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Huge Turnout Over New Williamsburg Charter School [✜]

I started to write a quick link to this Times SchoolBook article last Friday, but got distracted. Since then, there have been 26 comments posted, almost all of them thoughtful and passionate on the subject of co-locating a Success Charter school at JHS 50 on South 3rd Street. And almost of all of them opposed to the idea. What's interesting about the comments is that they run about 10 to 1 against the co-location, which, as I started to write on Friday, is about the ratio of locals against and for the co-location at last Thursday's DOE hearing on the issue.

The problem is, you wouldn't know that from reading the article - and you particularly wouldn't know it from looking at the photo accompanying the article, which shows a group of Success supporters bedecked in orange T-shirts. Nowhere does the article mention that most of the supporters were brought in by bus from Harlem and the Upper East Side1. Nowhere does the article mention the ratio of supporters to opposition (3 or 4 to 1; an order of magnitude or two higher if you just count local residents). Nowhere does the article mention that the opposition included many parents from the Northside, Greenpoint and elsewhere in the broader community (who, if they took a bus to get there, paid the MTA for the ride).

As I started to write on Friday - and as the comments to the article since then make abundantly clear - there are good arguments on both sides of this issue. But you wouldn't know that from reading this article.

1. In the comments, a Times editor says that the paper asked a Success spokesperson about the busing in of supporters - the spokesperson "could not say how many buses Success used". Sorry, NYT, but that is just lame.