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Lefferts Gardens Charter School to Fight Closure With Appeal and Petition

 The Lefferts Gardens Charter School, co-located at 601 Parkside Ave. with P.S. 92, is facing closure next year.
The Lefferts Gardens Charter School, co-located at 601 Parkside Ave. with P.S. 92, is facing closure next year.
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DNAinfo/Rachel Holliday Smith

PROSPECT-LEFFERTS GARDENS — Parents and friends of a neighborhood charter school set to close at the end of this academic year are gearing up to fight the decision with an official appeal to the city's Department of Education and a petition campaign, they said.

The board of trustees at the Lefferts Gardens Charter School said they’ve submitted an intent to appeal the DOE’s decision to not renew the school’s charter when it expires this June, as announced by the city last Friday.

In justifying the closure, the education department cited the school’s low state test scores in English Language Arts and math. In a statement, the DOE says it gave the school “clear benchmarks to improve student performance” when LGCS’ charter was extended by a year and a half last year, which they did not meet.

 The charter school opened in 2010 and has a co-teaching model, with two teachers in each classroom. Pictured is the classroom of fifth grade teacher Breanne Church who said her
The charter school opened in 2010 and has a co-teaching model, with two teachers in each classroom. Pictured is the classroom of fifth grade teacher Breanne Church who said her "heart was broken" by the news that the Department of Education will not renew the school's charter next year.
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Breanne Church

But Tim Pratt, secretary on the LGCS board of trustees, says it was “virtually impossible to meet those benchmarks,” given that the school had only one round of state test scores to show improvement.

“This renewal [decision], basically, is based on how our kids did on the state exam last April. It had nothing to do with anything else,” he said.

Parents and teachers at the school echoed the sentiment, deploring the emphasis placed on state exams for evaluating the charter school, co-located with P.S. 92 on Parkside Avenue in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens since 2010.

“Schools are not test factories,” said Richard Otto, father to a LGCS fifth grader and a former public school teacher in District 17, where the charter school is located.

“You would never go into the school and think this is a struggling school,” he said of LGCS, which he applauded for its rigorous reading and writing assignments, teachers’ smart responses to behavioral problems and a focus on the arts, apparent from artwork displayed all over its halls.

“This school is blossoming. I see amazing kids all over the place, an amazing administration,” he said.

Otto and his wife, Annalisa Riordan, wrote an online petition to reverse the closure decision as soon as they heard the announcement last Friday; less than a week after the news came down, nearly 400 people had signed the document.

One of those who added her name to the petition is Breanne Church, a fifth grade special education teacher at LGCS, who said her “heart was broken” when she heard the news.

“Our kids, our parents, our staff, our principal are all wonderful people and we’re all very close,” she said. “I was devastated.”

Though she admits LGCS’ test scores “were not optimal” in the past year, she and others remained optimistic the school’s scores “wouldn’t be the sole factor for our closure,” especially given recent backlash over Common Core standards.

“It’s an excruciating thing to watch a kid take that test,” she said. “I don’t think that that is, in any way shape or form, a gauge for our students’ learning success.”

The DOE said an appeal decision for the school will be made in April, adding that the department “will work closely with the families and students in these schools to ensure they are enrolled in a school for next year” if the closure is made permanent.

LGCS wouldn’t be alone in fighting the closure. Two other Brooklyn charter schools slated for closure by the DOE this year — the Fahari Academy Charter School in Flatbush and Williamsburg Charter High School — remain open during the appeals process, according to Chalkbeat New York.

And the LGCS community says they’re committed to keeping the school open. As a first step, Otto is hoping to get 100 percent of the parents at the school to sign the online petition for LGCS.

“We’ve got to show the Chancellor that we believe in this school, we love this school and we think this school is a nurturing environment for our children,” he said.

“Our community is going to stick together through this until we either get to stay open or they deny our appeal,” said Church, the fifth grade teacher. “We are going to stand up for ourselves for sure.”