Rockaway, NY – Assemblywoman Stacey Pheffer Amato (D-Rockaway Park) recently wrote a letter to the New York City Department of Education (DOE) Chancellor requesting the DOEto reconsider its recently unveiled changes to middle school admissions that could negatively impact The Scholars’ Academy, located in Rockaway Park, Queens. The Scholars’ Academy is an academically accelerated screened school, where 51 % of the students are from the Rockaway Peninsula. An admissions criteria is applied to each applicant to grant students admission to its middle school.

“I am vigorously opposed to any admissions changes that negatively impact the Scholars' Academy, which the Chancellor’s new guidelines clearly would,” Pheffer Amato said. “When the Scholars’ Academy opened in 2005 – it was a game changer for the students of the Rockaway Peninsula who would travel hours a day to go to an academically accelerated school. Now, after years of success beyond what we could have imagined, our own Department of Education is threatening to undo it – under the guise of wholesale changes without understanding the nuance or context of the schools they will be impacting. This is simply unacceptable, and unfair to the people of the Rockaway Peninsula who already have to fight so hard to get the services we need.”

Under the Chancellor’s new guidelines, a random lottery would be used to select the students attending the Scholars’ Academy middle school. However, the changes go beyond the middle school, but will also impact high school admissions as well – where 90% of enrolled students come from the middle school.