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With their plans to postpone parent council elections failing to placate critics, city school officials have decided to start the voting process all over again.

Chancellor Dennis Walcott announced today that already-cast votes will be invalidated and the two-step voting process be pushed to next week. Parents will now be able to vote in the first part of the election, which is advisory, from May 18th to the 25th. The results from that election are non-binding and are meant to guide parent association leaders in their final vote, which will now run from May 27th to June 3rd.

Pressure to stop the election and start from scratch came from a group of vocal parents who felt that the Department of Education’s Office of Family Information and Action had done too little to publicize the election. They also accused OFIA of releasing inaccurate about who was eligible to run. Complaints mounted when the DOE initially password-protected candidates’ information, preventing some parents who didn’t have passwords from seeing it.

From there criticism became contagious. Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and Public Advocate Bill de Blasio held a joint press conference earlier this week to chastise the city for thinking one week would be enough time to fix the troubled election. A group of parents also sued the city this week, asking for a restraining order to halt the elections. (more…)

Under pressure from elected officials and organized parents, the Department of Education is delaying elections for district parent councils until next week.

For weeks, parent leaders have been simmering with anger over problems in the city’s handling of elections for district Community Education Councils. They have charged that the city did too little to recruit candidates, turned away some eligible parents, and hid the names of candidates behind password protection.

The criticism escalated today, as Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and Public Advocate Bill de Blasio announced plans for a press conference Tuesday to demand that the city halt the elections, which they called “deeply flawed and undemocratic.” At the same time, a group of parents, spearheaded by Mona Davids of the New York City Parents Union, filed today for a restraining order to halt the elections.

This afternoon, the city announced it would delay the election proceedings by a week. “After reviewing concerns raised by parents and public officials about this year’s Citywide and Community Education Council elections, I have concluded that the process could and should have been handled better,” Chancellor Dennis Walcott said in a statement. (more…)

The Department of Education is launching an effort to include more parents in the process of voting representatives to perpetually short-staffed district parent councils. But there are already concerns that the effort will have limited impact.

By state law, only a small subset of parent leaders can vote for the council members. But the department is on the verge of signing a contract to move voting online, opening the door for a “straw vote” that would allow all parents to register their preferences, Martine Guerrier, the DOE’s head parent liaison, said yesterday at the monthly meeting of the Panel for Education Policy.

The straw vote wouldn’t count, but it would at least allow more parents to give feedback about council candidates. In the past, parents who wanted to give feedback could do so only in person, at poorly attended meetings, or by submitting written comments. The department plans to hold the straw poll in April.

Opening the vote to more parents is an improvement, said PEP member Patrick Sullivan. But without a change in the law that governs who can vote officially, the straw vote will just be “more meaningless input for parents,” he said. (more…)