The DOE Inequalities Of Providing Transportation Services To The Students In The Rockaway Pennnsula.

I read with much amusement the schoolbook article on how the Principal of the elitist Scholar's Academy praised the DOE for providing yellow school buses to transport his students to their temporary digs in East New York and had an attendance rate of 60%.  By contrast, many of the schools in the Rockaway Peninsula had inadequate transportation provided by the DOE to other schools and District 27 had an overall attendance rate of 20% which includes other less affected communities like Howard Beach, Richmond Hill, Woodhaven, Jamaica, and Ozone Park !   Some Rockaway schools' attendance rates were in the single digits The question is how did the elitist Scholars Academy get yellow school buses from the DOE while the rest of the Rockaway Peninsula schools did not have enough?   The answer is very clear to me and that is that the DOE plays favorites and has different rules for different schools.  Let's compare Scholars Academy with a typical Far Rockaway school  such as Rockaway Collegiate which is part of the Far Rockaway Campus.

Scholars Academy.................White/Asian........................Black/Latino
                                      64%                                    35%

Rockaway Collegiate..........White/Asian..............Black/Latino
                                               8%                            88%     

It is obvious from the statistics that Scholars Academy has a majority White and Asian student body.  Moreover,  the school only takes students who scored 3's and 4's on the math and reading tests.  Furthermore,  these students are also screened for absences and punctuality as well before they are accepted into Scholars Academy. Furthermore, only 35% of the students qualify for free lunch meaning that the majority of students come from middle class households. Finally the schools "college readiness scores" is 90%. By contrast, Rockaway Collegiate has 60% of their students qualifying for free lunch which shows that the majority of the school's students live in poverty. Finally, the "college readiness score" is a terrible 3.4%.

Despite all the Bloomberg, Walcott, and Tweed propaganda machine claims that it is "children first".  When it comes to the Rockaway Peninsula it is the "privileged children first" and as for the rest?  They can find their own way to schools that are many miles away can't they?

            
update:  After reading blogger Doenuts commets and talking to a few other people at the Rockaway Complex, they told me that many of the high school students were encouraged to take public transportation because of fears that there were not enough buses available for the first week.  Still it would appear the DOE showed favoritism to Scholars Academy in allocating buses to the schools.