GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

The principals union is fighting against a federal program that calls for improving struggling schools by firing their principals.

As part of a three year federal grant program to “turn around” the city’s lowest-performing schools, the city can choose from four intervention plans, all of which call for removal of the schools’ principals. Even the least intrusive option — the transformation method — keeps the schools’ staff in place but requires the principals to be replaced.

Department of Education officials said on Thursday that they were lobbying the state to allow them to keep some principals in place. Schools that are showing signs of progress and others that have principals hired in the last three years, may be able to keep their principals, officials said. (more…)

The Council of School Supervisors and Administrators is suing Mayor Bloomberg, the city, and the Department of Education for refusing to restore thousands of parking permits to the union’s members.

According to the union, an arbitrator decided in August that the city had to return the permits or it would violate its contract with CSA. But that decision hasn’t ended the back-and-forth. After two weeks of discussions, the union’s legal counsel headed to court today to file a lawsuit.

“Nobody has gotten an answer from the City about why it won’t honor the arbitration,” a spokeswoman for CSA, Chiara Coletti, wrote in an email. Coletti said that the decision not to reinstate the 6,500 permits came from the mayor’s office.

Jason Post, a spokesman for the mayor, did not address whether the city felt it was in compliance with the arbitrator’s decision, but said the current system should continue.

“For most City agencies and their workers the system has worked well for over a year, yet the CSA has stubbornly tried to hold onto their perks and has refused to work with us to combat misuse and abuse. The current system for the Department of Education limits the number of placards to the number of parking spots at schools, a fair and reasonable policy that we think should continue. We have not yet received the legal papers for this case,” Post wrote in an email. (more…)

Principals are furious that the teachers union bargained away two of the most important work days of the school year, according to principals union president Ernest Logan. But teachers union president Randi Weingarten says Logan shouldn’t complain, because he hasn’t come up with a better plan.

“My members are livid,” Logan said about the agreement that would have teachers and students reporting to school on the same day for the first time this fall.

Principals use the two teacher work days at the beginning of the school year to finalize schedules, register new students, set up classrooms, get staff members on the same page about discipline and curriculum, and integrate new teachers into the community, he said. “When are we going to do all of that if everybody’s popping in there the same day?” Logan asked.

Logan said he first heard about the agreement at 6:05 a.m. today on NPR, which he was listening to while shaving. “I almost cut myself,” he told me. “Nobody used common sense here. The educators did not make this decision.”

The decision to have students and teachers start school on the same day was Schools Chancellor Joel Klein’s preference, according to Weingarten. (more…)

The city principals’ union just passed along these details for the funeral of Mitchell Weiner, the assistant principal at IS 238 who died yesterday from complications of the H1N1 or swine flu.

Wednesday, May 20th at 2 p.m.

Sinai Chapels
162-05 Horace Harding Expressway
Fresh Meadows, NY 11365
Phone: 1-800-446-0406 • 718-445-0300
Fax: 718-321-0896
MAP & DIRECTIONS

Here’s an excerpt from a Daily News story on Wiener that ran a few days before he died:

When a teenage neighbor in need of math tutoring knocked on the door of his Queens apartment 28 years ago, Mitchell Wiener immediately dropped everything he was doing.

The young math teacher spent hours coaching Melissa Lipsky that day in 1981. Over the next several weeks, Wiener met with Melissa numerous times, guiding her through her eighth-grade arithmetic lessons. … (more…)

Part of the million pennies raised by schools through Penny Harvest. Photo from Insideschools.

City principals will have to submit plans in October explaining how they’ll meet the Mayor Bloomberg’s new service requirement for schools, but it shouldn’t be an onerous task for most of them.

Most schools, particularly at the high school level, already engage in some service, according to Department of Education spokeswoman Kerri Lyon. At Manhattan Bridges High School in Midtown, for example, students have always been required to log 40 hours of service before they graduate, Principal Mirza Sanchez Medina told me yesterday. Other schools announced service initiatives this week that were planned before Bloomberg’s announcement: Students from the Academy of Urban Planning and the Bushwick School for Social Justice planted 16 trees in between their campuses in honor of Earth Day, and kids at Harlem’s PS 57 pitched ideas for community-improvement grants to Scholastic’s Be Big Fund.

For the many schools that already engage in service, the mayor’s initiative should expand the number of volunteer options available to students, Lyon said. And schools that have never participated in service before can start slowly, such as by joining Penny Harvest, the popular program where kids donate pennies to charities of their choice, she said. (more…)