“I’m tired of begging,” Jamaal Salah told the Panel for Education Policy on Wednesday night, and he was right to be furious. All he and the crowd of angry parents who joined him want is for the city Department of Education to name a school building that can house a new Success Academy middle school in Queens this fall — so that their children can continue to receive a first-rate education.
“Success Academy is high on the list at everything we do,” Salah noted. “Minority students are doing some things in this city that you have never seen before.”
The Success network first put in its request for this space more than three years ago. The DOE and City Hall have given nothing but empty promises and dubious excuses ever since.
The city only has until March 6 to publicly identify the space or the prolonged process for “ratifying” that decision won’t finish in time for the school to open in September.
Meanwhile, insiders get what they need for their kids: The new DOE deputy schools chief, Cheryl Watson-Harris, managed to get her two children into two of the city’s most desirable schools, one of them even after the application period had closed.
“It’s a huge hypocrisy,” Salah said. “We just want our piece of the pie. We want to send our kids to the best schools in our area. That’s all we want.”
The parents have tried everything. One got through to the call-in for Brian Lehrer’s show Feb. 20, directly asking Mayor Bill de Blasio what the issue was with the Success space. “I don’t know the specifics around this school and this location,” he lied.
Yes, lied: The mayor has publicly discussed this situation many times, even on past Lehrer shows. Heck, in an October NY1 interview with Errol Louis, de Blasio gave a long discourse on the difficulties of this process.
But then he said, “When the DOE says to these schools, ‘We’re gonna have a space for you,’ they live by it.”
Make good on your word, Mr. Mayor.



