GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

The scheduling problems that have plagued high schools like Herbert Lehman High School in the Bronx and William Cullen Bryant High School in Queens have been blamed on poor summer planning and an influx of new students registering.

But the confusion has also been caused by an overloading of the servers the city uses for its high school scheduling system, according to e-mails a reader sent us today.

The reader forwarded us this series of e-mails that the team overseeing the city’s high school scheduling system, called STARS, sent to schools last week. The memos detail how the city has responded to the problem so far, including adding additional servers and memory dedicated to the system.

But our source also tells us that the team overseeing the system has also had its staff cut, reducing their capacity to be responsive to the scheduling process. (We’ve asked the DOE to confirm this and will update when we hear back.) This year was the first year the scheduling system was used by both middle and high schools, the Post reported this morning.

Here’s the e-mail that schools received last Monday, September 13:

As we identified the application was slow last week, we have added additional servers to handle the load and the application was functioning fine on Thursday and Friday. The application is still slow this morning and we further investigated the cause and would require to reset the servers to resolve the issues. (more…)

Yesterday I wrote about extreme under-enrollment at one of the schools a judge ordered the city to keep open against education officials’ will.

Currently, Jamaica High School is looking at an incoming ninth grade of only 23 students — a class size so small it may have to phase out its ninth grade. One of the reasons for little student interest could be a letter the city sent to families assigned to one of 14 high schools marked for closure.

The letter warned families that the schools might end up closing anyway, if the city wins its appeal. It also described the schools as “failing.” And in a sentence describing the teachers union’s suit to keep the schools open, the letter says the union was joined by “others,” instead of naming the NAACP.

A portion of the letter reads:

Back in December, your high school application listed one or more programs from 14 high schools that the Department of Education decided to phase out because they were failing. As part of the phase-out process, we decided those schools would not admit new students in the fall. However, the United Federation of Teachers and others filed a lawsuit in state court challenging our decision. On Friday, March 26, 2010, the Court ruled that the Department of Education did not comply with the procedural requirements necessary for phasing out these schools. We wholeheartedly disagree with this ruling and we are appealing. At this time however the court ruling requires us to permit students to enroll at these schools.

(more…)

A reader wrote in this simple message:

I have heard of the success of charter schools, and would like to learn more. I have a 11yr old son and a 5yr old granddaughter. Please tell me all you can.

Any brave souls want to step up to the plate? If you write an especially good response, we’ll forward it along to the questioner. E-mail us or leave a comment.

In a two-page letter sent to the Citizens Union Monday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan offered a stern warning that placing restrictions on mayoral control could “turn back the clock and halt progress” and have “profoundly negative consequences for New York City’s students.”

We reported yesterday that Duncan had sent such a letter, but at the time U.S. Department of Education officials wouldn’t confirm that the letter existed. That changed a few minutes ago when an official e-mailed it over.

The full text of the letter is after the jump. (more…)

Teach for America is reassuring its 2009 corps members assigned to New York City public schools that they’ll likely have spots come September — despite a hiring freeze that prohibits most Department of Education principals from hiring new teachers.

The assurances came in an e-mail message to people who were hired to join schools via Teach For America in September. “Despite some of the uncertainty that exists currently across the city, the NYCDOE and our charter partners continue to provide us with enough evidence to suggest that placing 230 corps members in district schools, and the remaining 100 in charter schools, will be possible,” Jemina Bernard, the executive director of Teach For America’s New York City branch, wrote in the e-mail.

The hiring freeze, announced earlier this month, prohibits principals at district schools that have operated for more than three years from filling vacancies with new teachers. A tight budget situation has already inspired Teach For America to scale down the number of people it recruited to work in New York City, and Teach For America is now sending more of its corps members to city charter schools, which are exempt from the hiring freeze.

Bernard’s e-mail message explains exceptions to the freeze, and it tells prospective teachers that the majority of them cannot be hired “unless and until the restrictions are lifted.”

The Teach For America corps member who sent the message to me said many corps members were calmed by the note. “There’s no evidence to suggest that we can’t hold them to their word,” the corps member said. “If they were going to screw this up, they would know by now.” But the email’s sender was skeptical and thought Teach For America was being overly optimistic. (more…)