Just two days after the Bronx’s MS 80 introduced its third principal in two months, the Department of Education approved a plan that will change the face of Norwood’s oldest and largest middle school forever.

Under a new school improvement model called “turnaround,” MS 80 will close at the end of the school year and open under a new name with new faculty in the fall. Teachers at the school can either re-apply for their current jobs or look for work elsewhere. Students are guaranteed a spot in the new replacement school, but have the option to enroll in another middle school.

The turnaround plan was approved at a meeting of the DOE’s decision-making body, the Panel for Education Policy, last Thursday evening. MS 80 is among 10 Bronx schools and 24 citywide that will be closing under the turnaround model. Earlier this year, the panel approved proposals to close 18 other city schools.

The DOE says MS 80 was chosen for turnaround because of sagging state test scores, low attendance and a chance to maintain extra state funding. Meanwhile parents, teachers and students are scrambling just to figure out what’s going on.

Simply determining who is running the school on a weekly basis represents a challenge.

“We did not get to say thank you and farewell to the original principal, Ms. Rivera, then we get an interim principal, now a permanent one,” said MS 80 parent Annette Melendez in an e-mail. “The kids are confused by all the changes, especially now when state testing is going on.”

Last week, a meet-and-greet was held for new principal Emmanuel Polanco who became the third principal at the school in less than two months. At the beginning of March, before the turnaround plan was approved, the DOE replaced longtime principal, Lovey Mazique-Rivera, with Lauren Reiss, who was previously at the helm of another school that was closed due to poor performance.

Polanco, a Bronx resident who worked as an assistant principal at Urban Assembly Bronx Studio School for Writers and Artists before taking the job at MS 80, will stick around and become the leader of the new school that replaces MS 80, according to the DOE.
Unlike other schools slated for turnaround, the MS 80 community organized very little opposition to the proposal.

Though the Mosholu Parkway School, as it’s officially known, has been around since 1924 and boasts famous alumni, including fashion mavens Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein, as well as actor/director Penny Marshall, the drumbeat to save MS 80 was little more than soft rain drops on the sidewalk.

At a DOE hearing on April 16, less than 50 people showed up and only about a dozen testified. Two weeks earlier, a planned protest fizzled.

It may not have mattered anyway. At a DOE hearing at the Bronx’s Herbert H. Lehman High School, some 500 people showed and many of them testified against the school’s inclusion in the turnaround program. More than 1,500 people signed a petition opposing the school’s closure. And at the panel meeting last week, about 10 teachers and someone dressed up as the Lehman Lion mascot attended and voiced their opposition.

In the end, Lehman suffered the same fate as MS 80.

In the coming weeks, a hiring committee will be created that will include Polanco, two representatives appointed by the DOE and two representatives from the teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT). That committee will come up with a set of criteria for new faculty at the new school and then go about interviewing and hiring new teachers. According to turnaround guidelines, only 50 percent of the old faculty can be re-hired.

It was the failure of the DOE and the UFT to come to an agreement that led MS 80 to the point of closure.

Going into the year, MS 80 was trying to improve its test scores, which were among the bottom five percent in the state, through an improvement model called re-start, which paired the school with an Educational Partnership Organization (EPO) called the Abyssinian Development Corporation and infused it with extra state money for additional programming.

But the extra funding was suspended when the UFT and DOE could not come to an agreement on teacher evaluations by the end of 2011. The DOE says putting MS 80 into the turnaround program was the only way for the school to continue receiving the state funding, which amounted to about $800,000 a year for three years.

Parents and teachers say the school wasn’t given enough of chance to improve before the DOE took the step of placing MS 80 into the turnaround program and closing down a school that first opened nearly nine decades ago.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appears in the May 3-16 print edition of the Norwood News.