Exclusive | DOE gives $4M field to ex-chancellors all-boys school and girls soccer players get the boot

It’s a field of broken dreams.The city Department of Education spent $4 million in taxpayer funds to renovate a Brooklyn athletic field — then handed it to a small all-boys public school founded by former Chancellor David Banks, which promptly kicked out three girls’ soccer teams.The power play by Eagle Academy for Young Men II in East Flatbush is under scrutiny by the feds for alleged violation of Title IX, which bars sex discrimination in public schools, The Post has learned.Until last fall, the girls’ varsity soccer teams from Medgar Evers College Prep, Wingate and Prospect Heights high schools — all in District 17 and within walking distance of the “Old Boys and Girls Field” at the corner or Troy Avenue and Rutland Road — used the space for practice and home games.But the DOE gave control of the refurbished field to the 622-student Eagle Academy in Ocean Hill, which is two miles away in District 23, for its football team.

DOE workers even painted the school’s logo and name in huge letters on the turf to underscore ownership.“Suddenly, quietly, behind our backs, it got transferred to Eagle Academy,” said Ruslan Yakovlyuk, coach of the Medgar Evers girls varsity soccer team, the Cougars.The girls, “from poor neighborhoods,” Yakovlyuk said, were forced to play on distant fields across Brooklyn, miss afternoon classes to make games on time, and got home late from pactice.“Once the facility was transferred to them, they basically said, ‘It’s ours,’” he said of Eagle Academy.“My guess is that Mr.

Banks gave it to them somehow.It’s all politics.”Before Mayor Adams named him schools chancellor in January 2022, Banks served 13 years as president and CEO of the Eagle Academy Foundation, which supports a network of five public schools in NYC, and one in Newark, for boys of color in grades 6 to 12.

Before that, Banks was founding principal in 2004 of the first Eagle Academy in the Bronx, which formed in partnership with 100 Black...