Despite its inability to open additional charter schools, the city’s Department of Education has assembled a pool of 15 charter schools that are in the pipeline to launch pending a change of law.

When the state approved the creation of charter schools in 1998, the law limited the number of such schools to 100. While the last of those charters were granted earlier this year, the department is encouraging more school operators to apply.

About 21 potential school operators have submitted concept papers for charter schools. Of those, the education department invited 15 to submit full, several-inches-thick applications by next month.

“We remain eager for Albany to do the right thing and lift the cap, and fundamentally we are trying to maintain as much momentum and planning as we can in order to insure that we can keep opening quality school programs,” the head of the education department’s office of new schools, Garth Harries, said. “We can’t actually get a charter issued, but we can put them in a cue or waiting list so that they are ready to go as soon as the cap is lifted.”

Among the applicants is a deputy mayor in the Giuliani administration, Ninfa Segarra, who is a former Board of Education president. For the past two years, she has been working on an application to open a charter school on the Lower East Side. By time the proposal was to be reviewed in January, the last of the state’s charters had just been issued.

“We had hoped that the school would open this September, and unfortunately that’s not what occurred,” Ms. Segarra, who has also worked on a Bloomberg election campaign, said. She has taken a job with a consulting firm that she plans to leave as soon as she is granted a charter.

The president of the board of the new South Bronx Charter School for International Cultures and the Arts, Richard Izquierdo, is trying to open a charter high school in the Bronx. He submitted a concept paper at the end of last year.

“We expected by now that the cap would have been lifted, but unfortunately that that hasn’t happened so we have to rethink the process,” Mr. Izquierdo, the chief of staff to Assemblywoman Carmen Arroyo, said.

Instead of seeking a separate charter, he is now seeking to amend his current charter to allow for a high school. But charter school operators worry about having too many schools operating under the same charter, because if one school fails to meet academic standards all schools on the charter risk closure.

In New York City, about 12,000 students attend 47 charter schools; 15 opened last year and another 13 are slated to open in September.

Operated as independent public schools with their own boards of directors, charter schools are given five-year charters that can be revoked by the state if academic goals are not met.

In exchange, the schools are exempt from many state and local regulations dealing with personnel hiring, financial management, and union contracts.

Debate over the cap flared earlier this year as Governor Pataki pushed to raise the statewide limit on charter schools to 250 as part of the budget negotiations. He could not ink a deal with state lawmakers before they left for the summer recess.

Mayor Bloomberg and the city’s school chancellor, Joel Klein, are vocal supporters of charter schools and have traveled to Albany to push the state to lift the cap.

Opponents of charter schools worry that the institutions are siphoning away much-needed dollars from the regular public school system and stealing away top-performing students from already disadvantaged schools. Although students are chosen through a lottery system, parents must seek out a slot for their children and are therefore already considered more involved in their students’ education than many other parents who simply sign up their children for the local school.