By Leslie Albrecht
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
UPPER WEST SIDE — Parents fighting a charter school's plan to open on the Upper West Side will rally before a Tuesday night hearing on whether to put the charter school inside the Brandeis Educational Campus on West 84th Street.
The rally will be the latest in a series of protests against Success Charter Network's attempt to open a new school called Upper West Success Academy in District 3, which stretches from West 59th Street to West 122nd Street.
Despite the vocal opposition, roughly 600 students have applied for seats at Upper West Success Academy. Charter school officials say Upper West Success Academy will provide high-quality public school alternatives in a neighborhood where some of the best public schools, such as P.S. 87, are severely overcrowded.
Organizers say the rally is a chance for them to stick up for the Upper West Side's existing public schools, which they worry could suffer if Upper West Success Academy moves into the neighborhood.
"The opposition isn’t simply a knee jerk reaction to charter versus non-charter, there are specific and real life issues that will affect the education that will be offered to students," said Mark Diller, co-chair of Community Board 7's education committee.
Opponents charge that Upper West Success Academy will worsen the neighborhood's over-crowding problem by attracting more students from outside the district. They also worry the charter school will drain resources away from existing public schools, especiallly Frank McCourt High School, the newest of five high schools inside the Brandeis building.
Parents worry that sharing space with Upper West Success Academy could mean losing access to some of Frank McCourt High School's most valuable resources, such as a ceramics studio with a kiln, a blackbox theater and choral rehearsal room, said Lisa Steglich, a member of Frank McCourt High School's PTA.
"It’s a wonderful facility, we have great teachers and enthusiastic students and we want to be able to continue on our path," Steglich said. "We don’t want to be restricted on how we can grow."
But Upper West Success Academy officials and the Department of Education say there's plenty of room in the Brandeis building for more students. One of the five high schools in the building is closing at the end of 2012, which will leave at least 300 unused seats, according to DOE documents.
The DOE proposed putting Upper West Success Academy inside the Brandeis Educational Campus after plans to open the charter school inside two other existing Upper West Side public schools met with fierce resistance.
Tuesday's hearing, scheduled for 6 p.m. at the Brandeis campus at 145 W. 84th Street, is the public's chance to weigh in on that plan, known as "co-location." The city's Panel for Educational Policy will vote on the co-location on Feb. 1.
The Department of Education has received about 140 comments on the proposed co-location, which DOE spokesman Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld said was a higher-than-average amount.
