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Ninth-grader Geronimo Miranda joins sixth-graders Ariyelle Ceasar, Tiane Jackson, Cheyanne Young and Nia Manerville in describing Wadleigh Middle School's positive qualities at a school truncation hearing Jan. 26.

A who’s who of elected officials and Harlem leaders turned out Thursday to defend the Wadleigh Secondary School of Performing Arts against the Department of Education’s plan to close its middle school.

About 200 parents, students, activists, and staff packed the school’s auditorium Thursday evening for a public hearing on the proposal. Just before, officials who included City Councilman Robert Jackson, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, State Sen. Bill Perkins, and Comptroller John Liu all held court in the packed lobby of the Harlem campus. Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and the city’s NAACP chief, Hazel Dukes, also spoke at the hearing.

They said the city was giving up on a neighborhood institution by moving to close Wadleigh’s middle school. Jackson promised to call Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Dennis Walcott today to air his opposition to the plan.

Wadleigh’s 440-student high school would remain open under the plan, as would another middle school in the building, Frederick Douglass Academy II, which narrowly escaped closure this year after earning an even lower progress report score than Wadleigh’s middle school. A charter school, Harlem Success Academy I, is set to move its middle school grades into the building, according to a plan the city set last year. (more…)

Seth Diamond, commissioner of the Department of Homeless Services and Kathleen Grimm, DOE deputy chancellor, testify before a city council hearing on education barriers facing homeless youth.

Despite improvements, the city is still falling short at protecting homeless students from disruptions to their education, advocates told members of the City Council today.

Education committee chair Robert Jackson said he convened a hearing on obstacles facing homeless students in part to follow up on the story, reported by the Daily News last year, of a high school student who was unable to take a required Regents exam because she had to spend the day with her family going through the city’s shelter intake process. Since then, the Department of Homeless Services revised its policy to excuse children from most of the lengthy intake process.

“We’re pleased that this harmful policy was changed,” Jackson said. But he said, “This is but one example of the hardships faced by homeless students. DHS’s placement of families in shelters outside of their original community, combined with the [Department of Education]‘s busing restrictions, lead to many students in shelters having to transfer schools, thereby disrupting their education.”

DOE and DHS officials said they are increasingly collaborating to help students classified as homeless, who have quadrupled since 2008 to more than 65,000 and who make up a significant portion of students who are chronically absent from school. But the officials said they could do more to help more support students’ legal right to remain enrolled at their “school of origin,” the school they were enrolled in before becoming homeless.

DOE Deputy Chancellor Kathleen Grimm said the DOE has counted 50,000 students in temporary housing, 20,000 of them in shelters. “Our number indicates about 65 percent remain in their school of origin,” she said. “We have no idea why parents move a child from a school, and maybe that’s something we could address.”

Advocates said the answer could be found in the city’s policies about school transportation and placement.

“Unfortunately, specific practices at DOE and DHS all but guarantee educational instability for a large swath of homeless students,” testified Jared Stein, the assistant director of New York State Technical and Education Assistance Center for Homeless Students, an advocacy group that helps school districts work with homeless students.  (more…)

The City Council’s education committee has given a great deal of scrutiny to schools the Department of Education wants to close. Now it’s turning its attention to the new schools the department wants to open.

Today, the committee held an oversight hearing about the DOE’s new school creation process, which has resulted in more than 400 new schools in the last nine years.

The process to open a charter school is set in law, but how new district schools come to exist is more obscure, Robert Jackson, the committee’s chair, said during the hearing.

“Some charge that there’s been two many new schools opened in too short a time, with too little planning and preparation and too much emphasis on quantity over quality,” he said.

Of the 500 district and charter schools that have opened since 2002, just six have closed because of poor performance, said Marc Sternberg, the DOE deputy chancellor in charge of new schools. He said the schools’ success stems in large part from the department’s selection process for school models and principals.

That process has gotten more stringent this year. Prospective school leaders will have to complete a rigid, three-month-long series of assignments, and at three points, some will be culled from the pool. (more…)

City Councilman Robert Jackson, Council Speaker Christine Quinn, and UFT President Michael Mulgrew addressing students at P.S./I.S. 187.

With a new round of budget projections already on the horizon, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn sent a clear message to City Hall today, warning Mayor Bloomberg that teacher layoffs would not be on the table to close gaps at the Department of Education.

“I cant imagine why you would go back to that idea again,” Quinn told reporters outside P.S./I.S. 187 in Washington Heights, where she spent more than an hour greeting students on their first day of school. “It didn’t work.”

It was just a couple of months into the last school year that Bloomberg announced his intention to lay off thousands of teachers in order to balance the city’s budget. But layoffs were ultimately averted after the city struck a deal with the UFT and City Council.

Quinn, who is planning a 2013 mayoral run, said she hasn’t discussed the prospect of teacher layoffs with the mayor yet this year. But she signaled that she would reprise last year’s fight if the mayor again levels a layoff threat.

“I think, and I certainly hope, that they saw how clear and strong we in the council felt about the idea of layoffs last year,” she said.

Quinn was joined by Councilman Robert Jackson, chair of the education committee, and United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew at the school. (more…)

People on both sides of the charter school fight are not happy about a hefty City Council earmark that’s going to the teachers union’s charter school.

The funding, sponsored by City Councilman Erik Dilan and approved last month in the council’s annual capital budget allocations, gives the union $2 million to develop a plan for moving its charter school out of the two East New York buildings it shares and into space of its own.

The announcement comes as charter schools and their critics are locked in fierce debate over how the city funds and allocates space to charter schools. That dispute is central to a lawsuit, filed in May by the UFT and NAACP, that seeks to stop 16 charter schools from opening, moving, or expanding.

The lawsuit alleges that some charter schools receive disproportionate public resources, and some of its backers say the City Council earmark is another example.

Teacher activist Norm Scott called the funding “a double outrage, maybe a triple outrage.” (more…)

As city and union officials remain mired in budget negotiations, parents and education activists gathered at City Hall today with a new tool to battle against school cuts—scrolls of signatures that reached far beyond the steps.

They unrolled seven of the 50-foot-long lists, which they said contained of the names of 20,000 people who have signed a petition against the mayor’s proposed budget. That number included over 16,000 online signatures.

“Unless you’re stupid or ignorant, you understand that 20,000 of your constituents have signed this, and don’t want you to make these cuts. If you ignore that, you shouldn’t be in office,” said Council Member Robert Jackson, chair of the council’s education committee.

During the rally, UFT President Michael Mulgrew accused Mayor Bloomberg of “playing political games” with the city’s children. “We will not sit idly by as you attack our schools and the services we need,” he said.

City Councilmember Robert Jackson speaks at a protest against cuts to arts education on the steps of City Hall.

Roughly 350 arts specialists will be among the 4,000 teacher layoffs next year if the City Council signs onto Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed budget, according to a report released today by an arts education advocacy group.

Building on 135 arts positions eliminated this school year, the layoffs would amount to a 20 percent reduction in the number of arts teachers working in city schools in just the last three years.

Eight City Council members and dozens of angry parents came to City Hall today to announce the report, prepared by the Center for Arts Education, and to protest the potential cuts.

Gretchen Mergenthaler, whose eight-year-old son Declan attends P.S. 98 in Inwood, said that he is offered either art or music once each week, but no dance or theater.

“We have a gorgeous auditorium that we don’t even use,” Mergenthaler said. “This is a picture of P.S. 98 before any budget cuts. Can you imagine it after?”

Today’s report is an analysis of data that the city has been releasing since it overhauled the way arts funding is allotted to schools. (more…)

Screenshot of the campaign page against the UFT/NAACP lawsuit (click to enlarge)

Michelle Rhee’s new advocacy organization is jumping into the fight between the NAACP and charter school families with a new email campaign that has been flooding elected officials’ inboxes since Friday.

The campaign targets elected officials who co-signed a lawsuit, along with the teachers union and the NAACP, demanding that the Bloomberg administration halt its plans to close struggling district schools and replace them with charters.

Students First, which Rhee founded last year, sponsored the campaign, titled “Tell NYC Officials: Don’t Decrease Charter School Space.”

“Remove Your Name from the Charter School Lawsuit,” reads the subject line in the identical emails, which has been sent to the dozen officials listed as plaintiffs in the suit. In four days, more than 550 emails have been sent from people from all over New York State.

“New York needs more quality public school options,” the email reads.

“That is why I ask that you remove your name from the lawsuit that threatens to close several existing charter s ychools [sic] and to prevent others from enrolling new children. This action is tantamount to condemning thousands of kids to failing schools who otherwise would have an opportunity at a great education.” (more…)

Underscored by an intervention from the council’s top budget broker, education committee members rang a unified tone at their hearing today, telling schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott they won’t support his final budget if a plan to eliminate thousands of teaching positions isn’t reversed.

Sources and council members said Mayor Bloomberg’s current budget proposal would not have enough votes to pass at the end of the month because of the layoffs. The city has maintained the layoffs are necessary to eliminate a $350 million education deficit.

“I just don’t see how I would vote for a budget that lays off 4000 teachers,” said Brad Lander, of Park Slope, echoing a sentiment shared by several other members.

The chorus of opposition started an hour before the hearing, when no less than 15 council members from the committee joined protesters on City Hall steps to punctuate their opposition to the cuts.

Walcott repeatedly defended the budget as members challenged ballooning contract costs and bureaucratic waste. They said that curbing those expenses could make up the difference to save teaching jobs. (more…)

Chancellor Dennis Walcott will take the hotseat tomorrow morning before a City Council whose members are growing increasingly restive about the city’s proposed teacher layoffs.

According to the city’s proposed budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1, the department is $350 million short of being able to fund its teaching spots. Mayor Bloomberg is pushing to close that gap by eliminating more than 6,000 teaching spots, 4,100 by layoffs.

Insiders say council members are likely to grill Walcott on why the city’s layoff estimates haven’t wavered, despite two changes in chancellors since Bloomberg first unveiled them in November. They are also likely to demand why the city didn’t cut other parts of the department’s budget that doesn’t directly affect the classroom, such as transportation and special education, both of which are projected to see a big spending boost next year.

Many council members have said they don’t think layoffs are necessary to balance the city’s budget, and a few say they won’t vote for a budget that includes layoffs. Robert Jackson, chair of the council’s education committee, is among the elected officials set to appear at a rally against the layoffs proposal an hour before the hearing’s 10 a.m. start. He’ll be joined by Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, who has been lobbying against the proposed layoffs on his own; Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who advocates cutting contract spending to boost the staff budget; and other officials.

But most council members haven’t stated where they stand so clearly. Tomorrow’s hearing is a chance for them to signal their intentions, offer suggestions for alternative cuts, and construct a roadmap for a month of political jockeying over the city’s spending plans. (more…)