Thursday
September 20, 2001
Thanks to all the parents’ efforts, especially those sending e-mails to Chancellor Levy, the Chancellor’s Office has responded to our safety and educational concerns, and to our request that the return to Stuyvesant occur much sooner than November 1. The Chancellor has informed the PA that “The City’s Office of Emergency Management...has promised that we will get control back of the building by October 1...”, and that following a thorough cleanup of the building, we can relocate to our school shortly thereafter.
On Wednesday, September 19, the PA President was informed by our Principal and by the Chancellor’s Office that a split schedule with no overlapping periods and with 30-minute instructional periods for each school will be implemented. The PA Executive Board’s safety concerns, therefore, have now been satisfactorily addressed. The PA Board’s educational concerns, however, have been only partly addressed.
On Thursday, September 20, schedules were distributed to students with the following arrangements: Brooklyn Tech students will attend school from 7:15am-1:20pm, a total of 6 hours-5 minutes, with 37-minute academic periods, and Stuyvesant students will attend from 1:30pm-6:28pm, a total of 4 hours-58 minutes, with 26-minute academic periods.
The Board was surprised that the academic period for Stuyvesant students was decreased from 30 minutes to 26 minutes. Although all Stuyvesant students will now have classrooms to go to, it is the Board’s belief that the small amount of instruction time allocated to Stuyvesant students is of little academic value.
Here is how the revised schedule has been received by the Brooklyn Tech Parents’ Association on their website (www.bthspta.org/919parents.html): “we felt that it was patently unfair to expect Tech to bear the entire burden of Stuyvesant’s misfortune, and to savage the integrity of its own educational environment in the process....we declare again that not only is this ‘solution’ unfair and overly burdensome to Tech, but it is not in the educational interest of either school. It is absurd to believe that a 30- or even 35-minute instructional period is a valid basis for high school education, let alone education at a New York City special high school....We cannot accept a plan to accommodate the Stuyvesant students and faculty that weakens the education of the students of both schools by shortening their class periods...”
Although the Stuyvesant PA Executive Board is extremely unhappy with the 26-minute instructional period, the Board is of the opinion that, at this time, it is not a productive use of its efforts to attempt to increase the academic period by 4 minutes, but rather all efforts should be focused and directed to returning to the Stuyvesant building on or about October 1.