously approved the Education Department’s plan to phase out M.S. 394, a prekindergarten-8 school in Crown Heights, over the next three school years.

And the panel greenlit opening a new school, the Central Brooklyn Literacy Academy, in the same building. It will be the second city-operated public school designed to serve students with dyslexia and other reading challenges.

City officials contend that M.S. 394 is too small — and low performing — to stay open. Two hundred students currently attend, 41% fewer than five years ago. The school’s reading and math proficiency rates in grades 3-8, at 23% and 27% respectively, are less than half the city averages last year.

The Education Department is under pressure to address a growing number of tiny schools, which are expensive to operate and struggle to offer a full range of programs because funding is tied to student headcount. In recent years, officials have ramped up school mergers, which are often less contentious than closures. M.S. 394 represents only the third school closure to be approved under Mayor Eric Adams.

The M.S. 394 proposal drew intense pushback, including a rare rebuke from the school’s principal, prompting some panel members to call for a broader conversation about how to improve the closure process to incorporate community input earlier.

“To be excluded from discussions about the very future of my school feels like a missed opportunity to explore creative, viable solutions together,” M.S. 394 Principal Sojourner Welch-David said in December before a closure vote that was ultimately postponed. “I just want to say this to the chancellor: Please allow principals [to] have a seat at the table so they’re not standing here like me trying to fight for my school.”

Read the Full Article