Parents livid over schedule ‘disaster’

Walcott said he, as well as Senior Deputy Chancellor Shael Polakow-Suransky, only found out about the issues at Metropolitan a couple weeks ago, despite the fact that Walcott’s daughter is a physical education teacher at the school.

“We try not to mix our respective lives as far as education is concerned because she is her own person and teacher,” Walcott said at the meeting.

Sadowski, who along with her husband, John, reached out to the senior deputy chancellor about the school’s woes in mid-November, said “the problems started on day one.”

“The kids went in and sat there for five days with no classes,” she said. “Some were given blank schedules.”

By the end of October, Sadowski’s son had received nine schedule changes, including some in which he had five or six empty periods. In one version, he was given no lunch period.

“He repeatedly went to the main office to report these errors and was finally directed to the guidance counselor,” Sadowski wrote in a recent letter to Polakow-Suransky. “The guidance counselor told my son to ‘find someone with a similar schedule and then just follow that student’s schedule.’ I was horrified to learn that this was the school’s response.”

Walcott, Polakow-Suransky and other city officials vowed to address parents’ concerns, and the deputy chancellor said the problems in part stemmed from the unexpectedly large number of students that started at the school, which opened last year. Others, like Patrick Sullivan, the Manhattan borough president’s appointee on the PEP and a frequent critic of the DOE, said the issues seemed “inevitable” when the city installs “inexperienced principals.”

Debra Zampelli, whose son is a sophomore at Metroplitan, said the DOE needed to give far more support to the prinicpal than it did when the problem first arose.

“Marci Levy-Maguire is a very dedicated principal,” Zampelli said. “Send in a team to help her. Don’t send a memo saying she should go to training.”

Polakow-Suransky called the issue at Metropolitan a “tricky situation.”

“We have not done well on executing the plan for the school,” he added.

The deputy chancellor said that officials expect to implement a “new plan” at the school the Monday after Thanksgiving, which he said should solve many of the scheduling issues.

“My hope is by the beginning of next week that parents see immediate issues they’ve raised have been addressed,” Polakow-Suransky said.

Councilwoman Elizabeth Crowley (D-Middle Village), whose two sons attend Metropolitan, said the scheduling disaster is just “one of many problems” at the school.

“My main concern is curriculum,” Crowley said. “I want to make sure they’re getting their main subjects in. … Many sophomores don’t have a chemistry teacher.

“We’re in the sixth week of school, and many of these students have three hours during the day where they had no programming,” Crowley continued. “It’s not fair to the students, and it’s not fair to the community.”

The problems at Metropolitan haven’t been the only scheduling woes in city high schools this year.

It recently came to light that there was a similar problem at Long Island City High School, where a complete upheaval of students’ schedules left pupils without permanent teachers for weeks and without basic classes like English or math.

“The objective now is to get things in order at the school and to make sure the chancellor has implemented safeguards so this doesn’t happen again anywhere else,” Dmytro Fedkowskyj, the Queens Borough President’s appointee to the PEP, said of Metropolitan. “I made it quite clear during the PEP meeting that the lack of a proactive interest by the DOE has harmed the school community and that policy should change going forward when inexperienced leaders take on new responsibilities. What occurred at the Metropolitan High School and at Long Island City High School is clearly unacceptable.”

Polakow-Suransky conceded at the meeting that the situation at Long Island City was “a bad mistake.”

“We’ve worked with the school to correct the issues and make sure the kids don’t lose any credits,” Polakow-Suransky said.