City educrats are punishing academic success by denying more space to a thriving charter high school — leaving choir students to rehearse in a hallway staircase and others to practice in storage closets, critics say.
“A lot of the time, people can’t all fit in the actual staircase,” lamented Georgia Williams, an 18-year-old senior choir student at the Success Academy Charter High School of the Liberal Arts on Manhattan’s East Side.
“So we have to like, clump up in the back,” the student told The Post. “And also we have songs where we move and clap … and we have to like, bend down, clap diagonally, snap, sway — it’s really difficult next to all the people.”
The school was so embarrassed by the sight of one music student with a trombone practicing in a storage closet during a Post visit last week that it forbade a news photographer from taking a snapshot of the situation.
Under state law, the city Department of Education is either required to provide charter schools space in their public buildings or pay for their leases in private facilities.
For the liberal-arts charter, it’s not a question of getting space — it’s how much it’s been given.
The charter high school shares space in a building on 111 East 33rd Street in Murray Hill with three other traditional public high schools: Murray Hill Academy, Manhattan Academy for the Arts & Language and the Unity Center for Urban Technologies.
But while the charter has nearly 900 kids and each of the other three schools has fewer than 300 students, the charter has gotten significantly less space considering its much larger population.
The charter is now at nearly 100% capacity in its space, while the other three schools are at under 50%, Success Academy noted, citing city data.
That has left the average class size for the charter at 26 to 27 students, whereas the other schools in the building have some average class sizes of around 16, Success Academy said.
The charter school, which opened in 2014, for example has only one science lab for its hundreds of students.
As for important extracurricular activites, in addition to the band practicing in a stairwell, a charter-school student with a bass clarinet was recently seen jammed into the back of a miniscule storage room — the size of a janitor’s closet — for a make-up test, according to a supervising teacher.
Next to her, in a separate storage closet, was the young student seen practicing on a trombone.
Both kids looked claustrophobic.
Down the hall, in a classroom retrofitted as a makeshift gym, girls and boys basketball players squatted, lifted weights and did strength training while coaches looked on.
The scenes illustrate the severe space jam at the charter school — and the creative lengths educators, students and administrators must go to in order to maximize the limited space they get.
“Really, that’s a testament to our teachers’ flexibility day to day and what they’re able to do,” the charter school’s principal, Kenneth Zhang, told The Post during its visit Friday.
The charter is part of the high-achieving Success Academies network of 57-school charter schools, the largest in the city. Many of its students in eighth grade want to continue their studies at one of the group’s three high schools, including the one in Murray Hill.
According to Success of the LIberal Arts, 100% of each of its seven graduating classes has been accepted to four-year colleges —51% to selective institutions or selective programs and 98.8% with acceptance offers meeting full financial need.
Last year, 95% of its seniors scored 3 or higher on at least one Advanced Placement Exam during high school — the same as the highly prestigious public Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan.
The charter network said city administrators directed it to rent out space at the Javits Center for its students to take Advanced Placement tests because there isn’t the space in their building for such proctored exams.
“As we continue to grow, the class sizes have gotten larger,” Zhang noted.
“The amount of talent, elective offerings that we can schedule, given the spacing that we have in the building, is much tighter” these days, he said.
“There are a lot of classes that are highly impacted by the space [constraints],” he said, adding, “We have been able to make it work” — with lots of resourcefulness.
The biggest challenge is finding room for the performing arts programs — dance, choir, band and theater, Zhang said.
“That’s really where the spacing issues happen. We have a theater teacher who can’t teach in a specific room consistently because she doesn’t always have the auditorium space to do practices and things like that,” he said.
“We’ve gotten creative with solutions. We have office spaces, hallway spaces that kids are able to use to have class. And again, they make it work, but it is a lot of kind of shuffling, maneuvering things that we really, you know, shouldn’t have to do because the kids deserve the space to have class.”
The school’s parents have launched a petition, which currently has 259 signatures, calling on the DOE “to fairly allocate space to us in the building we share with three other high schools.
“Our high school scholars are highly capable and hard-working. The inadequate space they are receiving unfairly hinders them in developing their talents and meeting Success Academy’s rigorous standards,” the petition said.
“As ever more students at Success Academies middle schools choose to attend its Manhattan high school rather than accept offers at other schools, it is imperative that the allocation of space be adjusted accordingly.”
Charter schools are publicly funded, privately managed schools that mostly employ non-union teaching staff.
Many of the charters have a longer school day and school year than traditional public schools, and studies show their students outperform their peers on standardized math and English exams.
There are now 282 charter schools serving nearly 150,000 students in the city. The charters make up about 15% of publicly funded Big Apple schools.
Despite achievements, the charter school sector has faced resistance from the New York’s Democratic-dominated establishment.
The city cannot open any more charter schools because of a cap imposed by the Democratic-run state legislature, which has deep ties to the anti-charter teachers’ union that opposes the competition.
Gov. Kathy Hochul did not recommend lifting the cap in her recent $252 billion budget proposal.
Zhang said the decision for his school to get more space is squarely in the hands of DOE, which is aware of his appeal. He complained DOE officials have been dragging their heels in finding an equitable solution.
The DOE dismissed the charter’s space gripe.
“Success Academy is a charter school — please reach out to them directly!,” a rep told The Post.
-Additional reporting by Aneeta Bhole