Funny if it weren't so sad: SUNY charter committee switches location of Success charter and switches it back

After the rally protesting the vote by the SUNY charter committee to approve 17 new charter schools for NYC-- including 14 more for Success Academy, despite the fact that two thirds of their schools are already underenrolled, a representative from the city told us that at the last minute Eva Moskowitz decided to switch the location for one of her charters from District 2 to District 1 or District 6, and the SUNY committee had approved this change.

Susan Miller Barker, Joseph Belluck and Ralph Rossi

This appalling practice is not all that surprising, given the way SUNY approves whatever Eva Moskowitz wants.  They allow her charters to repeatedly expand, despite the fact that she fails to enroll and retain equal numbers of high-needs students, which is required under the charter law and in fact, pushes out at risk kids with stunning regularity.  The committee also approved a stunning 14 more charters despite the public comments were overwhelmingly against allowing these charters to go forward.

You can see the tepid discussion of the last-minute switch and vote by the charter committee to approve it at about 30 minutes in a video of the meeting at the SUNY website.  You can also see that the committee members did not mention any of the public comment, or even appeared to have bothered to have read the summary beforehand.

The three members of the committee are Joseph W. Belluck,  the chair, Angelo Fatta and John Murad; two lawyers and a retired corporate executive, none of them with any background in education. Also present sowing more confusion in their wake, were Susan Miller Barker, the head of the SUNY Charter Institute, and the Counsel Ralph Rossi.

Understandably, parent leaders from District 1 and 6 and their elected City Council Members were quite angry that there were no hearings or outreach in their districts before this vote.  Despite the fact that SUNY considers this a "non-material" change -- switching the charter from one end of Manhattan to another -- it makes hash out of the public process, including district hearings, required by the law.  Few would argue that Washington Heights and the Lower East side are the same in terms of student population as the more middle class areas encompassed by District 2.   So these elected leaders, including Councilmembers Chin, Dromm, Mendez and Rodriguez , along with the presidents of Community Education Councils in Districts 1,2, and 6, wrote a letter to the SUNY board President Carl McCall, which is below, saying that their practice of switching districts and ignoring public input at the last minute reveals their "extreme and marked disregard for a transparent, democratic process."  Here's an article in tomorrow's Daily News about the letter and the anger aroused by this switcheroo.

Meanwhile, the NY Times had reported earlier that SUNY had not made any changed but had approved the charter for District 2, as earlier planned: "The new Success charters are approved for Districts 2 and 3 in Manhattan; 9 in the Bronx; 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 22, and 23 in Brooklyn; and 24, 27, 28 and 30 in Queens."

I contacted the reporter, Liz Harris, who assured me that SUNY had told her that there was no such change and that the school had been approved for District 2, though this might later be changed if Eva wanted.  They told the same to the DNA Info reporter, who posted a correction to an earlier article that had reported on the last-minute switch:

However, SUNY did not allow Success Academy to change its application, said a spokesman. Instead, it approved its District 2 charter “after undergoing the legally required process, including a public hearing,” he said.“The Institute was notified that Success may pursue alternative arrangements in Districts 1 or 6, an adjustment which, for a variety of reasons, is not uncommon for a charter school,” he said in a statement.
“Should they follow that course, under the law and well established practice the Institute can amend the charter accordingly, and there will be a process for additional public input.”

But as the DNA info story noted, SUNY posted the following document tonight, showing the charter had  been moved to District 1 or 6 after all.  Check out the time stamp of 6:25 PM.

CM Chin saw the new document and tweeted it:

Now SUNY claims it didn't approve a Success charter for District 1 or 6. Let's look at the list of approved charters: http://t.co/XY6RotMhAV
— Margaret S. Chin (@CM_MargaretChin) October 14, 2014

Apparently noticing the article or CM Chin's tweet, someone at SUNY Charter Institute took down the document and revised their version of reality once again -- that the switch to District 1 or District 6 had not occurred after all:

It would all be a comedy of errors if it weren't so terribly sad.

Who knows what happened and how many ways back and forth the truth was revised? The indisputable reality is that these three men make such consequential decisions by authorizing and randomly siting 17 new charter schools,  in such a cavalier fashion, without any knowledge or apparent interest in the views of the community or impact on their schools, and our public education system as a whole. 

Oct 14 Letter to SUNY protesting last minute switch to1/D6 Re protesting last minute switch to1/D6 Re Success by leonie7851

Joel Klein came to District 2 and told lies

Chancellor Joel Klein came to PS 33 in District 2 on Wednesday night. He told a number of outright lies to the assembled parents, assuming (I suppose) that we didn't know better. This is on top of all the misrepresentations and obfuscations.

- Klein said there are no for-profit charters in New York City. This is patently untrue. There are currently nine for-profit charters in operation in the city and more being considered.

- Klein said Contract for Excellence money is "fungible" in school budgets and this is why class sizes rose, despite billions more in state C4E funding. This is untrue. Contract for Excellence money is supposed to be targeted to specified purposes by state law and it is illegal to use it otherwise.

- Klein said he "wished we had more resources" for meeting the needs of special education students. Special ed services are also mandated by state law, and it has been well documented, by the Public Advocate's office among others, that under this administration, students with IEPs have not received the services and funds to which they are legally entitled.

- Klein also said that 5000 seats had been added to District 2. Where? The 2004-2009 and 2010-2014 capital plans funded about 7,000 seats, but most of these seats have not yet been built, and many are replacements. By my count there are under a thousand new D2 K-8 seats now in operation, and Manhattan has lost 1,000 high school seats in the last year alone to lapsed leases, but I would welcome a more detailed reckoning by the DOE.

- Klein said that enrollment projections are available on-line. The DOE has never made its full enrollment projection analysis available to the public or the CECs responsible for zoning. Only partial data and the discredited reports of a few expensive contractors are available on-line.

- Furthermore, Klein said repeatedly that charter schools would add seats to District 2. There is no way this is possible. School real estate in D2 is a zero-sum game, as he pointed out himself several times. Every new school that is added within an existing building removes seats to make space for additional administration and duplication of cluster rooms, and every new program that draws students from outside the district (as charters do) bumps out district students.

Unless charters can obtain their own space--which doesn't happen much in NYC--they can only subtract from the number of seats available to district students.

He also kept saying no sites are available in D2 and it is hard to find more, without commenting on the large number of sites put forward by parents (including most of those that have been developed under the last two capital plans). Parents have been pushing hard on various sites and the DOE refuses to put its weight behind these efforts.

---Ann Kjellberg, Public School Action Committee

District 2 blueprint

Check out this document (in pdf), sent late Friday to the members of the Community Education Council in D2, and prepared by DOE to deal with the problems of overcrowding at twelve District 2 schools.

It appears that rather than calling for the construction of new schools, it relies primarily on cutting back on variances, rezoning, and at least one case, busing 5^th graders from the Tribeca area to other schools one mile or more away. It also appears to rely on several quite questionable assumptions.

District 2 parents, please take a look, forward it on, and if you can, put down your comments and/or critiques in written form on the blog. It is also important that you forward the document to parents, PTAs, and SLTs in the affected areas.