After a massive walkout at Brooklyn Tech High school to protest school closings, demonstrators displayed messages to the Panel for Educational Policy.

By Clara Martinez Turco

Vincent Malfetano, 61, a teacher at Christopher Columbus High School, waited more than five hours before he could offer “some advice” to Schools Chancellor Cathie Black during a boisterous meeting of the Panel for Educational Policy Thursday night.

“Columbus has its problems, but we’ve been opened for 70 years and graduated scholars for years in our building,” Malfetano said before a diminished crowd at Brooklyn Tech High School. “The school needs a change of leadership, there are five principles and there has been a poor management.”

But his words and a massive walkout staged by some 2,000 parents, teachers and students during the meeting, were not enough to prevent the panel from approving the closure of Columbus High School and nine other schools, five of them in the Bronx. Along with Columbus and Global Enterprise, the panel voted to close John F. Kennedy High School, Frederick Douglass Academy III Middle School, P.S. 102 and Performance Conservatory High School.

The building had a heavy police presence as a few hundred students briefly protested outside after the walkout. They marched around the block holding banners that read “closing is not the answer” and “save our schools,” but the protesters acknowledged that they already knew what the outcome was going to be.

By the time the panel started to vote, only 80 people remained in the auditorium. “Shame on you!” shouted a group of parents as the members approved the closings one by one.

The Department of Education cited  “substantial evidence” in closing Christopher Columbus. Spokesman Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld said the school has had received Cs and Ds in the last four report cards. “Ninety-nine percent of the schools in the borough are outperforming this high school,” he said.

The panel had already voted last year to phase out the school, but a lawsuit filed by the United Federation of Teachers prevented the Department of Education from closing it. The Manhattan Supreme Court found the city had violated the provisions of mayoral control by not properly assessing the impact that the closures would have in the community.

“We knew they’d do it again,” Malfetano said of the panel’s vote , in an interview after he addressed the group. “The lawsuit last year was just a procedural victory. It just said that Bloomberg did not follow the law properly, but he needs our buildings for other schools.”

According to the proposal presented by DOE’s Division of Portfolio Planning, two new schools will replace Columbus High School and Global Enterprise High School, which shares the same building and will also close. Starting in September, the outgoing schools will not accept new ninth graders and will be closed by 2014.

Meanwhile, the two new institutions would move into the Christopher Columbus Educational Campus, which since 2004 hosts Columbus High School and four other schools.

“They are going to cram these two schools into a building that already has three other schools, it’s going to be a zoo,” said Malfetano. “It’s so out of control, we don’t have a teacher’s room to sit in anymore, there’s no refrigerator to put your lunch in anymore. You don’t even know who to go to order supplies.”