By Erin Brodwin

Jackie Albers Photo By Dale Eisinger

When a parent arrives in Principal Jackie Albers’ office to ask whether her student should take classes in music or math, her answer is both. Albers, who oversees an elementary charter school in central Harlem, said the most important aspect of her job is making sure students who leave her school are prepared for the real world.

“When we talk about our curriculum, we call it joyful rigor,” Albers said. “It’s challenging, but it’s also engaging and fun.”

After a two-year stint teaching English at a public school in the Bronx with Teach for America, Albers said she was drawn to a career in the charter school system.

“As the leader of a charter school, I’m able to see the needs in the curriculum and make adjustments immediately,” said Albers. “On any given day, I’m able to walk in and watch a teacher give a math lesson, and then talk with him or her afterward about what went well and what we can work on. It’s an atmosphere of open communication,” she said.

Harlem Success Academy 1, with its 60 teachers and 616 students—or scholars, as the school calls them—is a lot to manage. But for Albers, who has adored school since setting foot in her first English class, leading the Harlem elementary is a labor of love. “School opened doors for me,” said Albers. “I want to play a role in making sure other students have those opportunities as well.”

Albers’ school is one of 15 public charter schools managed by Success Academy Inc., a nonprofit that relies on funding from government and private donations. As a public charter school, the campus selects its students at random each year through a lottery.

Students attend classes daily from 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., more than two hours longer than students at traditional public schools. In addition, the school allows its students to choose from a diverse range of classes, from music to chess, art, sports and science.

“It’s important to us that school is fun for our students. We want it to be something they look forward to,” said Albers.

Students study Hebrew at another location of the Hebrew Charter Network.

A neighborhood that went to battle to fiercely oppose the opening of one charter school in the recent past is now set to welcome another with open arms.

The Hebrew Charter School Center is preparing to open its newest school in Community Education District 3, which covers the Upper West Side as well as parts of West and Central Harlem. Last year, many Upper West Side parents and politicians, as well as the community board and the Community Education Council (CEC), fought to keep a branch of the Success Academy Charter Network from opening there, mostly based on the fact that the school was to be co-located with the Brandeis High School complex.

Despite the vehement objections of education activists and two lawsuits, the school opened last fall and received 515 applications from within the district for 74 seats for the 2012-2013 school year.

But the Hebrew Charter school has received stamps of approval from the CEC and the community board and received its charter from the New York State Board of Regents in June, clearing the way for it to open in the fall of 2013 somewhere in southern Harlem. It will be called Harlem Hebrew Language Academy.

Mark Diller, chair of Community Board 7, said that one of the most attractive parts of the school’s application to the board was that it was committed to finding its own privately owned space and would not be co-located with an existing public school.

“It truly net adds seats rather than reallocating them,” Diller said in an email. “[The school also] has both a commitment to and a track record (at its sister school in Brooklyn) of encouraging applications from and actually enrolling and serving children with a variety of special needs, as well as English language learners.”

Diller said that the presentation made to the board focused on the value of bilingual education; how it can help those struggling with English as well as create a “level playing field” as all of the students learn Hebrew for the first time.

That element, the dual-language immersion program, is the other thing that sets the future school apart from other educational options in the neighborhood. The school will teach secular Hebrew, which board member David Gedzelman said is one of the ways they can attract a very diverse student body.

“We try to create integrated schools,” Gedzelman said. “We try to position our schools in geographic areas where the district itself is diverse so that we can create diversity.”

Gedzelman points to their school in Brooklyn, which he said has about 45 percent minority students, as an example of the makeup they hope to have for District 3.

“Our model of a dual-language program with modern Israeli Hebrew [means] there’s one constituency that naturally seeks out the school”—Jewish families—“and that helps to diversify the school,” he said.

Gedzelman said they’ve been working with churches and community-based organizations in Harlem to get the word out about the school and convince families that it’s not just for Jewish kids.

“Hebrew has gone through a lot of evolution over the last 30 years,” Gedzelman said. “It’s a modern secular language. It’s the language of the state of Israel, which has 7 million citizens—25 percent of the population is actually not Jewish.”

He said that Israel’s growing tech sector, as well as Technion—Israel Institute of Technology’s partnership with Cornell University to build a giant tech campus on Roosevelt Island in the next few years, makes Hebrew an attractive second language for any young children. One of the teachers at their Brooklyn school, an African American and a Muslim, learned Hebrew himself in order to teach gym classes in two languages, Gedzelman said.

The teaching model at the school will be based on immersive language learning as well as constant individualized assessment of students to tailor their learning. There will also be an emphasis on community service. The school plans to open with three sections of kindergarten students, 26 in each class. Its charter is currently K-5, but Gedzelman said they hope to expand up to 8th grade when they renew their charter.

P.S. 145, is according to the Department of Education and Principal Ivelisse Alvarez, a good school.

The city gave P.S. 145, located on 150 W. 105th St. between Amsterdam and Columbus avenues, a B in this year’s progress report card. Though the school received poor marks for school environment and student performance, it achieved an A in student progress.

Yet a charter school—often viewed as an alternative in areas with failing public schools—is being planned to open up in P.S. 145’s building.

Success Academy, a charter school network with locations in Harlem and the South Bronx, is seeking a spot in the Upper West Side and recently, the city deemed P.S. 145 “underutilized”.

Student enrollment at the school—currently at 59 percent capacity—declined to 431 this school year, from 524 in 2006.

Alvarez, the school’s principal, sees the situation inside P.S. 145 differently.

“You can say it’s underutilized, but on the basis of what?” Alvarez said. “The classes are being used, the rooms are being used.”

The principal at P.S. 145 believes that a charter school occupying the school building will hamper future expansion plans. She wants to grow the school so that it includes K through the 8th grade.

This year, the school received part of an $11 million, three-year federal grant awarded to eight Upper West Side schools in late September. The funding, $3.7 million for the district this year, is meant to help these “magnet” schools attract a diverse set of students. P.S. 145’s student body is mostly black and Latino.

“It’s not a failing school and there shouldn’t be a charter school in the building,” Alvarez said.

The city, however, seems intent on keeping student enrollment at P.S. 145 low.

The Department of Education presented a draft redrawing of school zones in the neighborhood’s school district Oct. 14. P.S. 145 was the only school to keep its boundaries in the draft rezoning.

“P.S.145 has been identified as an underutilized building. It is the only one on the Upper West Side,” Elizabeth Rose, a Department of Education official, told a crowd of parents and educators at a recent Community Education Council meeting. “Underutilized buildings are very rare.”

The school zones are being changed to ease overcrowding in the southern part of the Upper West Side school district where there are waitlists. Crowded schools like P.S. 199 and 87 in the West 60s and 70s had their zones shrunken, while the catchment area for P.S. 75 on West 96th Street grew.

Alvarez wants P.S. 145’s catchment area expanded to attract new students.

“We don’t have that many blocks in the school zone to register children from,” Alvarez said.

Eva Moskowitz, the former East Side Council member who is the CEO of the Success Academy charter schools, said that Upper West Side parents need a choice now and cannot wait years to see if P.S. 145’s enrollment increases.

“Parents need options now. Their 5 year old can’t wait five years,” Moskowitz said. “What are we going to tell parents on the Upper West Side, ‘Well this school might expand so we’re not going to use the 300 seats’?”

In New York City, charter schools have proliferated in economically disadvantaged areas. But Moskowitz believes parents in the Upper West Side should be able to send their children to a charter school as well.

“Even parents of means have a very anxiety-producing challenge and I didn’t think that should be the case,” Moskowitz said. “There’s nothing in the charter law that says you’re only supposed to serve the most disadvantaged.”

Noah Gotbaum heads the parent body that holds meetings on education policy, known as a Community Education Council. The council has to vote on the new rezoning map for the 2011 school year.

Gotbaum, a critic of Success Academy charter schools in Harlem, is supporting Alvarez, the P.S. 145 principal.

“They also want to be able to grow their school, which is a terrific school and use this federal money to really draw in students,” Gotbaum said. “Harlem Success will stop this in its tracks.”