Is John Jay Going Apartheid?

I was running a few errands yesterday afternoon when I stumbled upon an anti-apartheid protest rally in Park Slope. It was loud and well-attended and I contemplated trying to get a shot but it was dark and my crackberry wasn't up to the task.

It turns out that the students and parents of the smaller middle schools currently housed at John Jay are not happy about plans for a successful city high school, Millenium, to start up an outpost in Brian William's last frontier of Brooklyn.

Now, as it happens, I have long made fun of my mother for having attended Manual Training High School. That's what nee John Jay was called before it was John Jay and before it was whatever the names are of the three middle schools currently housed in the moldering but humongous building. 

I was actually quoted in an article Park Slope Patch did on the plans for a new Millenium a few weeks ago. They needed somebody to admit that we still avoid the place like the plague and no way, no how will send our little sweetlings over to be ghettified.

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Speaking of Piss: The Skankiest Public School Potty Award Goes To....

P.S. 58 (aka The Carroll School) in the economically deprived neighboring hood of Carroll Gardens. 

Yes, per a few (dare we say it) pissed-off parents, the fancily nicknamed Carroll School cannot seem to supply students with soap or paper towels. This despite "tony restaurants, boutiques catering to your every whim, moms clogging the streets while pushing $700 Bugaboo strollers and stomping around in $100 Hunter rain boots" 

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STOP HAVING CHILDREN! [KINDERGARTEN CLASSES ARE FULL]

Look ppl, the choice is yours: either stop having bebes or get rich enough to send your kids to private school. Cause there ain't no more room in either P.S. 321 on 7th Ave OR P.S. 39 on Sixth Ave. 

According to the Daily News:

The most popular schools admitted just a fraction of pre-K kids at the same time there were dramatic increases in the number of applicants: PS 321 in Park Slope had space for just 12 of 475 applicants this year; last school year there were 292 applicants for 48 slots. At PS 39 on Sixth Ave., there were 406 applicants for 36 slots this school year; last year 236 kids applied. And P.S. 10 got 499 applications for 36 pre-K spots.

This pre-K shit show is apparently going down because waaay more people are poor now and can't afford private school, so they want their kids to slum it in public school. And since school budgets are being slashed too, the schools can't add enough seats to meet the needs of the community.

Oh wellzers...guess that leaves way more time for all the kiddos to play with rocket balloons in the park!