As New York City school leaders, we have seen firsthand the historic challenges faced by our teachers, students and families as a result of the pandemic. Almost overnight, public charter schools across the country stepped up to meet community needs, becoming vaccine clinics, food pantries and safety nets for our families, while delivering high-quality remote and hybrid schooling and continuing to provide the best education possible for students.
The U.S. Department of Education was a key partner in our work, offering critical funding to keep our schools safe and enable us to continue serving our students and communities. But just as we work to recover from the devastating impact COVID-19 has had on education, the department is wrongfully sweeping away nearly $1 million in Charter School Programs (CSP) funding from eight public charter schools in New York, including three of ours, for purely bureaucratic reasons.
With the flick of a pen, the department can reverse its decision and ensure a senseless bureaucratic issue does not prevail at the expense of our children. We need U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona and President Biden to act now for kids.
In public education, every single dollar counts, and $1 million adds up to school lunch all year for more than 1,400 students, laptops for 3,000 students, thousands of books, or more than one million KN95 masks — supplies our schools have needed to fill in educational gaps as we collectively recover from COVID.
But the department does not seem to recognize how much these funds matter to our students. In 2020, our three schools and five others in New York collectively lost nearly $1,000,000 of 2011 CSP funding due to a bureaucratic misunderstanding between the department and the New York State Education Department that resulted in our schools’ grant funds being swept away before they ever reached us. In response, NYSED proposed to the department a simple solution: Allow NYSED to use available 2018 CSP funds to right this bureaucratic wrong and make our eight New York schools whole. This request was both reasonable and supported by precedent in similar cases, but the department inexplicably denied NYSED’s request, allowing this critical federal funding to be stripped from our students. The department’s decision is a clear example of bureaucracy erecting obstacles to low-income kids’ access to high-quality education, even amidst the worst educational crisis we have faced in a generation.
The Daily News Flash
Weekdays
Catch up on the day’s top five stories every weekday afternoon.
To make matters worse, the department recently proposed rules that would add burdensome requirements to future CSP grants, making it nearly impossible for many public charter schools to access those funds in the future.
Our schools rely on these funds not only to provide high-quality education and extracurricular programming for our students, but also to keep our schools continuously and safely open amid the repeated surges of COVID-19 — and any other crises that may arrive — so that we can continue providing excellent education and supportive services for our children and families. Our commitment to our kids and families is the reason for the increasing demand for public charter school education.
Our schools serve students from low-income communities of color that have historically been unable to access high-performing schools simply because of where they live. We help our students excel academically and in life. The impact of our work has never been clearer: the data shows that public charter schools in NYC significantly exceed district proficiency rates in math and in ELA, particularly among Black and Latino students.
For months, we wrote letters, made calls, and sounded the alarm — but the department refuses to listen. Left with no options, our schools are forced to pursue litigation in order to recoup our wrongly stripped CSP…
Read More: Biden’s Education Department is putting bureaucracy before kids – New York Daily News