Metro

Officials vote to close 23 city schools

More than 2,000 angry parents, students and Occupy Wall Street-affiliated protesters packed a Brooklyn auditorium last night as 23 city schools were voted to be shuttered.

The vote at Brooklyn Tech HS in Fort Greene set a record for the number of schools closed by the Panel for Educational Policy in one night.

“We’re making difficult decisions — that people may or may not agree with — to make sure we’re providing quality education to our students as quickly as possible,” said Chancellor Dennis Walcott.

Fred Baptiste, the PTA vice president at PS 161 in Crown Heights, a K-8 facility whose middle school will be closed, was saddened by the vote.

“It was a great school for many years,” said Baptiste, whose kids are in the first, second and fifth grades there.

“The fact that they let it get like this is the failure of the DOE.

“From the very beginning, the deck was stacked against us.”

La-Ron Gaskin, whose daughter is an eighth-grader at Aspire Preparatory Academy in The Bronx, said the principal and teachers often work until 7 p.m. with the students.

“I’m hurt,” he said. “The staff is a dedicated staff. They were doing everything right.”

The meeting was chaotic from the beginning, as many in the crowd chanted, “Whose schools? Our Schools!”

“I don’t think it’s right how they’re going to close the school without fixing it,” said Edidiong Essien, 17, a student at Samuel Gompers Career and Technical Education HS in The Bronx.

“There’s a lot of people with a lot of passion, and a lot of people are angry,” Essien said.

Nearly all the 23 affected schools serve a greater proportion of high-needs kids — such as special-education students and those living in poverty — than the citywide average, according to an Independent Budget Office study.

But city education officials insisted the schools had been struggling for too long to be turned around without the drastic intervention of closure.

SCHOOLS SLATED FOR CLOSURE

BROOKLYN

Middle School for the Arts, 790 East New York Avenue

PS 19 Roberto Clemente, 325 South 3rd Street

PS 22, 443 St. Marks Avenue

PS 161 The Crown, 330 Crown Street (middle grades only)

PS 298 Dr. Betty Shabazz, 85 Watkins Street (middle grades only)

Satellite Three Middle School, 170 Gates Avenue

Gen. D. Chappie James Elementary School of Science, 76 Riverdale Avenue

IS 296 Anna Gonzalez, 125 Covert Street

International Arts Business School, 600 Kingston Avenue

Brooklyn Collegiate, 2021 Bergen Street (middle grades only)

Frederick Douglass Academy IV Secondary School, 1014 Lafayette Avenue (middle grades only)

Academy of Business and Community Development, 141 Macon Street

BRONX

Academy for Scholarship and Entrepreneurship, 921 East 228th Street (middle grades only)

Aspire Preparatory Middle School, 2441 Wallace Avenue

Gateway School for Environmental Research and Technology, 1980 Lafayette Avenue

Samuel Gompers Career and Technical Education HS, 455 Southern Boulevard

Grace Dodge Career and Technical Education HS, 2474 Crotona Avenue

Jane Addams HS for Academic Careers, 900 Tinton Avenue

QUEENS

PS 215 Lucretia Mott, 535 Briar Place, Far Rockaway

MANHATTAN

Manhattan Theatre Lab HS, 122 Amsterdam Avenue

Washington Irving HS, 40 Irving Place

Legacy School for Integrated Studies, 34 W 14th St

STATEN ISLAND

PS 14 Cornelius Vanderbilt, 100 Tompkins Avenue