GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

After being criticized by parents for bungling the roll-out of parent council elections, the Department of Education is taking heat again for making parents jump through hoops to vote.

For the first time, the website where parents go to vote for candidates in their district is password protected. Although the city sent passwords home in elementary and middle school students’ backpacks, some parents who have children in high school said they never got the information. Without it, they can’t cast their votes in the Community Education Council elections and, if they’re running for a seat on the council, they can’t see who their opponents are.

A Department of Education official said the department’s Office of Family Information and Action decided to put the list of candidates’ names and profiles behind a password for privacy reasons.

President of the Community Education Council in District 1, Lisa Donlan, said she and other parents have not been able to log-on. Although she is running for office Donlan, whose son is in high school, said she can’t access the list of 12 candidates running in her district. (more…)

Burned by Albany funding cuts, charter school advocates are turning to a political base that they’ve long left untapped: parents.

In mid-October, a dozen charter school administrators gathered in a conference room at the Times Square Marriott for a seminar on the role of parents in charter school advocacy. Kenneth Peterson, a director of strategic partnerships at the New York State Charter School Association told the group that the charter school movement has a secret problem: it has almost no grassroots parent advocacy.

New York State’s political climate had changed, Peterson explained. Last year, legislators froze the amount of money that charter schools receive for each student they teach, effectively cutting their budgets. A fragile majority of charter school supporters in the State Senate made it imperative for charter school advocates to win over individual senators, rather than relying on friendships with a few party leaders.

“Crisis has a way of galvanizing folks around the need to act,” said Jeff Maclin, vice president for school advocacy at the New York City Charter School Center. “I think the ‘freeze’ in education funds to public charter schools this year was a wake up call to schools to make sure something like this does not happen again.” (more…)