Stiffing Harlem’s Children

Mayor de Blasio promises public-school parents “equity and excellence.” Does his Department of Education think that doesn’t apply to Harlem?

For over a year, DOE educrats have stonewalled a simple Freedom of Information Law request on librarians in Harlem’s District 5.

Diane Tinsley, a parent rep on the community-education council, sought to follow up on a Harlem Council of Elders report on understaffed school libraries. DOE refused her request in a dense haze of bureaucratic fog.

“A compilation of the requested citing data does not exist, and responding to your request would involve more than a simple extraction of data from a single computer storage system,” wrote DOE official Joseph Baranello in June 2016. Yet the State Education Department had little trouble providing similar info — which it likely got from DOE.

Even after Tinsley won her appeal of the rejection last August, DOE stalled — until The Post’s Selim Algar wrote two stories on the issue this week. Finally, the educrats said she’d get her answer by Friday.

State regs say any school serving grades 7-12 must have a librarian on staff to help develop research skills. Yet the Council of Elders reports that librarians are missing from 87 percent of the relevant Harlem schools.

Parents have every right to know if DOE is stiffing their children. Kudos to Diane Tinsley and the Council of Elders for exposing Team de Blasio’s failure to live up to its rhetoric.