In Williamsburg, A Charter School Divides North from South - SchoolBook Community organizations and church groups packed a Williamsburg, Brooklyn, middle school on Tuesday night to protest the planned arrival of a new Success Academy charter school, which they maintained is aimed at wealthy, white parents, not Latino families. The Department of Education's plan to bring a Success Academy school to Williamsburg has seemed like a given for months. The neighborhood has been blanketed in brochures and door hangers, advertisements adorn the Bedford Avenue L subway station, and people on the street hand out postcards that mark the school's planned location on South 3rd Street with a large star and a tiny asterisk with the words "Location subject to government approval." But the charter school network's advertising campaign has rubbed some Williamsburg residents the wrong way, angering those in the neighborhood's predominantly Latino South Side - known as Los Sures - who say the network has made few efforts to reach Spanish-speaking parents, while exhaustively recruiting families in the whiter, higher-income North Side. On Tuesday night, hundreds of South Side residents came to a hearing on the charter school's arrival, repeating a message that has become familiar as Success Academy, which now has nine schools, expands throughout the city: Charter schools are welcome, just not this one. For Luis Garden Acosta, founder and president of El Puente, a Williamsburg community development group that has organized much of the opposition to the school, the Success Academy's marketing strategy spells racism. "If you go to the L train Bedford Avenue station, which is ground zero of the newcomer movement, you're going to see that the whole station at both entrances has been totally blanketed, there's no other advertisement, other than the Success Academy," he said. And you don't see that in stations in the South Side. So there is a concerted effort to tell the newcomer community that there now is a school for them. Jenny Sedlis, a spokeswoman for the Success Academy network, said the organization has tried to reach Latino residents. "We've had Spanish-speaking people go around to all of the day care centers that are predominantly Spanish-speaking, we've been passing out Spanish flyers on the streets, we've been going to the neighborhoods that have a greater Hispanic population," she said. Next school year, she said, all Success Academy charter schools plan to set aside 20 percent of their seats for English language learners. Mr. Acosta said that what Williamsburg needs is a good middle school. At Junior High School 50, where the city plans to co-locate the Success Academy School, only 12 percent of students passed the state's English exam last year. El Puente began working to improve the school this year, Mr. Acosta said. But he also acknowledged that parents" elementary school options are lacking. In recent years, P.S. 84 Jose De Diego has improved, but the city is closing one of the nearby elementary schools, P.S. 19 Roberto Clemente, for poor performance, and two other elementary schools, P.S. 16 and P.S. 17, both have low test scores. Henry Mazurek, a Williamsburg resident who supports the Success Academy school's arrival, is zoned for P.S. 16 and has two young children. "Our only hope is to leave the neighborhood that we've chosen to make a part of our home or to opt out of the system entirely," he said. I don't know if I want my child to be in a Success charter school, I can't say that right now. I have an open mind, but I want the choice.