Friday, October 06, 2006

When Tweed Attacks - Part 2 - Rikers Prep

When last I wrote about how Tweed was angry that our school refused the wonderful DOE offer of cameras in the schools. The result was to treat our school as an impact-like school. (not an impact school but flood the area with police, and arrest the students for such major crimes as jaywalking, littering, and refusing to move quick enough). I mentioned that Tweed had put us on their radar screen and made surprise visits to catch our school unprepared. The result? They found such major safety issues as:

The cafeteria tables were inadequately washed between periods.

Too many students were late to school for first period and filled up the auditorium. it doesn't matter to Tweedie-dee & Tweedie-dumb that some of these students live over two hours away and take up to three buses to get there before 8am.

Too many teachers had pictures on their door windows.

What does this have to do with safety? Beats me. However, Tweed has come up with an age-old solution to try to show that our school has safety problems. What have they done? First some history. In the past as many high schools closed down, they designated my school as one of the schools to dump the unwanted level 1 eigth graders, 8+ students, and the student with language and/or other disabilities into. After community & political pressure this year, Tweed reversed itself and at the beginning of September, my school was 240 students short, resulting in budget cuts and six ATR's. Because our school had space, all students in the Region was assigned to my school. This included students first, moving into the region, transfers due to hardships or safety issues in their old schools, and private school students going into the public schools. This variety of students is similar to the school population. However, Tweed had their secret weapon waiting in the wings. 12 overaged felons from Rikers (Jail) were released and all, yes all were sent to my school in direct violation of DOE procedures that require these felons to terrorize their home schools. Tweed just needs to wait for these felons to do their thing and cause chaos and crime in the school and then label it an "impact school".

My school is fighting back with teachers, the community, and students contacting our representatives about how Tweed's disgusting behavior is endangering the students and staff of the school. We are in the process of getting the media involved and expose Tweed for what it is, a bully that welds abusive power and stacks the deck against schools that dare to question their flawed judgement. Children first? How about Tweed's ego first and children last!

To Tweed - Shame On You!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm very sorry to hear about that. However, I don't think the folks at Tweed have a lot of shame.

It's amazing that the papers, with no substantive achievements, speak of this mayor as though he's improved the schools. Even more amazing is the LA mayor's wanting to emulate Mayor Mike.

In my school, they simply dump hundreds and hundreds of new kids. Thus far, we've been OK. But one of my colleagues says, just one fire, just one death--and that's when they'll do something about it.

Unless, of course, they simply dump so many kids that the school fails and they have to break it up.

Anonymous said...

The Tweedledees and Tweedledums are both shameful and shameless.