Beset for decades by the under-achievement of its students and a legacy of violent crime on and around its campus on the Woodhaven-Brooklyn border, Franklin K. Lane High School will begin closing next fall.The Department of Education announced on Friday the phasing out of the school along with 13 others throughout the city, including Far Rockaway High School.
The releasing of school grades from the DOE’s controversial progress reports in November, which measured standardized test scores, attendance records and responses to parent and student surveys, preceded the announcements. Franklin K. Lane, which was built in 1936 and draws students from both Queens and Brooklyn, received a D.
The high school graduated 32.6 percent of its seniors last spring, down from 39.1 percent the previous year. With students at the school perennially scoring below average on standardized tests, interest in attending Franklin K. Lane has flagged. The size of its student body fell from 3,400 students in the 2004-2005 school year to 2,600 students this year.
According to Melody Meyer, a department spokeswoman, “The only thing that will help the school is to have a clean start.”
In an explanatory piece published in the New York Post on Monday, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein wrote of Lane: “A new principal started at the school a few years ago. He’s done good work in a tough situation, but the challenge of reforming this particular environment from the inside out would have been too long and too slow.”
Instability and violence plagued the school long before current Principal Evan Ahern, whose office deferred comment on the announcement to the city, took control. In 1969 three youths mercilessly beat a chemistry teacher and lit him on fire, prompting responses from then-Police Commissioner Howard Leary and then-Mayor John Lindsay.
During one four-year stretch in the 1990s, five different principals oversaw the school. In January 2003 a 16-member state panel threatened to revoke the school’s charter and laid out a three-year plan for Franklin K. Lane, addressing everything from the instability of its administration to the poor academic performance of its students. Months later, a fight just off the school’s property eventually resulted in two students being shot.
In 2004, the city settled a federal lawsuit with plaintiffs charging that the school illegally pushed out hundreds of struggling students in order to raise its graduation rate.
On Friday, the parents of Franklin K. Lane students received letters informing them that the school will not accept ninth-graders next fall. Students currently in Franklin K. Lane will be given the opportunity to graduate from the school as it decreases in size year by year.
Although Meyer said that department officials held a meeting with parents on Saturday morning, it remains unclear how many attended or how effective the meeting proved less than 24 hours after the announcement of the pending closure. In the next five weeks, two more meetings will be held to keep parents abreast of the changes they can expect to see.
Meyer said that several small schools will eventually occupy the Franklin K. Lane campus and that at least one will open for freshmen by September. The department is currently evaluating 135 different small school proposals, but may opt to expand one of the smaller learning communities currently in the school.
Small schools typically accept 110 students each year. Meyer said that six small schools will certainly not open on the campus by the fall. For this reason, it appears that not enough seats will open up for the approximately 650 freshman that would have enrolled at Franklin K. Lane.
Councilman Joseph Addabbo Jr. (D-Howard Beach), whose district includes J.H.S. 202 and J.H.S. 210, which feed into Franklin K. Lane, questioned where students will go.
“All of these students can’t be going to John Adams (High School in Ozone Park) or some high school in Brooklyn,” he said. “We just aren’t blessed with that much space.”
By June he expects an announcement about the small schools that will occupy the campus.
The small learning communities on which independent, small schools may be based started in 2005 at Lane. They were seen as a way to decrease class size and allow students to forge mentoring relationships with fellow students and teachers.
Many describe the programs as successes, and the school fielded a varsity football team last fall for the first time in 18 years. In 2005, the city removed Franklin K. Lane from its list of Impact Schools, which it compiled to identify those in need of additional police and security presence to address chronic crime issues.
But its reputation in South Queens proved too hard to shed. David Quintana, an Ozone Park resident whose daughter was zoned to attend the school, instead sent her to a high school on the Martin Luther King Jr. small school campus in Manhattan.
“I’m familiar with the school system. I knew I would find some way to get her out of there,” Quintana said. “I’m a big guy and even I feel a little leery around there (Franklin K. Lane).”
He also harbors doubts about the city’s ability to make change at the campus.
“They’ll put a new name on it and bring in a new staff,” Quintana said. “Does that really turn around the school? I don’t know.”
