QUEENS —Two schools that were on the Department of Education’s list to be phased out were spared from the chopping block after showing signs of progress, the DOE said.
Some 20 other schools are still in danger of being phased out; two more are proposed to be closed, and two others might be truncated.
The two schools that were taken off the list are P.S. 140 Edward K. Ellington in Jamaica and Herbert H. Lehman High School in The Bronx.
The DOE said that after conducting public hearings, which aimed to get feedback from school communities, it decided that the two schools would be kept open.
In an e-mail, the DOE said that the proposal to phase out P.S. 140 has been withdrawn because “students, parents, and community leaders pointed to promising quantitative and qualitative signs that suggest this school can get on the right track.”
At Lehman High School, the DOE wrote, “the school community pointed to promising signs of academic improvement and described a new energy in the building.”
The Bronx high school will go through "an enrollment reduction” instead, according to the DOE.
The fate of the rest of the endangered schools will be decided during upcoming Panel for Educational Policy meetings, the DOE said.
