CDEC 10 Holds July Meeting-No Parents Attend

   The replacement for school boards Community District Education Councils that were to have increased parent involvement have done the exact opposite. School Board 10 in the Northwest Bronx would draw hundreds of parents and School District 10 personnel to a school board meeting. Community District Education Council 10 the replacement for School Board 10 held its July meeting last night, and in the audience was not even one School District 10 parent throughout the entire meeting. School District 10 has over 45,000 students not counting high school students. There were two children of one council member, two translators for the one non-english speaking council member (who alternated every 30 minutes), one staff member from a district 10 high school, and myself in the audience. The CDEC meeting started at 6pm and ended at 7:25PM, and the reason the meeting took so long was that the DOE template of by-laws for the Education Councils were read aloud (all 7pages) with blanks left to be filled in at each District Council and be voted on to comply with the revised education law.

   Even District 10 Superintendent Ms. Sonia Menendez was not present, and the CDEC president marked her absent without notice. It must also be said that there are two parent vacancies on District 10 CDEC that have not been filled for several months, because no district parent is interested in serving on CDEC 10.

   This was an important meeting as there were elections of officers for the council, and passage of the council budget, which amounts to $20,000.00 per council. When you factor in the costs of having to open school buildings, translation, security, and other monies it takes to run CDEC's, one has to wonder how many millions of dollars are not going into the classroom citywide

   Years ago when School Leadership Teams had budgets of thousands of dollars, I personally told Chancellor Joel Klein to do away with them to put more money into the classroom. Chancellor Klein told me "SLT's are state mandated, and if we don't pay the staff to attend they won't". Chancellor Klein later cut the SLT budgets to only the stipends for the members. I would tell Chancellor Klein to cut out CDEC's as parent involvement is now at ZERO, but he will say again that CDEC's are state mandated. I must add that on the SLT's the principal has the final say as to what to do at the school, because the principal can be held accountable, and I was told that we can't fire the parents. Chancellor Klein has the final say as to CDEC's, as he can remove or keep off anyone he wants.

   My question to the state legislature is then why are you mandating things that take away money from the classroom, and why did you renew mayoral control when you knew it was wrong? The changes you instituted only have made things worse.