questions

The Proposed Charter for the PAVE Charter School was apparently presented to and voted on by the Board of Regents in January of this year. There was a hearing regarding this school, hosted/coordinated by CSD15 and the NYC DOE on September 20, 2007. I'm assuming that the proposal took considerable time to prepare and develop before it was ready to present to the official organizations that make these decisions; why wasn't the Red Hook community informed about the process a long time ago? The first time most people heard anything about this was in February of 2008, at the point when the Department of Education decided that this charter school would be housed in an existing school that has made tremendous progress and received high grades. I also find it ironic and interesting that this decision was presented just as P.S. 15's schoolyards have undergone a substantial overhaul in conjunction with several local organizations including the Trust for Public Land; P.S. 15 certainly presents a very desirable location for a new school that may expand and engulf it.

In the proposal, mention is made of an alternate location - one that is newly constructed and has 20,000 square feet available. I didn't notice any mention of an exact address. Why isn't the PAVE Charter School using that location instead of P.S. 15?

It's fairly obvious that Red Hook has been the target neighborhood for this school all along. Why hasn't the community been made aware of it sooner? It sounds as though only local organizations, rather than residents, have known about it.

Where does PAVE get its projected enrollment figures from? The proposal mentions 88 students for the first year. Are these real numbers, or "guesstimates" that exist only on paper? If they're real figures, what families have been approached and made a commitment to the new school?

Not to be a snark, but what is VIBRANCE? Is that even a real word? Sorry, I don't have a dictionary on hand at the moment, or I'd go look it up.

How are the assessment techniques mentioned in the proposal different from those used by regular public schools?

Are PAVE's funding sources the same ones used by P.S. 15? Is there going to be a conflict of interest over funding sources if PAVE is housed in P.S. 15 - which school gets the funds?

Will any of the funding received by the PAVE school be applied to maintaining the P.S. 15 site in terms of buildings and grounds expenditures? If their students break windows, clog plumbing, use the lunchroom, drop debris, cause wear and tear to the P.S. 15 facilities, etc., who pays the custodial staff to clean up after them and make repairs? I don't see any specific mention made of that category of expenditure; it looks like they've only accounted for the expenses connected with running the administrative and teaching end of their operation.

That's it for now, but I'm sure I can think of many more questions - and so can anyone reading this blog. PLEASE POST YOUR COMMENTS! Your feedback is relevant, important and necessary.

Thanks for reading.

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