Westchester Square / Zerega Improvement Org

April 22, Earth Day Festival at Pelham Bay Park Playground for All Children 12-3, May 12 Fair at the Square 12-4; July 14 12-4, Playground For All Children. See you there!

Lehman High School, which for so many years was a great school, seemingly overnight became one of the worst, and is going into a federally funded turnaround program (along with 33 other schools) that will allow the Mayor to close down the school and reopen it with a different principal and 50% new teachers. Will firing teachers fix the horrible overcrowding at Lehman?

I have also just read about a Bronx elementary school where there are twice the number of kids attending than the school was built for. They shuttle back and forth during the day to a junior high school across the street for various classes , despite 4 trailers in the school yard with 25 kids per trailer. When parents complained they were told by the DOE that the answer was to ADD ANOTHER SCHOOL to the junior high school building, maybe yet another privately run but publically funded charter school. This will magically decrease the population.

School overcrowding is a huge problem, being made worse by the Bloomberg administration’s policy of jamming 3-4 schools in existing already overcrowded buildings, and yet they say it helps overcrowding. Yeah, and would you like to buy the Brooklyn Bridge too?

Also, the DOE released the ratings of 17,836 public school teachers, based solely on test scores, with the caveat that the data are flawed and unreliable. But the names and ratings were published in the NY Post despite this causing a huge controversy. Over the next few days there were 2 items of interest in the local press:

• The “fact” that the” worst” teachers were found at the lowest ranking schools and the same with the “best” teacher ratings and school rankings, which somehow vindicated the release of the teacher ratings. The Mayor positively crowed about it.
• That teacher ratings for 114 charter school teachers were released. The headline was “Way Off the Charts!” gushing about how there was a higher percentage of “good” teachers in charter schools (12% vs 5% rated “high”) based on this tiny data sample.

Let’s deal with the first point: Both school rankings and teacher ratings are based on the same thing-test scores. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see why the two correlate exactly. When you consider 2 other points, that the test scores have been found to be unreliable due to widespread cheating and DOE doctoring the tests to pump up the Bloomberg administration’s image (this of course begs the question of the usefulness of education being only reduced to a test score in the first place), these ratings are really worthless. And yet in the new evaluation system agreed upon by the city and state tests are allegedly 40% of the score and “other”60%, but any teacher whose pupils do not do well on the tests automatically gets an ineffective rating. So couldn’t they at least be honest and say all they care about are the scores, and the teachers, kids, and education be damned?

Second: How can you compare percentages when the numbers being compared are so different?  114 vs 17,836? And the data were released voluntarily from the charter schools? Some of the stats in the article for public schools vs charters are as follows: High: 906  (5%) v  14 (12%); low: 899 (5%) vs 5 (4%); average: 8,981 (50%) vs 39 (34%), respectively. Even if it wasn’t ridiculous to compare such a huge number with such a miniscule skewed sample, these stats are nothing to brag about.  If the FDA allowed drug companies to manipulate and cherry pick their safety data like this we would all be in the hospital.

The Bloomberg administration is systematically dismantling the public school system in order to privatize it and make schools profit centers, and he is succeeding. People are constantly surprised and outraged that the DOE is starving public schools of resources and space, declaring them failing, even when there is little evidence for this, and shutting them down to reopen as charters. Don’t you see? That was the whole idea to begin with. Not to save the public schools, but to destroy them.

These are hard words, but when you look at the actions of the DOE since Bloomberg became the despot in charge of the public school system there is no other conclusion that can be drawn; actions speak louder than words and their actions have been deafening. And the children suffer; their future put in jeopardy through this chaos and instability.

When you add this to the chaos he has brought to the homelessness situation in NY, all I can say is: Be afraid, be very afraid.

On a very different note, I would like to give my most heartfelt congratulations to the Association of the Merchants and Professionals of Westchester Square, and particularly John Bonizio, the Chair of the BID Steering Committee,  and Councilman James Vacca on the Square becoming the 9th BID district in the Bronx. This will have a major positive impact on the Square, and many people worked very patiently and long to secure this victory.

I would like also to congratulate the Westchester Square Civic Association on their receipt of a grant from the Citizen’s Committee of New York. I hope we can work together in the future for the benefit of us all.

WSZIO’s season is about to begin so here is our tentative schedule for the spring: March 10 we will be in the Westchester Square Branch library window doing a display about butterflies and spring; March 31 we will be face painting at the Bartow Pell Mansion’s Easter event; April 7 back at the library for spring arts and crafts; April 22 we will be doing arts and crafts and face painting at the Earth Day festival in Pelham Bay Park; May 12 Mother’s Day arts and crafts at the library. We will add events as we book them.

It is wonderful to see all our hopes and dreams for Westchester Square begin to come to fruition. The establishment of the BID is one of the major pieces of the pie, and we also have the completion of the renovation of Owen Dolan to look forward to. I will leave you today with these words from Margaret Mead:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

There has never been a better time to become an activist. Stand up, speak up, be counted.

TTFN.