Quoted from 1975

So, in July it was going to be corporate apartments - now today, 2 months later, it's going to be a charter school?

Did I miss something in between?

Quoted from 1975

So, in July it was going to be corporate apartments - now today, 2 months later, it's going to be a charter school?

Did I miss something in between?

Quoted from DemocraticVoiceOfReason

Plans change -- sometimes one project falls by the wayside and another comes forward.  Nothing to lose sleep over.

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In addition to redeveloping the building, Galesi has applied to the federal government to list the property on the National Register of Historic Places.

Quoted from rachel72

    
  
Well, there is no record in the Schenectady Real property on-line tax database for 487 Nott.

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Hearing set on charter school
Eximius Academy says it is targeting lower-income Hamilton Hill, Vale areas
By Lauren Stanforth
Updated 10:50 p.m., Tuesday, September 18, 2012
  

SCHENECTADY — A public hearing will be held Wednesday night on a proposed new city elementary charter school that would target students from the Hamilton Hill and Vale neighborhoods.

The hearing on opening Eximius Academy, which is tentatively proposed to be located in the former Schenectady County Department of Social Services building on Nott Street, is at 7 p.m. in Mont Pleasant Middle School cafeteria.

Eximius, which would open in September 2013, would be Schenectady's first charter school since the State University of New York board of trustees shuttered the International Charter School of Schenectady in 2008.

The school plans on serving around 424 students in grades K-5, with a focus on science, technology, engineering and math. Eximius, which means "excellence, exceptional, extraordinary," would also have a longer school day, from 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., and include five more school days than the public school calendar at 190 days. In fall 2013, Eximius wants to enroll three sections of kindergarten and three sections of first grade.

Wednesday's hearing is part of the school's application process with the state. Pamela Swanigan, a former social studies teacher who now lives in Schenectady, has been leading the effort. The Rev. Ted Ward, who also is president of the city's NAACP chapter, is also involved. Organizational partners with Exmius include Northeast Parent and Child Society and the Hamilton Hill Arts Center.

In the application, Eximius says it would seek to attract students from the lower-income neighborhoods of the city's Hamilton Hill and Vale neighborhoods because it is "a distressed urban community ... with poverty, unemployment and dropout rates three times the national average."..........................>>>>...........................>>>>................Read more: http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Hearing-set-on-charter-school-3875288.php#ixzz26ubMvYYg

Quoted from mikechristine1

There is a record, but the typical dems in the city, we intelligent people on these boards know how the combination of the city & co dems, along with plex, keep everything a secret from the taxpayers.

So they don't list an "address"

It's found as 39.50-2-44, assessed for $1,498,200, and of course, "Maxon Alco Holdings LLC" i.e., super wealthy dem-politically connected Galesi that does not pay taxes.

Hey all Schenectady city taxpayers, when you get your tax bill, remember it includes all the properties owned by Galesi.   Remember your tax bill includes the gold ceiling at Proctors and the ILLEGAL STAR exemption that Philip Morris ha

Quoted from rpforpres

Just wondering why they haven't considered the old Horace Man/Carver building if they are targeting kids on the Hill and in Vale?  This would cut back on busing.

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SCHENECTADY
Charter school proposal assailed
BY KATHLEEN MOORE Gazette Reporter

    Residents overwhelmingly opposed a proposed charter school at a Wednesday night public hearing, but organizers said they have many supporters who simply didn’t feel brave enough to speak out.
    Many residents said the charter school would cost too much money — about $1.8 million in its fi rst year, and $5.6 million in 2018.
    While the Schenectady City School District would teach fewer students if the charter school opened, residents said fi xed costs would not go down. A classroom with three fewer students needs the same number of teachers. Residents said they fear services would have to be cut to provide for the charter school.
    “They cut into the school budget,” said Claire Covey in an email that was read into the record. “Charter schools are, in my opinion, nothing more than a private school run with taxpayer money.”
    Others called the funding system “unfair” and “unreasonable,” while school board member Ann Reilly’s husband said the cost could jeopardize the district.
    “I think the charter school really is a threat,” Donald Liebers said. “Our school budget is being squeezed everywhere, and we see these great programs, developed by Schenectady, threatened as a result.”
    Charter board Chairwoman Pamela Swanigan said she doesn’t like the way charters are funded either, but called the cost “nominal.”
    She represents a group that wants to put together its own charter school, using practices from a variety of other schools. The charter must be approved by the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York, which is the next step.
    At the hearing, two residents said the charter school could help students. Sharon Stevens, a city resident who would be on the charter school’s board, said she sees many caring teachers in the district.
    “They’re doing a fantastic job, we just need choices,” she said.
    She added that some classrooms are overcrowded and some children focus on “keeping up” with popular clothing styles. The charter school would have a dress code and an assistant in each classroom.
    “I now see the need for another charter school,” she said, citing those plans. “Two teachers to give individualized instruction. ... Please respect our choices.”
    Resident Will Vining said the charter school could also help the district improve.
    “You can use the charter school as an opportunity to test policies on the small scale and get the evidence you need,” he said.
    But others questioned whether the charter school could be trusted. In a district where voters replaced nearly the entire school board just three years ago, residents said they wanted more say in the charter school.
    Tom Della Sala wrote an email for the public hearing criticizing the charter school because no one will be allowed to vote on the charter board members. Fellow resident William McColl said the charter board was “undemocratic.”
    Liebers also questioned why the charter was not organized by Schenectadians. The board chair lives in Niskayuna. and only one board member lives in Schenectady.
    McColl and others also said it wouldn’t be fair to provide specialized instruction to only a fraction of Schenectady’s children.
    “Separate is inherently unequal,” McColl said.
    After the meeting, charter board member Wes Holloway said angrily that residents “had no idea” what inner-city black children faced in the school district.
    “They talked about the [International Baccalaureate] program. Very few people of color in the IB program,” he said of the district’s program for high-achieving students. “They don’t realize many of them are not getting the educational foundation to enter first grade. And they never get caught up.”
    The charter school would offer an extended day and a longer school year to help students catch up.
    Swanigan said residents were wrong to criticize board members for not living in the city. She said 190 parents want the charter school, but said it’s ludicrous to believe they could organize it by themselves.
    “They are teen moms of teen moms of teen moms,” she said. “How do you expect them to write a 200-page application, for God’s sake? They don’t know education law. We who are educated, it’s our obligation to help them.”
    They would not speak at the hearing, she said, because they were afraid.
    “A lot of them haven’t had a good experience in school,” she said. “They will not confront a huge institution because they don’t feel they have the wherewithal to do it.”

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"I’m sick of people rewriting the story of the four girls who committed suicide.

Their memory has been invoked to support programs that are wholly unrelated to what happened in their lives, and I can’t stand it anymore.

At Wednesday’s public hearing on a proposed charter school in Schenectady, I was offended to hear — yet again — their stories changed for the purposes of another project.

This time, the speaker said the girls who died are proof that the city needs a charter school. Why? Because they were all poor, black, Hamilton Hill kids who felt hopeless.

Ahem.

First of all, they were all teenagers — the charter school is for elementary school students. But leaving that aside for a moment, let’s get a few things straight here.

They were not all black.

They were not all poor.

Only one of them lived on Hamilton Hill.

They weren’t all “bad” at school (and they didn’t all go to the same school, though they were friends).

They all had loving families.

The parents of the last two girls to die did not willfully ignore the problem — one of them reached out to the parent of one of the boys who was harassing the girls, and tried to mediate a solution. Another parent brought her daughter to emergency counseling.

The frightening thing about the situation was that it didn’t work. Nothing worked. For a time, it seemed like children would keep dying, and nothing would stop it.

Since their deaths, those girls have been invoked as a reason for everything from suicide awareness groups (which at least makes sense) to gun buyback programs (although there’s no evidence at all that they were ever threatened with guns).

The truth is that they were harassed, and in some cases beaten horribly, by other teenagers who later were convicted of trafficking cocaine. Did the girls know about the cocaine? Is that why they were attacked? We’ll probably never know.

But many girls were attacked by those teenagers. Some killed themselves. Others didn’t.

Suicide is a complex decision that is not rationally based on one or two specific events. It’s based on a conglomeration of items that overwhelm the person until he or she feels like suicide is the best way out.

Not one of those girls committed suicide directly and solely because of the harassment. And just to make it clear, regarding the charter school — not one of them killed themselves because they felt they decided their education would not fulfill their goals for the future.

Suicide is not that simple.

But we don’t like to think that. We like to put scary things in little boxes, where we feel we can control them and make sure they never happen again. We like to believe that if we do one thing — better street lights, or a charter school — then none of our children will ever feel so depressed that they kill themselves.

We like to believe that we can control this, that we can figure out the absolutely perfect way to do things, and then our children will all be safe.

When I wrote about those children, and they kept on dying, I learned that there are things that are out of our control. I had expected to find that the parents were uninvolved, or perhaps abusive, terrible people. But you know what? They cared deeply. They tried as hard as they could to keep their children alive.

There were dozens of parents in this city who were afraid to let their children close their doors, for months, because they were so scared the child might kill herself if she was given the chance.

It was THAT scary. It was THAT out of our control.

We didn’t know who might go next. We didn’t know why one girl died and another one didn’t.

And we still don’t.

So please, if you must invoke their memory, invoke that memory: the memory of our hopelessness and fear. Don’t lie about who they were to create a simple problem that we can fix."