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The former chair of the City Council education committee, Eva Moskowitz, talked to the current chair, Robert Jackson, before today's hearing on charter schools. Moskowitz runs a charter school network, while Jackson said he is skeptical of charter schools. (GothamSchools, Flickr)

City Council members today moved to regulate the process of placing charter schools in public school buildings, introducing a resolution that they said would avoid conflicts between families at neighborhood schools and new charter schools placed inside of them.

Right now, Department of Education officials offer some charter schools space in public school buildings on their own, but the space-sharing arrangements are sometimes contentious. (Charter schools receive public funding, but operate outside of the DOE watch and are not guaranteed space in public school buildings.)

The Council resolution would force the department to follow some kind of a regular procedure — probably involving a requirement to work with members of a neighborhood — before it could place a charter school in a public building.

“Make community stakeholders part of that process,” City Council Member Maria del Carmen Arroyo, of the Bronx, said. “You fail miserably at including the people that have to deal with the fallout of the decisions that you make.”

Council Member Jessica Lappin of Manhattan, who chairs the council’s work on public land use issues, said that charter schools should be placed in the same way that new traditional public schools are placed. “I have worked very hard to bring community members, principals, and the Department of Education together so that we can resolve the issues that inevitably arise,” Lappin said. Why, she asked, shouldn’t charter schools be placed in the same way?

Testifying before the council, Department of Education officials said they agree that they need to improve the way that they bring in new schools, but they declined to support the resolution that would force them to follow a new procedure when doing it. (more…)