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why exactly was it illegal to charge parents for Mandarin? Many school PTA’s collect funds to add another teacher, when the DOE can’t afford it.  Does anyone have any more detailed info on these nine investigations?

Thank GOD I only have a few more years in this disgusting system filled with lies and money hungry bastards.  Murdoch, Bloomberg, Klein, and more who are JUST CONCERNED about $$$$$.  Minority students EQUAL $$$$$.  That’s it, bottom line.  These guys give each other contracts to make bigtime money.  They are so damn smart and get away with everything because as we are finding out each day, more and more people are on the payroll.  I wonder how many inside deals with $$$$$ have been made to grant contracts to Murdoch and Klein?  The kids are last!  Why in the world is the “slogan” Children First?  It’s the Children Last Network and that’s the truth.
The Charter schools are mostly cheating to get the best kids in.  The public schools are being pushed out slowly every year.  The kids go to schools an hour away from their homes.  We have networks and divisions and deputies and liasons and principals and assistant principals, and coordinators and much much more.  Thank goodness I moved from the Bronx and was able to get a place in Westchester where my kids go to a school with no “extra chaos.”  3 elementary schools and you go to your zoned school.  No B.S.!  You want to attend a better school, you move to that area, period!  I told my sons teacher to check this Gotham site during the year.  Today I saw him in the market and he told me he put everyone onto it at the school.  They use it as a laughing device while reading these sick stories of destruction concerning the D.O.E. and how it operates against the teachers and against the parents.  We don’t have this problem.  Of course it’s a smaller environment but I mean gimmie a break, this stuff is ludacris! 
I read several times on here that it’s about survival which is now the reality of the profession.  If you’re lucky enough to land in a school that somehow is getting the “right” kids then you can survive until certain students start attending.  It’s all just a disgrace.  I feel for the parents and kids who have to attend this twisted system which is crumbling right before our eyes. 

I understand the parents love Shuang Wen.  Isn’t the mandarin part of an after school program?  Why would it be illegal to charge for an afterschool program?  And how is the Murdochs pledging half a million to a public school be a bad thing?  Just because it’s a Murdoch pledge doesn’t automatically mean it’s corrupt or bad. 

Wendi’s in town?  Lock up Mr. Schlossberg.

The DOE fully supported the formation of SWAN, the non-profit organization that founded the Shuang Wen School and continues to administer the after-school.  It was a win-win situation for the DOE.  They did not have to pay for the Mandarin instruction, which would have cost quite a bit more than regular NYC instruction.  The Mandarin instruction was limited to the after-school and paid for by SWAN.  The after-school was represented to be mandatory because the school’s mission was to produce bilingual/bicultural kids.  

Then the school started doing well, so DOE wanted it to grow and serve more kids.  Understandable enough.  The problem was that funding the free after-school became more and more difficult the larger the school grew.  By 2006, there were more than 550 kids in the school, more than 10 times the number who were enrolled when the school opened in 1998 (42 kindergartners).  The recession hit and made matters worse.  The question became: do we close the after-school because we can’t make it free anymore, or do we keep it open, make it non-mandatory and impose a charge?  SWAN decided to do the latter, and their decision was ratified by the high percentage of parents who decided to continue enrolling their kids in the after-school (about 95%) despite the charge.  SWAN continues to fund-raise, and its work allows the costs of the program to stay low — $1,000 per child for the entire year of 5 days per week instruction from 3:00 to 5:30.  SWAN also offers scholarships and some financial aid.  But the bad press the school has been getting as a result of the DOE’s harassing investigations is making it much harder for SWAN to raise the money for these initiatives.

Seventy percent of the student body of Shuang Wen qualifies for free lunch, by the way.

So, to answer your question, it is NOT illegal to impose a charge for a non-mandatory after-school program.  The problem is that apparently some people (and definitely some news reporters) define “mandatory” in their own way, ignoring that several Shuang Wen families opted to withdraw their children from the after-school while it was still free; these families never suffered negative consequences to their kids’ enrollment or academic performance at the school.