Panel approves charter school expansion within Red Hook’s P.S. 15

Just after the city’s Panel for Educational Policy voted to close 19 under performing public schools in the early hours of Wednesday morning, the group decided to allow a Red Hook charter school to expand. The PAVE Academy, which has occupied part of P.S. 15 — the Patrick F. Daly School — on Sullivan Street since it opened in 2008, is increasing the size of its kindergarten-through-second-grade program to include children through the eighth grade. The Department of Education had previously said PAVE could grow in that space by one grade per year, for the next five years. This panel’s vote gives PAVE more space within P.S. 15 for just three more years, after which it will have to find its own facility. Still, teachers and community members’ opposition made the decision contentious. “You know damn well that building won’t be built in three years,” said Julie Cavanaugh, a teacher at P.S. 15, who said she believes the decision is part of an effort by Mayor Bloomberg to move the city away from public schooling. “It will be a whole other ordeal and a whole other fight.” [Brooklyn Paper]