New Charter Schools Tsar Is Eager To Exit Boston

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The New York Sun

After nine months without an executive director, the city’s charter school office will get a new leader this month, Chancellor Joel Klein told staff in an e-mail memo sent yesterday.

The new director, Michael Thomas Duffy, enters as pressure ramps up to create 50 new charter schools before Mayor Bloomberg leaves office in 2009.

Mr. Duffy, who now runs an inner-city charter school in Boston that has sent every graduate to college for the last six years, said yesterday he is eager to travel south, where he said the contrast with Boston is stark.

While Mayor Bloomberg and Mr. Klein have made helping charter schools a priority, privately pushing successful schools to expand and offering up the use of public school facilities, Mr. Duffy said school leaders in Boston do not support charter schools. To find a home for a charter school whose board of trustees he headed, the MATCH School, Mr. Duffy, a former top aide to Governor Weld, said he had to negotiate a complex arrangement involving tax-exempt bonds.

After moving to the City on a Hill School in Roxbury, he realized other charter schools needed so much support that he launched an association dedicated to providing it, the Boston Charter School Alliance.

Having the support of the mayor and the schools in New York City, he said, will be a relief.

Yet even with help, charter school operators and city officials said the expansion Mr. Bloomberg is pushing for will not come easily. “It’s a big challenge,” the chief executive of the city’s Office of New Schools, Garth Harries, said. Mr. Harries said he is confident Mr. Duffy will meet it.

Facilities remain a hurdle in New York, with so many charter school operators scrambling to secure space as they expand that a nonprofit charter school facilities developer, Civic Builders, has termed the problem a “crisis.”

Mr. Duffy said solutions he is mulling include securing longterm building leases for charter schools rather than making full purchases; renovating existing buildings, and delaying many charter schools’ start dates until just before Mr. Bloomberg’s term ends, September 2009, so that they have time to secure buildings. “All of the easy options for charter schools to locate in city space have been taken,” he said. “We’re going to have to get more creative about the locations for these schools.”

Another challenge is a new requirement that charter schools hold a community hearing before opening. In the past, community members have greeted charter schools with skepticism.

In Roxbury, the president of City on a Hill’s parents’ council, Charlene Phillips, said Mr. Duffy never missed a monthly parents’ meeting. “I worked very, very closely with Michael,” she said. “He is such a warm person. He can bridge the gap between administrators and parents.”

Ms. Phillips said she would have to tell other parents that Mr. Duffy is leaving at a meeting this Saturday. “I’m not looking forward to that,” she said.


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