One of the largest drawings for school seats in a network of Harlem charter schools was held last night, while charters statewide learned they won a separate lottery and will get millions of dollars more in state funds.
Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith (D-Queens) announced that the state is allotting up to $30 million extra for charter schools in the upcoming fiscal year’s budget — a move that restores nearly 60 percent of a funding shortfall.
“In difficult fiscal times, this funding restoration will go a long way to avert program cuts and teacher layoffs,” said Bill Phillips, president of the New York Charter Schools Association.
In the night’s other big event, about 5,000 parents and their kids vied for 450 slots for September at four Harlem Success Academy schools.
Amid a festive atmosphere at the Washington Heights Armory, kids’ names were drawn at random and then projected onto a giant screen overhead.
“I got into a charter school for kindergarten,” beamed 5-year-old Gregory Howard, who was accompanied by his mom, Cheryl Monroe.
Former City Council member Eva Moskowitz, who runs the Harlem Success Academy network of schools, said the turnout confirmed “a mass exodus from zoned schools,” which she said have been failing the kids of Harlem.
In another development, a state labor board gave teachers at a Brooklyn school run by one of the country’s most prominent charter organizations the OK to join the city’s teachers union.
The move, which was spurred by a request in January from teachers at KIPP Amp to join the United Federation of Teachers, was seen by some analysts as a step in the wrong direction for the successful middle school.
“This isn’t part of their model,” said Neal McCluskey, an educational analyst at the Cato Institute, a think tank. “KIPP requires a lot of their teachers that is above and beyond what’s in the normal union contract.”
UFT President Randi Weingarten hailed the decision by the Public Employment Relations Board, which she said would give teachers more of a voice in how the school operates.