As of now, the Out of School Time program reaches 154 schools in Brooklyn. According to its website, it offers "a mix of academic, recreational and cultural activities for young people (grades K-12) after school" and is free of charge. It's also a relief to parents who work longer hours and rely on the program to watch over their children into the evening.

But, according to a new report out by The Daily News, it looks like almost 10,000 kids in Brooklyn who participate in the program are out of luck this fall.

The OST program houses 52,567 students every weekday city-wide. This number will be halved once the budget cuts from Bloomberg's administration are installed. Here's the data: this year, the budget was $91.5 million; next time school is in session, the funds will have dropped to $73.3 million. Instead of 154 programs, Brooklyn will be left with 77 overloaded OST's, pushing 10,000 kids out of the program. And none of the parents involved are too happy about it.
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From New Settlement Parent Action Committee flier.

This afternoon, parent advocates in the Bronx are organizing a march that will start at a transportation hub in the borough, move to a suspensions hearing center onward to an early care education site, and then to an elementary school and a middle school. The final destination of the rally is a juvenile justice center.

This, they say, is a reflection of the path that all too many Bronx youth take today -- from school to prison.

A South Bronx group called the New Settlement Apartments Parent Action Committee is holding a rally today to shed light on some alarming statistics around the arrests that take place inside schools and to push the Dept. of Education to make policy changes that they say would better address behavioral problems and curb the rates of youth incarceration.

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Sam Levin

Paul Robeson student holds a Bill of Student Rights.

Students frustrated with the city's plan to shut down their high school walked out of class today and marched two-and-a-half miles in support of Occupy Wall Street's May Day.

Separate from the chaotic protests in Manhattan -- which, as expected, are getting a lot of attention for their arrests and police-protester confrontations -- the rally in Brooklyn was peaceful and remained focused on a number of key education issues in the city that have gotten support from Occupy Wall Street. The march was organized and led by high school students with some help from a handful of OWS-ers.

The Voice first caught up with students at noon in Crown Heights from Paul Robeson High School -- a struggling school the city is in the process of phasing out. It's the time of the year when education rallies and heated Panel for Educational Policy meetings make headlines as critics target Mayor Bloomberg's controversial practice of shutting down failing schools. It's one of a handful of policies that have fueled criticisms over mayoral control, the governance structure that gives Bloomberg direct authority over the education system.

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Sam Levin

Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott with a map of new schools opened under Bloomberg.

Yesterday afternoon, Mayor Mike Bloomberg joined Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott to unveil the city's plan to open 54 new schools this fall -- which the mayor touted as an important step in the reform efforts he began when he took control of the school system at the start of his administration.

But hours earlier at a separate event, a handful of pols who hope to replace Bloomberg in 2013 criticized some of the mayor's education policies, specifically targeting Bloomberg's controversial practice of closing failing schools.

These comments from the expected mayoral candidates, along with news earlier this week that state lawmakers want to eliminate mayoral control of the city's school system, have put pressure on Bloomberg to defend some key aspects of his education agenda. Under the system of mayoral control -- as opposed to a traditional structure with an elected board -- Bloomberg says that test scores have improved, graduation rates have increased, and that minority students are performing better.

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www.imdb.com

Unlike the Griswolds, Eddie Calderon-Melendez's European Vacation was paid for by taxpayers.

There appears to be a reason a Brooklyn charter school was so broke in 2009 that its teachers were forced to double as janitors: the school's founder was allegedly using the (publicly funded) school's credit card to go gallivanting across Europe -- amongst several other alleged acts of sleaze.

That founder, Eddie Calderon-Melendez, was hit today with an 11-count indictment alleging that he failed to pay more than $70,000 in taxes over six years after getting compensated $1.4 million to "manage" the school.

All of that compensation came either "directly or indirectly from taxpayer funded charter schools," according to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

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Lynn Passarella

For some students the idea of a principal who bumps up your undeserving performance might be great. None of the work, all of the credit. For most (hopefully) that educator would seem to be setting an incredibly poor example. Though, say, giving students credit for courses they didn't even take might seem worthy of a Cameron Diaz movie, that's what happened at a highly regarded Bronx middle and high school. Principal Lynn Passarella of the Theater Arts Production Company School was ousted Friday upon the discovery that she had falsely altered the school's records, improving its overall performance. "The behavior uncovered in this report is dishonest and disgraceful, and shows a blatant disregard for principal responsibilities," Chancellor Dennis Walcott said in a statement, according to the New York Times. Yup. Sounds about right.

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New York Civil Liberties Union

Add this to the list of grievances activists throughout the city have with the New York Police Department.

Protests of the city's surveillance of Muslims and the NYPD's controversial stop-and-frisk policies have reached new heights in recent weeks.

And today, activists are rallying around another policing policy that they say is unfairly targeting minorities and outer borough residents: arresting students in public schools.

Last month, the New York Civil Liberties Union spoke out about new data from the city's Department of Education that reveals that school discipline practices are disproportionately impacting students of color and students in the Bronx.

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More black and Latino students got into New York City's top high schools than in 2011, putting a halt to several years of decreasing admits among these demographics.

The New York Times reports that Education Department stats show that 730 black and Latino students were admitted to top-tier institutions such as Stuyvesant High School and Bronx High School of Science -- 14 percent more than in 2011 and 12 percent more than in 2010.

Blacks got 6 percent of admission offers, while Latinos got 8 percent.

Asians got the highest number of offers for specialized high schools -- 46 percent, according to the Times -- while whites got 23 percent.

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Data rating 18,000 New York City teachers was released Friday, but not without strong caveats as both teachers and education leaders warned of flaws. Teachers are evaluated based on how much value they add as evidenced by change in student performance on standardized tests relative to measurement of how the student should perform when taking into account demographics. The margin of error is, however, wide: 53 percentage points for English teachers and 35 for math. "I think it's extremely important that we not denigrate our teachers based on the reports. This, as I have indicated, is just one piece of information. It's dated information, it's two years old," Chancellor Dennis Walcott said. News organizations had requested the information under the Freedom of Information Law. [NYT, NYDN, NY1]

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The NYPD took over school safety in 1998, and the New York Civil Liberties Union claims that cops have since abused their position, using their role to stop and frisk students.

Today, the NYCLU released what's said to be the first study chronicling student arrest and summons data, and the results are pretty startling: During the last three months of 2011, an average of five students were arrested daily -- 93.5 percent were black or Hispanic.

The vast majority of these schoolkids -- 74.9 percent -- were male.

Most of these arrests took place in the Bronx (28 percent), followed by Brooklyn (26.2 percent), Manhattan (19.7 percent), Queens (14.7 percent), and Staten Island (11.5 percent).

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