This is a tale of three neighborhoods and two schools.

First, overlooking the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge, there is Brooklyn Heights,

a predominantly white, old-money enclave of stately brownstones.

Brooklyn Heights is home to PS8.

Just east of Brooklyn Heights, but a world apart, there are the Farragut houses,

a complex of ten brick public housing towers populated mostly by low-income, black and brown

folks. Across the street from Farragut is PS307. In between Brooklyn Heights and Farragut,

almost like a hinge, is a neighborhood called Dumbo. For decades, Dumbo was mostly industrial,

but the warehouses were turned into lofts, glass high rises started sprouting up like weeds, and Dumbo now has

the most expensive housing in Brooklyn. Dumbo used to fall within the school zone for PS8 in Brooklyn Heights.

So as Dumbo filled up with upper middle class families, PS8 became wildly popular and severely overcrowded.

By 2014, the school was enrolled at 142% of its capacity.

Meanwhile, PS307, like so many schools across Black Brooklyn, had plenty of space.

So in the summer of 2015, the Department of Education announced a plan to redraw the school zones,

moving Dumbo out of the zone for PS8 and into the zone for PS 307.

If you were a parent in Dumbo with a child too young for school, you may well have bought a home in that neighborhood because you believed you'd be entitled to a seat at PS8.

This rezoning would have taken that away from you.

So when the city held a public hearing, Dumbo parents came out and forced to protest, to make it known that they were not happy to be rezoned into a school that primarily serves the projects.

They called our school dangerous.

They talked about fires and things that they said happened at the school.

They never happened at the school.

Of course, they talked about test scores.

...