I'm a parent of a student at PS15 in Red Hook, and this past February, the Department of Education dropped a bomb on us with no advance warning: they plan to park a charter school in our school - which by the way has been doing exceptionally well for the past several years - PS15 is not a failing school, it's actually way ahead of many other schools.
Some of us are strongly opposed to the whole privatization issue. Some of us just don't want our school to become crowded. Some of us are suspicious of the true motives of the founders.
Read more about it at http://charter-free-ps15.blogspot.com; we'd like feedback from other parents about this issue - and we want more people to be aware that is IS possible to fight large bureaucratic agencies.