Blas’ War on Kids
Looks like the clock is about to run out on thousands of out-of-luck kids at Success Academy charter schools.
To please his union pals — who fear competition from Success and other non-union charters — Mayor de Blasio is intent on killing off any possible growth of these high-achieving schools. So he’s refusing to provide Success with seats for its soon-to-be middle-school kids, even though there’s plenty of good space available.
That has left families in limbo: They’re pulling their hair out wondering where their kids will be going to school next fall.
“It’s all anyone is talking about,” says Lizzette Muniz, whose daughter is a fourth-grader at Success Academy Cobble Hill. She notes that the situation is stressful even for the kids.
At another Success school, in Rosedale, Queens, Ebony Ragsdale fretted that her son Isaiah would lose out on a great education. “This school is pulling out the best in him,” she said. “He’s reading at a higher level and enjoying it.”
Here’s the backstory: Success needs space for 8,000 kids who’ll be entering fifth through eighth grade over the next four years, but the city’s offer- ing seats for just 1,000, including some too far away to be practical. As of now, 2,000 kids have no certainty where they’ll be come fall 2018.
Worse, at this point, even if the city does come up with a viable place for Success kids, there may not be enough time to have those places officially approved for next fall’s opening day. That’s because the unions have spent years getting lawmakers to impose a months-long process for approving charter space. And the kids are left hanging. Never mind the availability of nearby space in Department of Education buildings. Never mind, too, that de Blasio promised lawmakers he’d end his war on charter kids in exchange for their renewing the law that puts him in charge of city schools.
And put aside the insanity of trying to strangle well-performing schools like Success to protect dreadful union-run schools. What makes the city’s hostility especially tragic is that it is the kids who get trapped in the middle.
It’s one thing to appease your union pals, Mr. Mayor. It’s quite another to simply ignore the collateral damage of your political war — when the victims are kids.