This report was an update from our earlier 2019 report, which found many of the same problems after analyzing DOE spending data that we had acquired through Freedom of Information Law requests and spreadsheets posted on the City Council website.
As a result of this earlier report, the NYC Comptroller’s office sent a letter to the Chancellor in January 2020, asking him to respond to our findings. When Deputy Chancellor Karin Goldmark replied several months later, she surprisingly did not refute any of our conclusions and actually confirmed some of our findings. She also sent a new spreadsheet which purported to show DOE’s matching funds that contained data completely different from the data provided us earlier by DOE via FOIL and/or from the City Council website.
Yet the data in the new spreadsheets still revealed considerable shortfalls in matching funds nearly as egregious as we found in our original report. The state passed a law in 2010, requiring that any spending undertaken by co-located charter schools to enhance their spaces be also offered to public schools that shared their buildings, in recognition that too often, public school students were subjected to separate but unequal conditions inside the same building. Nevertheless, we found that only four public schools out of 812 instances over six years had received funds equal to the amount spent by their co-located charter schools on facility upgrades, and not a single public school received the cumulative amount owed to them from FY 2014 to FY 2019.
Instead, 127 co-located public schools were owed a total of $15.5 million over this six-year period. A searchable database of schools that lacked matching funds is posted here.
Two of the five schools that were the most shortchanged were District 75 schools for seriously disabled children, despite the fact that staff and parents at these public schools reported considerable needs for upgrades and repair. One of those D75 schools is the Mickey Mantle school in East Harlem that shares space with Success Academy Harlem 3 and CONTINUE READING: NYC Public School Parents: Our new report finds DOE overspent by millions on charter school rent; and denied co-located public schools millions in matching funds for facility upgrades