Rally against Brooklyn Success co-location is canceled abruptly

A Bedford-Stuyvesant school protest that was supposed to end up at Tweed Courthouse was cancelled abruptly this morning because too few people showed up.

Basilica Johnson, whose son Deron is autistic and one of 72 special- needs students enrolled at the Star Program, organized the rally because of concerns she had about a proposal to open Brooklyn Success Academy, a new charter school, inside the building. The Star Program would lose two classrooms this fall under the plan.

About a half dozen others joined Johnson at 8:30 a.m. for the protest, which was advertised to end with a larger rally outside of Tweed at 10:30 a.m. They distributed hand-outs and carried signs, but after about 90 minutes, Johnson called the protest off.

Many of her fellow parents weren’t aware of the co-location plans, she said.

“It just makes me know that we got to fight harder,” said Johnson, the school’s PTA president.

Johnson said she planned to protest later tonight at Prospect Heights Campus, where the Panel for Educational Policy is scheduled to vote on the plan. Under the proposal, Brooklyn Success Academy would open as an elementary school next fall with 190 students in kindergarten and first grade. The charter school would add one grade per year until it reached a capacity of 424 students and 20 full-sized classrooms by the 2013-2014 school year.