Charter school seeks space to open in Harlem

The New York French American Charter School exists—in theory.

Last Month, this French charter school—a new immersion program that will be the first of its kind in New York City—gained official recognition by the Department of Education. This marked a major step forward for the organization, which seeks to open its doors to Harlem students in the fall of 2010.

But what the DOE did not grant the organization was an actual location.

So a month into the process, Corinne Bal, the co-founder of this legally established but currently homeless school, said she is working to secure funds and a space. As a charter school—a public school accountable to the DOE, but run by an outside not-for-profit board—it is a difficult burden, she said. Bal suspected this is because they typically receive only 70-80 percent of the operating budget from the DOE, which does not account for public space that the French school’s board is currently struggling to find and fund on its own.

“We exist and can open, but if we don’t have the money we won’t be able to,” she said, adding, “Be sure I’m trying hard. I’m not going to stop.”

Bal said at a recent information session at the Maison Française at Columbia University that the school, also known as NYFACS, is seeking a location in Harlem to capitalize on the large francophone populations in the neighborhood, along with the academic resources of the University, where her husband is an applied mathematics professor.

NYFACS will be an immersion program—offering a bilingual and multicultural curriculum—starting in 2010 with kindergarten, first and second grades, and adding classes every year, so that they can ultimately retain students K-12. As a parent, Bal said this is crucial to her. “Of course I want to remove the stress of applying,” she said.

Bal emphasized small class sizes and extended school days, from 8:30 a.m. until 4:30 p.m, along with a curriculum that fuses traditional French educational methods with modern American teaching philosophies. “We really want to participate in American education reform through the charter school movement,” she added.

After jumping through many hoops of DOE bureaucracy—including an extensive interview and application followed by a 125-question follow-up—NYFACS has secured its recognition and has now shifted its efforts toward the streets of Harlem, where they are courting community support.

Ibrahima Diafoune, president of the Association of the Senegalese in America, said, “We truly need it. That’s why we are fighting for it,” he said. He added that it was especially important in the Harlem neighborhood, considering the void of French programs. In terms of West African culture, Diafoune said, “We don’t want our kids to be lost.”

Robye Wallace, executive director of the New Song Community Corporation in Harlem—which was once considered as a possible site for NYFACS—echoed Diafoune, saying, “Look at the school system. It takes away the children’s language, and they aren’t able to communicate with their parents.” A comprehensive immersion program could help reverse that unfortunate trend, she said.

Emmanuelle Saada, director of the center for French and Francophone Studies at Columbia, said she hopes to provide University support through workshops for teachers and parents. “Columbia is a very important citizen of the Upper West Side, Morningside Heights, and the Harlem community,” she said. “It is very important for us to be involved.”

But even for supporters, it is difficult to ignore the baggage that charter schools in Harlem carry, with criticisms of the lottery system of enrolling students along with local complaints that charters take funds and limited space away from desperately struggling public schools.

“My feeling is that the DOE has in general in Harlem tried to use charter schools as a way to make up for the lack of quality of education in this neighborhood as opposed to enhancing it,” Erika Dilday, Journalism ’93 and an NYFACS board member and local resident, said.

But because NYFACS fills a need that is absent from public schools, she said, “I do believe that this one is being created in the right spirit.”

For Dianne Johnson, the president of the Community Education Council for District 5 of Harlem, the addition of any charter school—no matter how great a program it is—is an offense to the neighborhood. “You put community against community,” she said, adding, “We don’t have the room. Allow our children to stay in our community and grow and prosper.”

Bal acknowledged this challenge. “Our school is coming maybe at the wrong moment. There are many tensions with charter schools,” she said, adding that they politically cannot even ask nearby schools to potentially share buildings because of the controversy surrounding this relationship.

Catherine Poisson, president of the Education Française à New York, has brought French programs to existing public schools, and though she said she fully supports NYFACS for addressing serious needs for language programs, she said she has her concerns with the charter school admissions process.

Poisson expressed her fears that the lottery system—which goes in place when there is high demand—would make it difficult to establish effective ratios of French and American students that have proven successful in bilingual programs.

But she added, “They have worked so much. I really sincerely hope it will work.”

For some neighborhood parents, NYFACS is a breath of fresh air in the school search.

Astrid Benedeck, who spent most of her childhood speaking French in Morocco, has been looking for schools for her four-year-old son for the past year. While she acknowledged the uncertainties of NYFACS, she said, she is very interested in an authentic immersion process that actually promises to teach her son how to speak the language.

“It is part of my background—I would hate to have a child who only spoke English,” Benedeck said, adding that she is also intrigued by a fusion of education systems that would integrate some strengths of European-style learning into the American classroom.

“I want my kid to know every country in Africa,” she said.

Tags: News, Sam Levin, French Immersion, New York French American Charter School