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The city is reversing a back-room deal that would have had teachers and students returning to school on the same day in September, giving staff no official planning time.

Now, instead of starting school on the day after Labor Day, students will have their first day on Wednesday, Sept. 9. That will give principals and teachers one day together to plan for the opening of school.

Principals union president Ernest Logan had attacked the plan to eliminate the beginning-of-the-year planning days, which he said were the most important days of the year. “No one used common sense here,” he told me.

After today’s schedule adjustment, Logan declared, “Common sense prevails,” in a message to principals. He also said his union would continue to discuss the effects of the schedule change with the Department of Education.

One effect of the change will be a stray school day for students at the end of next year. Instead of finishing on the last Friday in June, as they are this year, students will be required to report to school the following Monday, as well.

Below are Logan’s full statement and the city’s press release, which emphasizes that other components of the teachers union’s deal with the city will save the city $100 million a year.  (more…)

Charter schools will not have to pay union wages on construction projects, as New York’s Department of Labor had ordered them to do, a state appeals court ruled today.

The decision follows a tussle in which the state ordered that schools pay their janitors and construction workers union wages, causing an angry uproar among the schools’ leaders, who said the high wages would have been impossible for them to afford and could have jeopardized their ability to expand into new buildings.

The Department of Labor began asking charter schools to pay the union wage in September of 2007, but a group of charter schools in Albany and in the Bronx filed a lawsuit challenging the decision. A state supreme court upheld the decision last May, but the plaintiffs appealed, and this new decision overturns the supreme court’s.

Charter schools are publicly funded, but operate outside the regular Department of Education bureaucracy. The appeals court concluded that the schools are “inapplicable” to the law requiring that certain public entities that hold contracts with workers pay what is known as the “prevailing wage,” or the union wage.

Charter school supporters cheered the decision. “This is a victory for charter schools, which are under tremendous financial pressure to meet increasing expenses with less funding,” Bill Phillips, the president of the New York Charter Schools Association and a co-plaintiff in the case, said in a statement.