As an elected representative who believes that a public official’s first duty is to their constituents, as a Bronxite who wishes for a solution and as a father committed to providing my daughters with the best education, I urge our city leaders to do the right thing by providing public charter school students across New York City with the space they need to learn – not just for one year, but for many years to come.

For parents and kids at Success Academy Cobble Hill, their three-year battle with the Department of Education for more classroom space isn’t a political exercise — it’s a daily anxiety. That’s because the high-performing charter school has never been provided with the promised space for students in grades five to eight within the district.

One school became 46. One hundred sixty-five students became 15.500. A tiny outpost in Harlem spawned brethren all across Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens; Harlem Success Academy is now part of the Success Academy Charter Schools network, of which Moskowitz—the author of a lively new memoir, The Education of Eva Moskowitz—is CEO. From that position, she has become one of the country’s most influential crusaders at a turning point for charter schooling.

The city Department of Education claims it can’t give Success Academy the middle-school space it needs because it’s just too hard to say if half-empty public schools will stay that way. That’s nonsense. Most of the buildings where Success wants to open new schools, in areas near its scholars’ primary schools, have had plenty of room for years, as the city’s own data show.

Last week, the City offered a “solution” to Success Academy’s rising fifth-grade families across Brooklyn and Queens: one building in East Flatbush. Success Academy has 12 elementary schools in Brooklyn alone: its middle school enrollment is set to triple in the next two years and in four years, Success will have 3000 Brooklyn middle schoolers. Mayor de Blasio’s non-solution means that scholars will be forced into a temporary, distant space, only to move yet again for seventh and eighth grades.

With rigor and joy as the guiding principles, Success Academy believes schools should be inspiring houses of learning where student engagement is the number one priority. With that in mind it has created a content-rich curriculum that is constantly being refined and improved. Because it is a charter school it has the autonomy to be nimble about making changes when something isn’t working for its scholars.

Fuming Success Academy parents blasted Mayor de Blasio Thursday for failing to provide adequate accommodations for the charter network’s burgeoning population of middle-schoolers.

Here’s a tale of two cities for you: The villain is Mayor de Blasio, sentencing hundreds of minority, low-income schoolchildren to the educational guillotine.The mayor’s minions refuse to offer adequate space for new Success Academy middle schools. There’s ample room in buildings near the primary schools the children now attend, but the city Department of Education wants to make them travel long distances — forcing fifth-graders in Southeast Queens to tramp up to the South Bronx.

Try again. That was the message Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz sent longtime foe Mayor Bill de Blasio in a letter Wednesday and a press conference outside City Hall, where she said the city’s offer of building space for her schools fell woefully short.

Last week, the city falsely announced — without Success Academy’s input or community engagement — that it had resolved Success’ requests for space to accommodate hundreds of our rising middle schoolers. But this woefully inadequate proposal leaves hundreds of graduating elementary students educationally homeless and discriminates against the highest-achieving public charter students not just in the city and state, but in the nation. That is why Success Academy is rejecting the city’s proposal.