Less than a week after dropping plans to house a new Arabic-language secondary school inside a Brooklyn elementary-school building, the city Department of Education yesterday announced a new home for it.
The Khalil Gibran International Academy will open this fall in a Boerum Hill building with two other schools: the Brooklyn HS of the Arts and the Math and Science Exploratory School.
The building at 345 Dean St. is just two blocks south of an Arab-American enclave along Atlantic Avenue that features scores of shops, halal butchers and the Al Farooq mosque.
A department spokeswoman described the site as “suitable” and said the proximity to an area heavily populated by Arab-Americans was a factor in the school’s siting, along with the amount of space available in the building.
But the department has scaled back the number of students it will permit to enroll at Khalil Gibran from 81 to “up to 60,” and said the school would only need three rooms to operate.
“We are confident that the three schools can share space effectively and that the [high school] and the [middle school] will be able to maintain their current programs during the two years that [Khalil Gibran] is housed in the building,” said the spokeswoman, Melody Meyer.
The school, which will open with only a sixth grade and expand annually to the 12th grade, has been a lightning rod for controversy since its inception earlier this year.
Some critics have painted the school as a disguised “madrassa,” an Islamic religious institution that teaches the Koran. Its principal, Debbie Almontaser, and the city insist the school will be modeled after the handful of other dual-language public schools.
But the brunt of opposition came from parents and educators at PS 282, where Khalil Gibran was to have been housed, who argued that it would overcrowd the building and cost their children valuable space.
According to the latest available data, the HS of the Arts is operating at 47 percent capacity and the Math and Science middle school at 71 percent.
“This is something we can easily accommodate. We have the room and we’re excited about it,” said Robert Finley, principal at HS of the Arts, which last year began hosting the middle school. “I don’t believe there will be any opposition from the parent community.”
Some of his students had a different perspective.
“Each year, less and less of our school is ours,” said sophomore Lexis Bugett, 16. “Since the middle school came in a lot of our programs were cut. Anytime we ask why we don’t have something anymore they tell us it’s because of the middle school.”