Dear supporters, We thank you for your support of our school, Central Park East 1. We are asking you to join us tomorrow at a protest at the Department of Education to support our demands. This week is critical for us. Since launching this petition, we have received incredible support from outside our school while mobilizing an overwhelming majority of our own families. We have testified at multiple venues, pressed our elected officials for their support, filed formal complaints and demanded that the DOE give us answers. However, we have yet to receive a satisfactory answer from the DOE. Our elected parent representatives have not yet had an opportunity to meet formally with officials in our district. And the situation in our school is deteriorating. Tomorrow's demonstration, scheduled to take place at the Chancellor's office, is a critical opportunity to show the highest levels of the DOE that we are serious about demanding answers. The end of the school year is rapidly approaching and it is clear that the DOE is hoping to wait this out. We refuse to let that happen. We know that if Monika Garg remains in place at the end of the school year, she will be able to accelerate her attack on our teachers and our progressive mission. Your support is crucial. We hope that you can take out an hour of your day tomorrow to join us at our protest and raise your voice together with us in defense of progressive public education. You can also help us by circulating the email announcement for our event to your friends and sharing our event on Facebook. We hope to see you tomorrow! ---------- Rally to Save Central Park East 1! We Are More than A Score - Defend Progressive Education What: Rally to demand that Chancellor Farina listen to two-thirds of CPE 1 parents and remove Principal Garg When: Tuesday, May 17th at 4:30pm Where: Steps of the Department of Education at 52 Chambers Street (just east of Broadway) Who: CPE 1 Families and Staff; Save CPE 1 supporters; anyone who believes that our children and their teachers should be "more than a score" For more than 40 years, Central Park East 1 has been a beacon of progressive education in East Harlem. It has supported a diverse community of learners with a wide range of needs. Visited and studied by educational experts and students, it is a model of educational excellence that has been replicated across the country. Enormously successful by any measure, it has provided public school students with the kind of education that the wealthy seek for themselves. This year, however, CPE 1 has come under threat. Invested with new authority through the hierarchical restructuring of the DOE under Chancellor Fariña, District 4 Superintendent Estrella hired a first-time principal, Monika Garg, with no progressive education experience.Since her arrival Garg has shown no commitment to progressive education nor to learning from the school's successful practice. Instead, she has has failed to properly train new teachers, observe classrooms as required by DOE guidelines, or collaborate with veteran teachers, a necessity for a new principal with no progressive education experience. Instead she has made unilateral decisions that are harming the school's long-proven academic and community building pedagogy and methodology; she has carried out retaliatory investigations of long-standing teachers. As part of these investigations, she has interviewed very young children without their parents' consent or knowledge. A teacher was removed from his classroom with little communication and no supports in place for his class. She has implied that progressive education, the kind successfully used at CPE 1 for 40 years, is not appropriate for children of color or low-income children and has attempted to divide the parent community. Our teachers describe their conditions as intolerable. Our parents have lost trust in our leadership. This is why more than 65% of parents have signed a petition asking for Principal Garg's removal and support for the progressive mission of CPE 1. Despite dozens of letters, phone calls, appeals for help and the delivery of our petition, we have yet to receive a direct meeting or support from the Department of Education. The Chancellor has told the media that she has directed the district to support us and meet with us; this hasn't happened. What's been happening at CPE 1 this year is not unusual: top-down administration with little respect for the school's staff, parents or culture; attacks on teachers by abusive principals; a priority on data-driven assessments over attention to the needs of young learners, and more. All of these have been happening at schools across our city--by an administration that campaigns on liberalism, progressivism, and equity. What is unusual is that it is happening at a highly successful, long-celebrated school known to educators and parents across the country. If the DOE can do this to CPE 1, then they can get away with such attacks anywhere. Join us to defend progressive education and demand that the Department of Education listen to the voices of the parents and staff at CPE 1. RSVP and Share on FB: https://www.facebook.com/events/229938650705895/ For more information, see our website at www.savecpe1.org Sign our petition here. Contact us at info@savecpe1.org