THE CITY OF NEW YORK

OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT

BOROUGH OF MANHATTAN

SCOTT M. STRINGER
BOROUGH PRESIDENT

May 4, 2011

Dennis M. Walcott
Chancellor
New York City Department of Education
52 Chambers Street
New York, NY 10007

Dear Chancellor Walcott,

Thank you for your timely response to my April 21st letter, in which I shared concerns about the
management and state of Community Education Councils (CEC). I wish I could say those concerns had
been alleviated since that last communication. Instead, I am writing today to share additional concerns
about the chaotic and confusing manner in which the CEC and Citywide Council advisory elections have
unfolded in recent days. In fact, I believe the process is so badly flawed, and the final election by parent
selectors so close at hand that I am calling upon the Department of Education (DOE) to postpone next
week’s CEC elections until such time as serious questions about ballot information and integrity can be
corrected. Moving ahead at this juncture, I believe, will cause irreparable damage to parents’ confidence
and faith in the validity of the election process and, by extension, in the DOE and its Office of Family
Information and Action (OFIA).

I would like to address three specific concerns related to what I believe is OFIA’s mishandling of the
election process to date, which from the beginning has lacked the kind of transparency that should be the
hallmark of any election. As you know, an advisory vote of all parents in community school districts is
now being held through May 7th. The official vote by parent selectors – namely PA/PTA Presidents,
Secretaries, and Treasurers (or their designees) – will be held from May 10th through May 17th.

First, I believe it is widely acknowledged that the CEC and Citywide Council election process got off to a
rough start, with the DOE needing to extend its application deadline because so few candidates emerged
from the first round of outreach. The roughly 500 candidates for approximately 325 seats, in a system
that serves more than one million children, is not reflective of the kind of parent participation I think any
of us would hope to see.

More recently, parents have raised numerous concerns to my office about OFIA posting inaccurate
information about candidate qualifications and procedures and distributing voter guides with incomplete
candidate profiles. In addition, despite the fact that CEC and Citywide Council elections take place at the
same time every year, OFIA failed to foresee obvious scheduling conflicts forcing Citywide Council
members to spend needless hours working with DOE staff to rectify the situation.

Second, the Department decided for the first time this year to not make publicly available its final list of
CEC and Citywide Council candidates. I understand that OFIA implemented new steps for parents to
access candidate profiles in order to achieve greater levels of privacy. However, these steps ultimately
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made it much more difficult for parents to access critical information about candidates and contributed to
significant confusion. It is my understanding that after numerous complaints about this information not
being made public, it has just this morning been posted on the Power to the Parents website. This late in
the game, however, I think there is reason to be concerned that the needless hoops parents were required
to jump through dissuaded many from participating in what should be a simple, open process.

Finally, I am extremely concerned about the process by which OFIA has been verifying candidates’
eligibility. My office has fielded numerous complaints from veteran CEC members who have been
declared ineligible, despite clear facts to the contrary. For instance, OFIA informed my office last month
that their records showed that one of my appointees was no longer eligible to serve on her CEC because
her term had ended. That was not true, and my office had to tell OFIA that their records were incorrect.
In another case, OFIA removed from the ballot this week a member of one of the Citywide Councils
based on information that, again, was simply incorrect. Worse, this Council member was left with the
burden of proving to the DOE that in fact she is still eligible, with just days to go before the election
process shuts down.

These incidents, which I am hearing are not isolated, may stem from disorganization. But they are also
feeding troubling speculation that OFIA is intent on removing candidates whose independent voices may
not be closely aligned with DOE views. This concern is understandable, given media attention this March
to the problem of OFIA staff directing Parent Coordinators to recruit “Happy Harry” rather than “Angry
Sally” parents to public meetings, and to encourage parents to sign petitions supporting the repeal of Last
In, First Out (LIFO). These actions, which the DOE publicly acknowledged as inappropriate, raised
serious questions about OFIA’s allegiances and broader agenda.

The CECs and Citywide Councils have the potential to offer parents a meaningful opportunity to
participate in our public education system. But this goal will not be realized if the DOE fails to conduct
an open and credible election process, and then does not offer the training, oversight and support that
these bodies so richly deserve.

I believe the DOE must re-set the clock on this year’s chaotic election process and start over. The
mismanagement of the process to date has done little more than undermine the credibility of the CECs
and Citywide Councils, whose members work too hard to be subjected to the haphazard and error-filled
oversight that OFIA has provided to date.

I look forward to discussing this further with you at our upcoming meeting. I appreciate the openness you
have shown in addressing parental concerns since the moment you were named Chancellor, and I know
your commitment to trying to find new ways to involve parents in city schools goes back many, many
years.

Sincerely,

Scott M. Stringer
Manhattan Borough President