Franklin K. Lane High School will house two new small schools in the fall. (Michael O’Kane) The long-troubled Franklin K. Lane High School had been set to close at the end of this school year, but will reopen for returning students in the fall, while also housing two new, smaller high-schools.
Lane, meanwhile, will undergo what the Department of Education calls a “phase-out,” whereby the school is slowly eliminated with the departure of each succeeding graduating class. As students graduate from Lane, new freshman classes will occupy seats in the new high schools.
The Department of Education had announced in December that the school would be closing, leaving many in the community wondering what would happen next — particularly to displaced students.
For the time being, only two new schools are planned, with doors opening in the fall. Both are what the DOE is calling “new small schools,” which house around 500 students or less, are often organized around a theme, and are wholly separate entities, with separate administrations and principals. The only substantive relationship one school will have to another, will be in sharing some facilities.
One of the schools coming to Lane, the Academy of Innovative Technology, will allow students to acquire official certification in several information technology fields.
The other, Brooklyn Lab School, will emphasize small class sizes and close student-teacher relationships.
As the existing Lane high school is phased out over time, there will be room for additional small schools, said Melody Meyer, a spokeswoman for the DOE.
As for which schools will be added in the future — or how many — Meyer was uncertain.
“It depends on what school proposals we get and what grades they cover,” she said. Many new schools opening up around the city comprise grades six to 12, for example, and can require different set ups.
Lane, which literally straddles the border that divdes Woodhaven, Queens, from Cypress Hills, Brooklyn, has been plagued by a long list of troubles in recent years.
In 2003, the high school was placed on the Department of Education’s School Under Registration Review list because of poor testing scores, one of two such schools in Queens at the time, along with Campus Magnet High School in Cambria Heights.
In January, 2004, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly added the school to its Impact Schools list, a group of what were considered the 12 worst schools in the city in terms of violence.
The move by the mayor followed an eruption of gang violence at the school the previous September, in which three students were shot.
Most recently, the school received a “D” letter grade for 2006-2007, as part of the DOE’s yearly progress reports — a grade received by only 6.3 percent of the city’s schools.
Providing the basis for its assessment, the progress report cited several factors. Among them were an an overall score of 29.6, which placed in in the bottom 5 percentile among high schools citywide; and a school attendance record of 65.7 percent.
As a result, numerous plans of action have been attempted throughout its recent history, but none has produced sufficient success, according to the DOE.
The latest attempt was in 2005, when the DOE divided the school into seven separate “learning communities.” Though the school retained the same single principal and basic administration, it added three assistant principals and was divided into what were essentially separate schools-within-schools, including Air Force Jr. ROTC, Law and Law Enforcement, Humanities Language and Performing Arts and others.
Although some of the “learning communities demonstrated a certain amount of success, the school was still dubbed a failure overall.
“I feel if they had just given it a little more time” it may have worked out in the end, said Maria Thomson, executive director of the Greater Woodhaven Development Corp., and member of the Woodhaven Residents’ Block Association and Woodhaven Business Improvement District.
As Thomson noted, the freshmen of 2005 were the first to attend the school under the new program. It would take another year — that is, until 2009 — to really measure the success of the program, she said.
The DOE, however, insists that the school needed a fresh start.
“Ultimately, the failure of Franklin K. Lane was an organizational failure,” Meyer said. “Which means the entire organization of Franklin K. Lane has not been able to meet its goals.”
Meyer added that “some of the small leaning communities have had success,” and that the DOE hoped to consult with them in building proposals for additional schools, which the department hopes could be ready by 2009.
