Eva Moskowitz Wants To Take School Building From Autistic Children

In all the "De Blasio is harming poor minority children by shutting down charter schools that don't exist yet" stories, we fail to find out that Success Academy edu-entrepreneur Eva Moskowitz wants to subsume space from a school for autistic and emotionally disturbed children to expand her charter empire.

Juan Gonzalez writes:

No one is happier about her policy change than the parents and staff at the Mickey Mantle school, a program for autistic and emotionally disturbed children that was slated to lose space and seats to the proposed expansion of Success Academy.

“Our school already lost a music, a theater arts and an art room the past few years,” said Barry Daub, principal at Mickey Mantle. Those losses happened to make room for Harlem Success 1, launched in the same building in 2006.

Mickey Mantle would have lost enrollment and even more space if Fariña had approved the Success Academy expansion.

“We would be doing physical and occupational therapy in the halls,” Daub said.

Yvette Santana, whose grandson Aaron Cruz is a fourth-grader at Mickey Mantle, is furious at the way parents and children are being pitted against each other.

“We don’t want to throw anybody out, but it’s not right to take away the programs our children have,” Santana said.

Gonzalez writes that Chancellor Farina has a fix for Eva's problem:

Fariña’s people say the four middle schools in the 22-school charter network Moskowitz already operates have enough empty seats to absorb the 194 students from Success Academy.

No child is being denied an education. It’s just that one charter network is no longer getting everything it demands.

Too bad de Blasio and Farina weren't ready to go with this message as soon as last week when they announced they were overturning three of the eight Success/Bloomberg co-locations.

Because this could have been a very different media story than the one they got - de Blasio harms poor black minority children by shutting down charter schools.

That story emanated straight from Moskowitz's P.R. office and it's pure propaganda.

At least know we're starting to see the truth come out.

Alas, it may be too late.