NEW YORK— With a roaring applause Mayor Bill de Blasio entered the auditorium of Coalition School for Social Change Monday to announce his plan to turn around the city’s struggling schools.
The Education Department singled out 94 of the schools and plans to give them $150 million over the next two years to make them community schools, de Blasio said.
The selected schools are marked by the state as “Priority” or “Focus Schools” and the city is required to present a plan for their improvement.
Coalition School for Social Change is one of them. “This is a school on the move, a school getting better all the time,” de Blasio said. “You can feel it when you walk in the door.”
Yet at this school, only two out of five students manage to graduate in four years and barely three out of four are even present on any given day, 2013 data shows.
De Blasio put the blame on Michael Bloomberg’s administration, saying the school “was forced to fend for itself.”
His plan is to give the school more money to pay for one additional hour of learning every day and a host of other wrap-around services usually seen in community schools.
A community school is a strategy to invite nonprofits or businesses that can bring additional personnel into a school building. These “community partners” provide tutoring, after-school activities, mental and physical health care, and services for parents, such as workshops.
