Bill de Blasio ups the ante in his war on low-income, minority students

Mayor de Blasio’s war on charter schools — read: on children, and mostly children of color — rages on. Now it’s not just sports fields, but the SATs.

We wrote last week about the city Department of Education’s bid to bill the Success Academy network $500,000 so the public-school kids could use seven taxpayer-funded athletic fields.

The DOE’s initial excuse was the cost of COVID-related cleaning and maintenance. Then Success threatened to sue, since state law forbids the charging of fees to use school grounds for “recreation, physical training and athletics.”

So now DOE says the kids are just plain banned — merely because their classes are remote-only. In a Tuesday letter, the educrats insist their own reopening plan for regular public schools “limits in-person aftercare activities to students who were in physical attendance on that given day in the same school building.”

Thing is, charters by law get to set their own policies in such matters. The DOE can limit its own schools, not independent ones. And, in any case, outdoor activities are far lower-risk — especially for children, who have minimal infection rates.

Worse, the DOE is now blocking Success from using a school building to proctor SAT exams for some 300 students (175 of its scholars plus 125 others, some from DOE schools) on Nov. 7. Again, its pretext is that Success kids aren’t in the school during a normal day — so what?

Mind you, these students are overwhelming the low-income, minority children that de Blasio and Chancellor Richard Carranza say they most want to serve.

“It feels like I’ve been fighting with the mayor my whole life,” Fervelyn Nunez, a junior at SA’s high school, sighs. “I remember waking up early and getting on buses to go to Albany [to lobby for fair treatment]. I really don’t understand why he is doing this. Doing well on the SAT is important for minority kids like me.”

Actions speak louder than words: De Blasio and Carranza don’t about kids, or boosting the less-well-off, only about their grubby political games.

Source: NY Post