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.

Assembly Member Linda Rosenthal heeded the itchy cries of residents on and around West 84th Street who have been suffering from a bafflingly hard to quash infestation, rounding up city officials to hear their tales and explain what the city is doing to combat the insects. The result was a promise to coordinate efforts and take the problem seriously, which barely soothed a very frustrated population.

“It’s not [just] a nuisance,” said Lisa Perlman, who brought photos of her young son’s red, swollen leg after he suffered a mosquito attack. “These mosquitoes are biting ,and their bites itch like hell for days; they hurt like black fly bites.” She and dozens of other meeting attendees said they or their kids sleep under mosquito nets in an effort to keep them away, but are sometimes up all night swatting.

Representatives from the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), the Department of Transportation (DOT), the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and Con Edison each explained to the public what they were doing to combat the localized pests. Mosquitoes breed in standing water, and despite residents’ best efforts to eliminate stagnant water from the area and the city flushing the sewer system over 10 times in recent months, a single sewer trap is still catching over 300 mosquitoes in a day on West 84th Street.

Dr. Jody Gangloff-Kaufmann, an urban entomologist from Cornell University, explained the science of the problem and told residents that even little measures might help eliminate mosquitoes.

“If you find a bottle cap, get rid of it. If you see leaves in the gutters, get rid of them,” she said. “High participation is required.”

Gangloff-Kaufmann said that installing screens is the “No. 1 [method of] urban pest control,” but acknowledged that they won’t solve the root of the problem.

Part of the difficulty in eradicating the pesky bugs is that it requires the coordination of several city agencies. For example, the DEP can flush the sewers, but it can’t pull up any part of the roads without the go-ahead from the DOT. The DOHMH is responsible for pest control, but they still have to work with other agencies.

While some at the meeting wanted to know why the city won’t just spray chemicals to kill all the larvae, others were quick to reject that idea, saying they’d rather not resort to poison in a residential area.

Part of the frustration people felt was due to the fact that because the species of mosquito found on the Upper West Side hasn’t been shown to carry West Nile virus, the city has treated the infestation as a nuisance rather than an imminent threat to public health.

“The premise is, if someone doesn’t die, you can go to hell,” said West 84th Street resident Abraham Newman. “This is just a small sampling of the people who are suffering day and night. They have no recourse, no one listens to them, no one gives a damn because no one has died.”

City officials also admitted that they don’t know exactly what the next steps should be. Rosenthal suggested they all come to the location of the infestation and work as a task force to come up with more creative solutions, which all of the agencies agreed to.

“I’m happy that this many people came here, and that the agency representatives got to hear from them directly,” Rosenthal said. “I don’t think they grasped the magnitude of the problem.”

She also suggested that if the city can’t come up with a fix, they should bring in an outside consultant.

“It doesn’t seem that the city has responded in a way that is really going to solve the problem,” Rosenthal said. “They admitted, ‘I don’t know what the problem is, it’s a mystery.’ I mean, that’s not acceptable. These are intelligent, involved people and they’re not going to be happy until the problem is fixed.”