Brooklyn charter school to squeeze space from autism program

The city’s plan to move a Sunset Park charter school into Carroll Gardens’ P.S. 32 will steal space away from a widely regarded program for autistic students, the Brooklyn Paper reported. The 300-seat Brooklyn Prospect Charter School is slated to get 12 classrooms at the 46-classroom P.S. 32 building, which is also currently shared with the New Horizons Middle School. P.S. 32 has 500 students, 40 of whom participate in the Nest program, which integrates autistic students into classrooms but also pulls them out into separate groups to work on socialization and behavioral exercises. There won’t be space for those separate groups once the charter school moves in. The city, whose Panel for Education Policy is slated to for on the relocation April 28, said Brooklyn Prospect will only take temporary shelter in P.S. 32, and will move permanently to a gowanus home on Douglass Street and Third Avenue by August 1, 2012. [Brooklyn Paper]