Mayor’s giving NY a ‘chart’ attack
$1B school memo ‘bean-counting bananas’
Mayor Adams is trying to panic city taxpayers over the cost of creating new charter schools with City Hall’s latest budget predictions, a leading charter advocate said Tuesday.
An internal budget memo that surfaced last week estimated the Big Apple could be on the hook for $1 billion in lease payments under Gov. Hochul’s plan to lift the cap on new city charters.
The city Office of Management and Budget memo went so far as to call the charter-cap lift an “unfunded mandate” from Albany.
But James Merriman of the nonprofit New York City Charter School Center said such a scenario won’t come to pass for at least a decade — if ever. That’s because it takes years for city charter schools to win approval from
state officials and actually open their doors to students, usually at a rate of just five to 10 annually.
“This is not a case in which they can reasonably claim that there is a $1 billion hit on their budget except in out-years down the road —
and no one talks about budgets 10 years from now,” he said. “You might as well be talking about Tolkien’s ‘Middle Earth.’ ”
Merriman added, “The point is: this is bean-counting bananas.”
And the OMB’s dire prediction is likely to be cited by charterschool foes in Albany, where Adams will make his case for billions of dollars in additional state funding at a Wednesday budget hearing known as “Tin Cup Day.”
The controversy erupted as Adams, who campaigned in favor of parental school choice, was offered a way to increase the number of charters in the city.
Under state law, the Big Apple is limited to a maximum of 275 charter schools, all of which have already been authorized.
But Hochul’s record $227 billion budget proposal for fiscal 2024, which begins April 1, would abolish the city cap and allow operators to seek approval for 85 more that now can only be opened elsewhere in the state. Hochul’s plan also includes a provision to unlock the permits for 21 since-shuttered, “zombie” charter schools across the state, which could also be located in the city.