On Tuesday night, when the State Senate failed to act on the school governance law that authorizes modified mayoral control, the law sunset, which meant the city was required to revert back to the old system where a Board of Education controlled the schools.
Today, the Mayor recognized his responsibility to follow the law, and he and the five borough presidents selected appointees who met as a reconstituted seven-member Board of Education. The two mayoral appointees and one appointee for each borough president unanimously voted to retain Joel Klein as chancellor. They also voted to elect Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott the president of the board and to call on Albany to enact the Assembly’s version of mayoral control.
Today’s developments were far from ideal, but we are in uncharted waters. I want to commend the borough presidents and the mayor for acting quickly and doing the best they could under the circumstances. Even though we neither wanted to return to the past nor continue the current version of mayoral control, the safety, stability and instruction of 1.1 million school children are paramount. These elected officials demonstrated today that children’s well-being and the rule of law are important. Their actions were necessary to ensure that schools open safely and efficiently both now during summer school and in September with the start of the new academic year. None of us want to see any slip backwards in the school system after all of our hard work in recent years.
That does not mean, however, that the UFT favors either the status quo or going back to the old board. We think that the school governance bill passed by the State Assembly provides a good framework because it would maintain cohesion, stability and resources while including additional checks and balances to ensure a greater role for parents and teachers, and provide more transparency. Could that bill be improved upon? Of course it could, and we are still advocating additional checks and balances, but the Senate would have to be able to get itself together to do so.
Mayoral control is not the only education-related issue that is sitting on the state Senate’s desk awaiting action. Equally important, the New York City and DOE budgets depend on the passage of an increase in the sales tax. Without such action, there would be further cuts of hundreds of millions of dollars — with great damage to schools.
We will, of course, keep you informed.
Sincerely,
Randi Weingarten
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