Irate parents are fighting to maintain advanced math classes at a top-rated New York City middle school, the third battle to keep accelerated offerings at a Manhattan school in recent months.
The Robert Wagner Middle School on the Upper East Side announced it was permanently scrapping the honors math program for seventh graders, after cutting it during the pandemic. The reason given by the principal, according to one parent, was that too many students wanted to enroll.
“The honors program is awesome,” said Nikos Papageorgiou, whose younger son will be in seventh grade in September and whose older son graduated from the school. “We said, ‘Why didn’t you extend it instead of getting rid of it?'”
Papageorgiou said many of the school’s students apply to the city’s specialized high schools, and the advanced math program was key to their preparation.
More than 500 people have signed a petition to keep the program, he said. The petition notes that, “This is a systemic problem that will affect all of us if we don’t speak up to stop the craziness!'”
The Department of Education is contending that all Wagner seventh graders will have an honors-level curriculum to prepare for Regents math, a notion Papageorgiou and others dispute.
“What happened suddenly, everyone is ‘accelerated’?” he said.
In June, the principal of the Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies in Manhattan, another top school, faced a backlash after she said honors math would be scrapped. Maggie Feurtado, a former Lab teacher who started the math program, told The Post it was a “misguided” attempt at equity.
The principal changed course after the outcry and said the program would be maintained.
Parents were also in an uproar at LaGuardia High School, the “Fame” school on the Upper West Side that focuses on both performing arts and academics, over potential changes to Advanced Placement classes.
The school wanted to scale back the offerings, with some administrators saying the classes caused too much stress for students and even led to suicidal thoughts, parents claimed.
The outcry led the principal to largely scrap the plan, but parents are still upset over some of the modifications, including a limit on how many AP classes students can take and how they will be weighted in grade point averages.
“There are large groups of students and parents who are invested in getting our curriculum back,” said Tai Hernandez, the parent of a sophomore. “This is the curriculum that has existed at LaGuardia for a very long time and suddenly, in the midst of COVID, we’re having all this change.”
The DOE said that the AP limit was only a recommendation and that LaGuardia students could take as many classes as they wanted and that there would be additional advanced options at the school.
“Academic standards at New York City schools are higher than ever,” said DOE spokesman Nathaniel Styer.
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July 25, 2021 at 05:38AM
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Parents demand NYC middle school bring back honors math classes - New York Post
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