New York City education officials said on Thursday that they planned to close an additional four schools for poor performance, including Jamaica High, a 1,500-student school that has been open since 1927.
The announcement brought to eight the number of schools that education officials said this week that they planned to phase out, beginning in the next school year. More such announcements are expected over the coming weeks.
As part of his effort to reshape the school system, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has announced the closing of 91 additional schools for poor performance since 2002, generally replacing them with clusters of smaller schools, often in the building where the failed school once operated.
Enrollment at Jamaica High School has been falling — it was 2,500 a decade ago — and its graduation rate has remained below 50 percent for years, education officials said. Under the city’s proposal, the school will stop accepting ninth graders in 2010 and slowly shrink.
Also due to be phased out is Public School 332, the Charles H. Houston School in Brooklyn, an elementary and middle school that earned a C on its school report card the past three years. School officials said that its below-par scores on standardized English and math tests and the low demand for the school argued for its closing. Its enrollment this year slipped to 560, from 860 a decade ago.
In Manhattan, officials plan to phase out the Academy of Collaborative Education, a 254-student middle school on West 134th Street opened in 2006 under the Bloomberg administration’s small-school initiative. Along with poor academic performance, safety was a key concern: the school was named to the state’s list of “persistently dangerous” schools in August 2009, education officials said.
The School for Community Research and Learning on Lafayette Avenue in the Bronx, a 387-student high school opened in 2003, is also scheduled to be phased out. It had a graduation rate below 50 percent and earned the “the lowest possible C” on its 2008-9 school report card, school officials said in an e-mail message to reporters.
As a result of the mayoral control law passed in Albany this summer, a 45-day public comment period and a public hearing must take place before the phase-out plans can be adopted. They will be voted on in January by the Panel for Educational Policy, which is controlled by the mayor, virtually assuring that they will be adopted.