Guest Post: Donna Lieberman on Parental Involvement under Mayoral Control

Last week, the Department of Education announced that they would back away from the plan to replace three traditional public schools with charter schools. Gotbaum testified on Monday at the City Council Hearing on Charter School Expansion, and today's guest post comes from Donna Lieberman, Executive Director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. 

"The New York Post and the Daily News just don’t get it. In shockingly similar editorials, the two newspapers criticized the United Federation of Teachers and the New York Civil Liberties Union for, in the words of the Post, “killing hope.” All this because the two organizations, a dozen parents and Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum sued the DOE for breaking the law.

Earlier this year, without giving any warning to communities, the mayor and Chancellor Klein unilaterally decided to close PS 194 and PS 241 in Harlem and PS 150 in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville area of Brooklyn.

State education law requires the DOE to get the approval of the community through its local Community Education Council when it wants to make certain changes, including zoning changes that affect neighborhood schools. Zoning laws are the one small area of oversight that parents were allowed to keep under mayoral control.

But even that was too much for the mayor and DOE.

You can read the full details of the case at the NYCLU’s web site. But the particulars of the lawsuit matter less than the principle behind the case.

What these editorials don’t get is that the mayor took away the one voice that parents and the community had on issues that affect their kids. Our lawsuit was about nothing less than ensuring concerned, active parents keep a voice in the educational lives of their children.

Anyone that cares about parents, about children about the future of the city should want parents and communities to have a say in the schools that their kids go to. No one was arguing that the current schools were great, but that the law promises the community a voice in deciding the outcome.

The DOE has since announced that, in response to the lawsuit, the three schools will remain open.

But it shouldn’t take a lawsuit to make the DOE follow the law. Parents need a voice in what happens to their kids. Let’s hope the state legislature is paying attention."


Donna Lieberman is the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. She has also served as the associate director (1988 - 1993) and founder/director of the NYCLU Reproductive Rights Project (1990 - 2000). Under Lieberman's leadership the NYCLU has expanded the scope and depth of its work, supplementing and strengthening the pursuit of litigation with an aggressive legislative advocacy and a field organizing program that works on behalf of civil liberties and civil rights. 

Comments

[A Brooklyn Mom]

Parents must have a say in their children's schools, even under mayoral control. Thank you for standing up for this important principle.