Courtney Ross’ charter school facing student flight. Another charter disaster.
February 24, 2010
Courtney Ross had money and married rich when she married the head of Time-Warner. He since has passed away.
She started a little school in the Hamptons for her rich friends and then convinced NY Mayor Bloomberg to give her a charter on the lower east side. It shares a building with a neighborhood school. But the two schools are very different.
Several years ago, New York Magazine ran a lengthy piece on the strange world of Courtney Ross.
Ross Global, Courtney Ross’s new charter school, is holistic, organic, Ayurvedic, artistic, and evolutionary. But when you’re building an educational Utopia, there are going to be some casualties.
As it turns out, the casualties appear to be the students and teachers.
A Manhattan charter school is so plagued with discipline issues and a dearth of academic services that students have been fleeing or have been pushed out in record numbers, parents charge.
This school year alone, 91 of 410 students of those enrolled at Ross Global Academy have left, according to the Department of Education.
It continues an unprecedented trend in which the East Village elementary and middle school has shed more than 20 percent of its students — and at least 42 percent of its teachers — every year since it was founded in 2006.
Parents say the exodus is caused in part by the school’s undisciplined and sometimes violent environment.
Others charge that the administration encourages parents to withdraw their special-needs kids who can lower a school’s performance and who cost more to educate.
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