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The DNAinfo archives brought to you by WNYC.
Read the press release here.

Four New Bed-Stuy and Ocean Hill Schools to Co-locate With Existing Schools

BEDFORD-STUYVESANT — Four new Bedford-Stuyvesant and Ocean Hill schools set to open in 2013 will do so in existing school buildings, according to the city.

P.S. 73, P.S. 44 and Boys and Girls High School will each share space with new schools come September, according to a release from the Mayor's office on Tuesday.

Brooklyn Landmark Elementary and the Brooklyn Environmental School will both open at 251 MacDougal St. in Ocean Hill, which currently houses P.S. 73, the Thomas S. Boyland School, according to the Department of Education.

Rigorous new charter school UNITY Prep will open inside P.S. 44 at 432 Monroe St. in Bed-Stuy, while a transfer school called the Research and Service High School will open in Boys and Girls High School, at 1700 Fulton St., according to the DOE's website.

The announcement of the four new schools came as part of a larger announcement that the city was opening 78 new schools in the fall.

"The 78 schools announced today are a part of our commitment to improving public education in New York City," said Mayor Bloomberg. "Our administration has created a record number of schools and programs for our students – which have helped lead to record gains."

Representatives from the newly-occupied schools were not immediately available for comment.

All of the occupied schools are below full capacity, according to statistics from the School Construction Authority. But at P.S. 44, which received a B on its latest progress report, Unity Prep administrators said that there were concerns from parents and teachers about the colocation.

"Everybody's kind of resistant to change at first," Hemanth Venkataraman, the charter school's director of culture and enrichment, told DNAinfo.com New York in March. "We would never have come into this building if there was even a quesiton of impinging on another organization's space. It would never have happened."

The latest school progress reports also show that the other two schools being used to house the new programs are struggling.

P.S. 73 received an F on its latest progress report, falling within the bottom three percent of schools it was compared to. It is currently being phased out as part of the city's last batch of closures

Boys and Girls High School also failed its latest progress report, falling in the bottom one percent of all city high schools. The school has a four-year graduation rate of 38.6 percent, and a six-year graduation rate of 55.9 percent.

Those problems led to some public concern that the school would close, but thanks to some powerful political allies, the school escaped the chopping block this year, according to a report at Gotham Schools.