Lawsuit Restores Authority to Community School Districts

An agreement reached yesterday will restore authority to the city’s 32 community school districts, which have been operating in the shadow of Mayor Bloomberg’s 10 instructional regions since 2003.In January of that year, the mayor moved to centralize the school system by consolidating the city’s 32 school districts into 10 regions. Education watchdogs, led by state Senator Carl Kruger, a Democrat of Brooklyn, and Assemblyman Steven Sanders, a Democrat of Manhattan, sued the mayor a few months later, saying he broke the state law that requires that New York City have between 30 and 35 districts. The lawsuit was successful, and the geographical lines of the 32 school districts remained, but the mayor’s 10 regions became the central nervous system for the city’s public schools anyway, and the community district offices quietly faded into little more than answering machines.“Members of the public and even people within the system itself failed to realized the community district offices even existed,” Mr. Kruger said.Under the mayor’s system, six regional operations centers managed the school budgets to allow the 10 regional superintendents to focus solely on instruction. The new division of responsibility was said to make it harder for individual principals to get money for school programs. Before those changes, the 32 community superintendents controlled their own budgets.“Under the current organizational structure, there is a gap between instruction at the school level and the operational supports schools need,” the president of the Council of Supervisors and Administrators, Jill Levy, said in a press release yesterday. Her union joined the lawsuit in May 2003.Yesterday’s agreement will ostensibly restore budgetary control and the power to make policy decisions to the community superintendents.Mr. Kruger said it will also reopen lines of communication with parents, who sometimes could not get through to understaffed district offices.“It marks an important victory for New York City parents, who have felt virtually shut out of the current school bureaucracy and unable to find any information about their child’s education,” Mr. Kruger said.“We have affirmed the law, and it is very clear,” Mr. Sanders said. “There are 32 community school districts with 32 community superintendents and 32 offices with staff.”

Lawsuit Restores Authority to Community School Districts

Lawsuit Restores Authority to Community School Districts

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