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To the great relief of City Hall and Tweed Courthouse, the New York state Senate intends to pass the Assembly’s version of mayoral control tomorrow. As part of the deal enabling this basic but, for the Senate, extraordinarily difficult accomplishment, senators will also take up four amendments that appeared on paper for the first time today.

The amendments include no surprises, and outline only slightly more detail about the agreement than had previously been disclosed.

Sponsored by Senator Shirley Huntley and several other senators, including Eric Adams, Martin Dilan, and Jose Serrano, the amendments would create a $1.6 million parent training center, an arts council, yearly school safety meetings, and an additional supervision requirement for superintendents. Democratic senators agreed to vote for the Assembly’s bill in return for the passage of these four amendments.

The newest details are in a bill to create a parent training center, which has already garnered some criticism from Assembly members. According to language in the bill, the center will have many arms, each of which are thinly outlined. While offering basic guidance to parents on how to enroll their children in special education or gifted programs, the center will also recruit parents for community education councils and school leadership teams. It also aims to support college counseling initiatives.

Housed at CUNY (though at which college the bill doesn’t say), the center will be nonpartisan. The state will fund the center and the city will match that funding up to, but not above $800,000. (more…)

Sen. Ruben Diaz Sr. delivered a speech in Spanish against no-bid contracts. (GothamSchools)

The circus around the State Senate intensified today as half a dozen senators gathered to complain that Mayor Bloomberg would not meet them at the bargaining table. Immediately afterward, senators confirmed that negotiations are, in fact, ongoing.

“We will not be dictated to, we will be negotiated with,” said Senator Bill Perkins, a persistent critic of mayoral control. Joining Perkins on the steps of City Hall were Sens. Shirley Huntley, Hiram Monserrate, Pedro Espada, Eric Adams, Ruben Diaz Sr., and City Councilman Robert Jackson. All of the senators were among those who supported a failed bill that would have curtailed mayoral control.

After the press conference, Monserrate acknowledged to reporters that negotiations were already in progress. “We’re at the table,” he said. “There are some meetings occurring.”

Those meetings, which began on Monday after mayoral control talks fell apart last week, are being held by Democratic conference leader John Sampson’s staff and deputy schools chancellor Christopher Cerf.

Senators would not discuss the details of the negotiations today, but they reiterated their support for increased parent involvement, funding for art programs, and fixed terms for citywide school board members. A source close to the discussions described the talks as “fragile.” (more…)

Senators and Bloomberg administration officials met last night and this morning to resuscitate the mayoral control negotiations that collapsed last week.

Democratic conference leader John Sampson and senators Shirley Huntley and Martin Dilan met with advocacy groups and City Hall officials last night to restart negotiations, according to Senator Eric Adams (D-Brooklyn). And early this morning, members of Sampson’s staff met with deputy schools chancellor Christopher Cerf, according to a source close to the discussions. Cerf did not return requests for comment late this afternoon.

“There was a meeting held today with the mayor’s office that we believe went extremely well,” the source said.

“There was no agreement, but they’re moving forward. We’re hopeful that we’ll have something in the upcoming days.”

Sources said that Bloomberg did not attend either of the meetings. A spokesperson for the mayor’s office declined to comment on the negotiations.

Adams said he had “no idea,” whether the school governance fight would be resolved before the Fall. “We’re not scheduled to go back up to Albany until it’s time to deal with the deficit,” he said. “So I don’t know if we’re going to make a special trip.” (more…)

Bloomberg administration officials are ending a sleepless week in Albany today with no idea whatsoever of how to get mayoral control renewed, along with the unsettling realization that the stalemate could go on for the rest of the summer.

In the end, it wasn’t that the mayor’s office couldn’t strike a deal with the largest group criticizing mayoral control, the Campaign for Better Schools, or with the city teachers’ union, which had pushed for checks early on. All three parties signed onto a deal together earlier this week, writing down a Memorandum of Understanding that would have put in place parent-training centers that senators said they wanted to add.

But Senate Democrats ultimately did not go along with the deal.

“It’s not like we couldn’t agree on terms. It’s like they couldn’t agree on terms amongst themselves,” an exhausted and depressed city official, speaking on background, said in an interview today.

“They clearly were saying one thing to us yesterday and doing something different,” said teachers union president Randi Weingarten. “That was very frustrating.” (more…)

When senators return to work on Wednesday, they will likely vote to bring back mayoral control — but they may also pass checks that would further curb the mayor’s power.

Details about what those checks would look like began to surface last night, when four senators introduced three amendments with specific changes.

Sens. Malcolm Smith, Martin Dilan, Bill Perkins, and Shirley Huntley have all proposed bills that would amend the bill passed by the Assembly, which Mayor Bloomberg supports. Two of the bills call for state funding for a parent training center and only one would prevent the mayor from firing his appointees to the citywide school board at will.

Smith’s amendment comes as a surprise. As Senate Majority Leader, a post he held a little over a month ago, he was a vocal supporter of Bloomberg’s policies.

Smith’s bill and the Dilan/Perkins bill would give $1.6 million per year for two years to the New York University Center for Urban Education, which would run a parent training center. Another $600,000 would be divided among the city’s student success centers, which work to increase the number of students in public high schools that go to college.

Huntley’s bill would leave parent training to the borough presidents, and sets aside no extra funding for the project. (more…)

I spent nearly an hour earlier today trying to cobble together out of several askew, truncated, and fuzzy faxed versions a single shareable copy of State Sen. Martin Dilan’s explosive mayoral control report. I should have spent my time on something else, because Liz Benjamin at the Daily News just posted an impeccable version on her Daily Politics blog; I’m sharing it below the jump. 

Benjamin’s copy of the report, which recommends that lawmakers place substantial checks on mayoral control when the school governance structure expires June 30, is easier to read than the one I just trashed. But the version I was working with looked about as muddled as debate over the report has been since it was first revealed in the Post yesterday. At issue is whose opinions the report contains and whether the report was meant to be released this week at all.

Gail Robinson at the Gotham Gazette wrote yesterday that her copy of the leaked report didn’t indicate anywhere that it was a draft version. But City Hall, which condemned the recommendations, told the Post that it considered the report to be in draft form, and Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith’s office said the report doesn’t reflect his position on mayoral control. Later yesterday, Dilan, one of the two chairs of the school governance task force convened by Smith, issued a statement saying that the leaked report represented only his own opinions, not those of his fellow committee members. 

This afternoon, I called the office of State Sen. Shirley Huntley, the task force’s other chair, to find out how her position compared to Dilan’s. A spokeswoman who works in Smith’s office, Selvena Brooks, returned my call on Huntley’s behalf. “The task force is still convening hearings,” Brooks told me. “She feels it’s a bit premature to make recommendations.” (more…)