Metro

Appellate court affirms ruling to keep struggling schools open

Open sesame!

In a huge victory for the teachers’ union, the city must keep open 19 struggling schools it had sought to begin shuttering this fall, an appellate court ruled today.

The ruling affirms a Manhattan Supreme Court decision in March that found the Department of Education had violated portions of state law that govern the public process for closing schools.

SEE THE FULL LIST OF SCHOOLS HERE

“No one is above the law, and every court that has looked at this issue has ruled decisively that the Department of Education violated the law when it tried to close these schools,” said United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew.

The UFT, NAACP and other groups filed a lawsuit challenging the school closures in February.

The appellate court said this morning that the so-called educational impact statements published by the city for each shuttering school lacked specifics about how students, the community and the buildings would be affected, as required by state law.

In fact, the ruling slammed the DOE’s impact statements as “nothing more than boilerplate information about seat availability.”

It also said education officials “abused” the wiggle room allotted for what to include in the impact statements “by limiting the information they provided to the obvious — that students at phased-out schools would be accommodated at other schools.”

DOE officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.