NYC- The PTA of NEST+m (New Explorations into Science, Technology and Math) has filed a lawsuit against the NYS Board of Regents and the Department of Education (DOE) in response to Chancellor Klein's move to squeeze the educationally unsound Ross Global Academy Charter School into NEST+m's already crowded public school building. Chancellor Klein has taken this action against NEST+m, New York City's first and only K-12 College Prep Public School, despite its having, after only four years of existence, achieved perfect to near perfect scores on every standardized test at every grade level* and a 100 percent graduation rate in its high school, which subsequently has had students admitted to Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Wesleyan, Yale and other outstanding post-secondary schools.

The DOE's plan to invade NEST+m's space, which it hatched in concert with the Hamptons-based Ross Institute and New York University, has been in the works for two years. NEST+m only learned of it on March 28th due to a leak to the NEST+m Parent-Teacher Association. Since then NEST+m representatives have met with State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Chancellor Klein, and DOE officials and, using the actual 2006-07 NEST+m enrollment figures and architectural diagrams, demonstrated that NEST+m – and any incoming school – would be seriously compromised by cramming the two into the building.

At the meeting, Chancellor Klein and Garth Harries, who heads new school development at the DOE, had no plan – either concrete or conceptual – as to how the two schools could effectively share the building. Instead representatives from Speaker Silver's office and NEST+m were told how many classrooms and how much office space the charter school would require. After conceding that it would be impossible to find any space on the lower floor, which houses NEST+m's elementary school, Mr. Harries recommended locating the charter school's initial classes, which will comprise primary and middle grades, on the upper floor, where NEST+m's high school is located. He suggested that NEST+m “figure it out.”

After an analysis, NEST+m administrators figured this out: To accommodate the charter school's needs as “calculated” by the DOE, NEST+m's high school would have to eliminate its honors, Regents, language and Advanced Placement classes, as well as electives and SAT prep, while increasing its class size from 20 to 35. The college preparatory school's students would not be left with a skeletal program of core classes – rather they would be left lacking the courses required for admission to the sort of post-secondary schools for which they came to NEST+m to ready themselves. Klein and Harries, meanwhile, have insisted that this move will not adversely affect NEST+m, yet how can a college preparatory high school exist if it can't offer the very classes that will ensure its students consideration for college placement?

Not only will the Ross thereby destroy NEST+, but it will do so while "double dipping" into public funds. Ross claims in its Charter application that it is able to cap its class size at 20 (rather than 24) as a result of the savings garnered at the rate of $1.00 per year in rent it intends to pay the DOE for use of NEST+m's physical plant, facilities, custodians, electricity, etc. as well as the $600,000 worth of facility renovations which NEST+m parents paid for, while Ross still collects funds from the Charter School Payments Act intended to cover these services. The Charter application also indicates that Ross is actually able to pay for a market rate lease, but that this will require increasing class size to 24 - a hardship indeed, while their unwillingness to compromise eliminates critical classes for our high school and pushes NEST+m's class size to 35.

Meanwhile, NEST+ m parents and students continue to urge their community and its leaders to take action to convince the Ross Global Academy Charter School that it would be best for all concerned if Ross were able to incubate in a place where it can do just that - incubate, not overtake. After all, how can a "Global" school make its very first act a Colonial takeover? How does one fit that into the curriculum?