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UFT, allies file suit to re-do PEP vote to close schools
Feb 4, 2010 3:14 PM
‘No one is above the law’
Brooklyn Councilman Lewis Fidler sums up the feeling among all the litigants opposing school closings when he says, “I don't understand how [the DOE] can close these schools when they didn't first do anything to improve them. This is Super Bowl week, and [we petitioners] are throwing flags down and penalizing them.”
The UFT, joined by other plaintiffs including community and education advocates and city and state elected officials, filed a lawsuit on Feb. 1 charging that city school officials “studiously ignored” key provisions of the school governance law in its campaign to close 19 New York City schools.
The suit asks the court to re-do the vote by the Panel for Educational Policy that “unlawfully rubber-stamped” the closings.
“No one and no organization is above the law,” said UFT President Michael Mulgrew in announcing the lawsuit at a press conference at union headquarters.
The suit says the Department of Education and the PEP failed to do the legally required analysis of how school closings would affect the more than 13,000 students who would potentially be displaced, particularly special-needs students.
It also faulted the city for failing to analyze the effects of the closings on other already-overcrowded public schools nearby; and failing to give communities and interested groups appropriate notice of local public hearings.
Plaintiffs joining the UFT in the lawsuit included the New York State Conference of the NAACP, the Alliance for Quality Education, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and other city and state elected officials, parents and members of the community.
The UFT lobbied Albany last year to ensure that any renewal of mayoral control legislation would address the community’s need for voice in key DOE decisions, including school closings. At the time, the mayor and the chancellor publicly embraced those changes.
The revised statute, petitioners say, is quite specific. In order to “guarantee that parents, students, staff and interested community participants are afforded ample opportunity to review and comment on any proposed school closing,” it requires that the chancellor first conduct a substantive study of the potential impact of a school’s closure on current and prospective students as well as the community.
Under the statute, the chancellor must draft a detailed Education Impact Statement for each closing school and give it to affected stakeholders.
That did not happen, the lawsuit charges.
“Thousands of parents and students went to local public hearings with very little notice, only to get fragmentary information, boilerplate analysis and meaningless platitudes about these school closings,” said Mulgrew. “Thousands more joined us last week at the PEP meeting where the mayor’s appointees rubber-stamped the decision the chancellor had already made.”
At the press conference, Hazel Dukes, a veteran of the Montgomery, Ala., civil rights movement and head of the New York State NAACP, said the bottom line was that the schools targeted for closing and the many special needs students they serve need more resources and support.
She said parents want both choice and a stake in decisions that affect them and their children.
“Parents are being denied inclusion in decision making, and the closings are pitting parents, community members and educators against each other,” she said.
Stringer, whose representative on the PEP voted against the closings (as did all the borough president appointees except Staten Island), said, “When you have a struggling school, you bring in your ‘A’ team, you create an opportunity to save the school. That is what is getting lost here.”
The lawsuit’s petitioners also included seven parents (some of whom are Community Education Council heads and members), state senators Eric Adams and Bill Perkins, Assembly members Hakeem Jeffries and Alan Maisel, and City Council members Robert Jackson, Lewis A. Fidler, Charles Barron, Erik Martin Dilan and Mark Weprin.
