In the pursuit of federal grant money earlier this year, the Department of Education designated Middle School 80 in Norwood, and 23 other city schools, for the “turnaround” program, throwing school communities into chaos and confusion.

But now, several months later — after principals were replaced, schools were renamed, teachers were forced to re-apply for their jobs and a successful lawsuit by the teachers union — the turnaround program has been suspended.

That means, at least for the time being, MS 80 will continue to be called MS 80 (it’s also known as Junior High School 80, the Mosholu Parkway School) and all of its teachers will be allowed to return. (Under turnaround, the school’s name was supposed to be changed and half of its staff replaced.) It also means that struggling schools like MS 80 will lose out on federal grant money.

Dayana Nunez, a teacher at MS 80 who vocally opposed the turnaround program, said she was surprised and pleased by the reversal.

“After all that, I thought, really, so they decided not to close the school?” Nunez said about her reaction to the news. “The Lord made it possible,” she added.

Nunez will be returning to MS 80, but it’s unclear how many of her fellow teachers at MS 80 will also be joining her. Toward the end of the school year, every teacher was forced to either re-apply for their job or look for jobs at other schools. Nunez said she was told she would be re-hired, but some of the school’s longtime teachers were not asked to come back.

Nunez said some of her friends were actively looking for other jobs because of the negativity surrounding the entire situation. Although the lawsuit changed everything, one teacher who had been at the school for 27 years was not asked to return, Nunez said.

“To hear that they were not re-hired was heartbreaking,” she said.

David Pena, a spokesman for the DOE, said they don’t have any data yet on how many teachers or students have left the school.

Another outspoken critic of the DOE’s decision to plunge MS 80 into turnaround midway through the year, Cecilia Donovan, the president of MS 80’s parents association, said “the whole hiring process was unbelievable.”

The school was supposed to install a hiring committee that would include parents. But just two days before the hiring committee was going to begin interviewing teachers, Donovan was called and asked if she could commit to a process that could possibly last from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. during weekdays.

She couldn’t do it and neither could other parents. “There were no parents on the committee,” she said.

Donovan and others were upset that Lovey Mazique-Rivera was removed as principal in March. They believed she had the school on the right track before her ouster. According to the Daily News, Donovan was right. MS 80 achieved a huge jump in state math exams. In 2011, only 14 percent of eighth graders passed the math exam. This past year, half of the school’s eighth graders passed.

Originally, the DOE said they designated MS 80 and the other schools for the turnaround program because improvement didn’t appear to be happening fast enough. But it was also because the DOE had not reached an agreement with the United Federation of Teachers on new teacher evaluations, which caused the federal government to suspend its grant funding for struggling schools.

To keep the funding flowing, the DOE decided to put those struggling schools into the turnaround program. Now, the UFT’s lawsuit has once again suspended that grant money, which amounted to about $31 million. Pena said the DOE infused the schools with $18 million worth of funding to keep the programs implemented last year on track.

While Donovan decided to keep her daughter at MS 80, she is still trying to figure out exactly what is going on.

“Ultimately, too much was happening too fast,” she said.

Editor’s note: A version of this article was first published in the Aug. 23-Sept. 5 print edition of the Norwood News.

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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.