It’s almost September — do you know where your child’s school is?
Education officials are playing a big game of musical schools this summer — moving 91 schools into buildings that didn’t house them last year.
While the bulk involves new schools or replacements for others being phased out, many of the other relocations involve schools being moved for the second time or into buildings that can house them for only a year.
The rejiggering is most troubling to parents whose kids are at schools that are moving as far as six miles away from their old location — sometimes even across school-district lines.
“We’re very angry,” said Pedro Llanos of Washington Heights, whose 17-year-old son, Jihad Brown, will be a senior at Coalition School for Social Change.
Because the high school lost its lease, it is moving from its Midtown home at West 58th Street near Broadway to 120th Street and First Avenue in East Harlem — an area that parents and students say is notorious for gangs and violence.
“That’s a drastic move,” said Llanos, who adds that there has been a significant exodus of students from the school because of it. He said his son “is losing friends. He’s losing teachers who he really loved and respected.”
In The Bronx, parents at the Bronx Early College Academy said they aren’t irate just because the school is moving six miles — from Riverdale to the South Bronx — but also because it will be 1½ miles farther from Lehman College, where their kids are supposed to be taking classes.
Officials have had two years to find a site for the growing seventh- to-ninth-grade school. While Department of Education officials said shuttle-bus service was planned for the 3½-mile trip to Lehman College this year, parents said they were told last week that buses wouldn’t be running until 2011.
“We’re very outraged because this is not what was promised to us,” said Namina Bah, whose son, Lamrala, will be a ninth-grader there this year.
The Department of Education says the amount of movement among schools is fairly typical.
“Given the constraints that the market presented us, we actually think at the end that it will be a very positive thing,” John White, head of the DOE’s office of portfolio development, said of Coalition.
He said the building in East Harlem offers better opportunities for after-school sports, science labs and other programs.
“In many cases, these moves are the result of our urgency to provide high-quality educational options for families where, too often, that has not been the case,” he said. “While we have the space, we’re not going to wait.”