metro

Arabic school goes ahead in Park Slope

BROOKLYN HEIGHTS. A controversial plan to open an Arabic-language middle school on the top floor of a Park Slope elementary school will go ahead, despite the protests of parents and residents, said Community Education Council 13 President Diane Nathaniel at a meeting here last week.

“All people heard was that it was Arabic,” she said. “So we’ve been receiving e-mails and phone calls about ‘how could you’ and about the war, and everyone’s missing the point.”

When it takes a floor away from P.S. 282 in September, the Khalil Gibran International Academy will be the city’s first and only school to focus on Arabic language and culture. It will initially accept 81 students for sixth-grade. The school plans to move to another building in three years’ time, after adding seventh- and eighth-grade classes, Nathaniel said.

She blamed negative reactions on misinformation and poor dialogue between parents and education authorities.

“Arabic is only a language, in addition to English and Spanish, that they will teach,” she said. “It’s not a religious school. People are just a little afraid of the word Arabic, which is unfortunate.”

Two days after the plan was announced at a March 12 PTA meeting, P.S. 282 parents wrote a collective letter to schools Chancellor Joel Klein and other officials. “[Our] objections are in no way based in ethnic or religious intolerance,” it read. “Our concerns are based solely on the allocation of limited resources.”

At a protest on March 23 outside Department of Education offices in Manhattan, some parents said they would consider pulling their children from P.S. 282.

“I probably won’t keep [my daughter] in 282, because of crowding and safety,” Daniel McShane told the Brooklyn Paper. “I just like that she is in an elementary school, not an elementary/middle school.”