December 9, 2004
Leaders of Parent Councils Form School Association
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN, NY TIMES

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Fearful they are being marginalized by the Bloomberg administration, the parent councils that replaced New York City's community school boards have banded together to form an association and hired Norman Siegel, the civil rights lawyer, as their legal adviser.

The council leaders said they voted to form the association on Tuesday night to make parents and communities a credible force in the running of the public schools, under a highly-centralized system in which, they said, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein seem to hold all the cards.

"We do not want to be ignored," said Johnny C. Rivera, the council president from District 4 in East Harlem. "We want to be stronger and better."

The council leaders stressed that their main goal was to share information with each other and that they still hoped to have a positive relationship with the city's Education Department. But the decision to join forces and hire a lawyer came after months of complaints by some council members over their treatment since they took office on July 1.

Some council members have said they were denied access to schools or permitted to visit only when chaperoned by administrators, and were prohibited from distributing surveys to principals, teachers and parents. They also said that they were denied access to their budgets, not given official identification cards, and were otherwise disregarded.

Some council members also charged that the Education Department had prevented them from exercising their authority over changes to school zoning lines, one of the few substantive powers granted to the councils in the state law that abolished the old school boards and gave nearly full control of the school system to the mayor.

School zoning lines indicate which elementary and middle schools are attended by residents in a particular neighborhood. Such boundaries are often a sensitive issue because they can affect property values.

"The Board of Education has become a dictatorship," said Nick Comaianni, the council president of District 24 in Queens and an organizer of the association. "They keep saying they want parent involvement, yet we are the parent involvement and they shut us out."

Deputy Chancellor Carmen Fariña, who now oversees the school system's contacts with parents, said that officials were working hard to support the councils. "I think we really have made a big effort to make them a total part of the team," she said.

Not all council presidents expressed the same degree of frustration, and some put off joining the association, saying they wanted to consult with their members. Some councils have already developed strong relationships with their superintendents, particularly in areas of the city with a history of active involvement in the public schools.

But even these council leaders said they had concerns that the only training offered to the new council members was being provided by the very Education Department that they are supposed to monitor.

Ms. Fariña and other officials said they were not opposed to the councils seeking out as much information and as many resources as possible. She said this was why she had hired Karen Feuer, a former president of School Board 2, as the city's liaison to the councils. Ms. Feuer attended Tuesday night's meeting as an observer.

Mr. Comaianni said that his council had wanted to survey parents and teachers about problems at an elementary school, only to be told by Reyes Irizarry, the regional superintendent, that they had no authority to do so.

Aliya Brown, the council president of District 16 in Brooklyn, said her council had been barred from touring schools unless accompanied by a local instructional superintendent.

In a letter to Chancellor Klein last month, Assemblyman Steven Sanders of Manhattan wrote: "My office has received troubling reports about interpretations made by the Department of Education concerning the powers and duties of Community Education Councils - interpretations that in some instances directly contradict state law."

In his response, Mr. Klein acknowledged that the Education Department had yet to rewrite a regulation on zoning that expired on July 1. "We are in the process of preparing a revised chancellor's regulation on zoning, which will implement the C.E.C.'s new statutory power," he wrote on Nov. 23.

Michael Best, the department's general counsel, acknowledged that the councils' authority over zoning began when their officials took office on July 1. But he and other officials insist that there have been no zoning changes in the city schools since then.

Carmen Colon, the council president from District 13 in Brooklyn, said she and other council members were simply protecting the interests of the city's 1.1 million students. "The only agenda I've got here is our kids," she said.