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Finance Committee Chair Domenic Recchia, Jr. was among Dennis Walcott's (left) vocal questioner today.

On the first day back to work since 672 school aides were laid off, City Council members unloaded criticism on Chancellor Dennis Walcott for what they said was an intentional failure to notify them about the layoffs.

In several tense exchanges with Walcott, Finance Committee Chair Domenic Recchia, Jr. repeatedly claimed that council members were kept in the dark about the layoffs. If they’d known the layoffs were possible, Recchia said the Council would have acted to stop them, just as it did for teachers this summer.

At one point, Recchia ordered a staff member to hand deliver a budget document to Walcott, seated 30 feet away at the testimonial desk, and asked him to read it.

“Nowhere in the executive budget did you say you were going to lay off school aides,” Recchia said. “We would have done something about it and you didn’t tell us.”

But in his testimony and in subsequent exchanges, Walcott pointed out that Recchia and his colleagues in the Council actually signed off on a budget agreement that “made clear” that an additional 1,000 non-uniform and non-pedagogical employees could lose their jobs.

Echoing previous statements, the Chancellor said the layoffs did not show up specifically in the executive budget because they were cuts made by principals in July to reduce individual school budgets by an average of 2.4 percent. (more…)

Teachers’ union president Michael Mulgrew will urge the Department of Education to return superintendents to their districts when he testifies before the City Council tomorrow.

In the wake of new school governance legislation passed this summer, the City Council Education Committee is holding a hearing tomorrow on whether the city is complying with changes in the law. Among those changes is a revised role for superintendents and new powers for the citywide school board, which is now legally empowered to vote on certain contracts.

In draft comments released to reporters this afternoon, the United Federation of Teachers expresses “grave concern” that the DOE is ignoring what few changes were made to the law.

The UFT will argue that the city is not complying with a provision of the law that calls for superintendents to work within the districts where they are assigned, rather than in districts throughout the city. According to the union, the superintendents in districts 26 and 25, both in Queens, are still being made to answer for the performance of over a dozen schools outside of their districts. In an extreme example, the union says that all of the schools supervised by the superintendent for district 30 are outside of her district. The union’s draft statement reads:

“I wish I could say they can’t be serious, but my experience tells me otherwise.  How can a superintendent supervise his own schools when given responsibility for over 15 schools in another district? … I’m here to tell you — it currently doesn’t measure up to the standards set forth in the new governance law.  It doesn’t even come close.” (more…)

New York City cannot spend state school aid until it holds mandatory hearings on how the money will be used, the state said on Wednesday, correcting an earlier statement that the city could already use the funds.

The state funding, known as Contracts for Excellence, is only doled out to districts that prove they will spend the money in certain kinds of programs pre-approved by state school officials, such as training for teachers and principals, and reducing class size. This summer, the city’s Department of Education skipped the mandated date for hearings, and is now saying that the hearings will be held when the new school year begins in September.

“Contracts cannot be approved without proper public hearings being held,” Jonathan Burman, a spokesman for the state education department wrote in an email on Thursday. “Contracts need to be reviewed and approved before any contract funds are released by the State Education Dept.”

Previously, the state had said that the city could use funds continuing last year’s contract, and only money for “new purposes” would require the commissioner’s approval. The state’s grim financial picture has meant that the city will not receive an increase over the amount it was given last year.

A spokeswomen for the city DOE, Ann Forte, said that even though the state has yet to approve the contract, the city Office of Management and Budget has fronted the money to its schools. (more…)

Photo by p_a_h

Elected officials, teachers, and parents offered up a litany of concerns about the DOE’s proposed Contracts for Excellence — regarding both their content and the process by which they were developed — last night at the final public hearing in Manhattan.

The hearing, chaired by Terence Tolbert, executive director of the DOE’s Department of Intergovernmental Affairs (and soon to direct Obama’s Nevada campaign), was well-attended by representatives from numerous organizations, including ACORN, Class Size Matters, the Coalition for Educational Justice, the Alliance for Quality Education, the City Council, school level PTAs, the UFT, and others.

Legally, Contracts for Excellence funding must “supplement, not supplant” existing spending; several speakers expressed concerns that the money will be spent to close holes in the budget rather than create or expand programs. Others worried that the new funding would be used to make up losses due to budget cuts in low-performing schools, rather than expanding services for high-needs children in those schools. Complicating these issues, several speakers noted, the plan includes little oversight of whether principals spend the Contracts for Excellence money as intended.

(more…)