Friday Night's School Diversity and Specialized High School Admission Community Forum

 There have been calls by Mayor De Blasio and Chancellor Carranza to scrap the sole test for admitting students into the city's specialized high schools , in favor of putting in a system so more minority students would be admitted than is currently in place. 

 State Senator John Liu, a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science has been given the task to hold hearings in all five boroughs, and then report to the state senate his findings. 

 At the Bronx meeting held Friday night at Lehman College a poor turnout by Bronx residents and parents allowed speakers mostly from Queens and Brooklyn to dominate this forum. There were statements that the admission test is color blind by many, and only a couple of people who said that the admission process should be changed. 

 Speakers went on to say that the Department of Education has and is doing a poor job of educating students so they are unprepared to answer the questions on the test. There were a couple of students who said that their goal is to pass the admission test to the specialized schools so they can have a better education than in high schools in their area.

  If one waits outside the Bronx High School of Science, you will notice dozens of buses from a company in Queens that brings students to the school, and the takes them back to Queens. Others take the subway getting off at the nearby #4 train station of Bedford Park Boulevard. 

 The NYCDOE tried to solve this problem a few years ago expanding the specialized high schools from the three original State mandated schools to eight by adding five more NYCDOE schools. The mayor and chancellor can change the admission process at the five additional schools. At the original three specialized high schools Bronx Science, Stuyvesant, and Brooklyn Tech the state legislature would have to change the admission process, because it was the state legislature that set the admission policy.

Above - State Senator John Liu (R) the Chair of the Senate NYC Education Committee, and State Senator Jamaal Bailey (L) the senator for area where the forum was held. 

Below - A little levity before the forum began between the two senators for the camera.