Students and teachers at a Brooklyn middle school are putting pharmaceutical giant Pfizer on notice for backtracking on promises to develop a fenced-off vacant lot next door.
More than 150 students and teachers from Beginning With Children Charter School, joined by Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso and other elected officials, walked out of class Friday to demand Pfizer take action at 11 Bartlett Street.
The rally comes as decades of conversations between the school and drug company have soured as a series of proposals fell through.
Protesters called for 350,000 fenced-off square feet to be repurposed for the school or as a shared community center with an auditorium or gym — two facilities that the school currently lacks — or build apartments in an increasingly unaffordable neighborhood.
“It had barbed wire, and it made the school look like a prison,” eighth grader Leeandra Cleto, 13, told the News. “A lot of the time when we’re playing sports outside, our balls will get stuck inside the fence.”
The vacant lot is nestled inside the Broadway Triangle on the border of Williamsburg, Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant. For more than a century, much of the area was home to Pfizer, which closed its Brooklyn manufacturing facility in 2008.
Pfizer gifted the building to Beginning With Children in the 1990s for $1 in annual rent. As the pharmaceutical company vacated the borough, property records show it sold the schoolhouse for $10. But school officials said the property was split into two tax lots that granted Pfizer development rights over the full stretch.
In the years that passed, Beginning With Children representatives said they partnered with Pfizer, the city Department of Education and developers to pour money into a slew of proposals for expanded school spaces, neighborhood hubs and affordable housing.
But all were ultimately shut down for environmental or business concerns.
“Pfizer tore the buildings down, carted away the rubble, and left more…
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