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Community groups from Crown Heights, East Harlem, and the Ridgewood section of Queens are the latest to sign on with Learn NY, the group lobbying to preserve mayoral control.

The law that created mayoral control is set to expire at the end of June, and state legislators are currently grappling with whether to preserve, eliminate, or alter the school governance system. Learn NY is trying to amass a coalition to show legislators that many New Yorkers are happy with mayoral control as it currently exists. 

Yesterday the group announced that the coalition now has 40 members, up from just over 30 a month ago. The new additions range in size from a single person, in the case of Demetrius Carolina, pastor of Staten Island’s First Central Baptist Church, to all of Fordham University.

One of the organizations added to the list yesterday also runs one of the nine support networks that principals can hire to provide training for teachers. Fordham University’s network currently works with 10 schools. Other coalition members, including Urban Assembly, Ghetto Film School, and the Young Women’s Leadership Network, are lead partners for DOE schools created during Mayor Bloomberg’s administration. In the past, Bloomberg has been criticized for citing as backers organizations to which he or the city gives financial support.

Learn NY has solicited backers in a “grassroots” fashion since launching late last year, by reaching out to community groups and trying to sell them on Learn NY’s platform, spokeswoman Julie Wood told me. (more…)

After a rocky journey marked by allegations of dystopianism and favoritism and almost too many principals to count, the charter school founded by the millionaire Courtney Ross is moving out of Tweed Courthouse and into a home of its own. That’s happening despite the fact that there is still no resolution to the cheating scandal that hit Ross Global Academy charter school last year, when its principal was pushed out after being investigated for tampering with tests.

Next year, Ross Global Academy charter school will move to a new East Village space, which it will share with the progressive East Side Community High School. Another small high school, the Urban Assembly School of Business for Young Women, is leaving the building for its own new space, at an office building in Lower Manhattan.

A person at Urban Assembly today told me the school is excited to get a new space. “It’s very crowded here,” the person said. “We were supposed to be here for one school year, and it’s already four.”

Ross expects to have more students next year, 384 up from 316 this year, Department of Education spokesman Will Havemann said.

In Ross’s place, two new elementary schools are starting off with kindergarten classes in the basement of Tweed next year. They are eventually scheduled to move into larger spaces now under construction. Downtown Express has a profile of the new schools.