New York state lawmakers are blocking the charter schoolhouse door.
Albany’s arbitrary cap blocking the opening of new charter schools in New York City has left 52,700 mostly black and Hispanic students from the neediest neighborhoods languishing on waiting lists, records show.
The clamor to get in comes from some of the city’s neediest neighborhoods, according to an analysis by the New York City Charter School Center.
In The Bronx, there were 27,020 applicants for 6,969 available seats for the current school year, leaving 20,051 students stranded.
In the South Bronx — the borough’s poorest area — there were 17,234 applicants for 4,453 seats.
The Bronx Charter School for the Arts in Hunts Point received more than 2,000 applications for just 150 seats — but it can’t expand to higher grades because of the cap, said Executive Director Miriam Raccah.
“I don’t think it’s about kids and their education. Our kids are thriving. Their families want this. This has to do with other factors that don’t have to do with our kids and their education. I wish we could focus on what kids need and want,” she said.
There were also about four applicants for each opening in Harlem charters — 13,184 applicants for 3,366 seats, leaving 9,818 kids in the lurch.
In Brooklyn’s District 18, encompassing Flatbush and Canarsie, there were 3,439 applicants for 806 seats this year.
Staten Island had 1,144 students competing for 520 seats.
Over in Queens, 7,255 applicants vied for 2,203 seats.
The operator of a charter school in Queens serving largely Hispanic and South Asian immigrants said the cap stops him from expanding.
“We cannot open another grade 5-to-8 school without another charter,” said Suyin So, founder and director of the Central Queens Academy Charter School, which has two campuses in Elmhurst and Glendale. “If we had a second charter, we would be able to give more families an opportunity. But we simply can’t.”
There are now 235 city charters serving 123,000 students.
Under current law, 460 charter schools can be authorized statewide. But a sub-cap further restricts the number of charters in New York City.
There are 99 charter-school slots still available outside of the city, but none in the city, where the need is greatest. The State University of New York approved the remaining seven charter-school applications for the city last month.
Last year, 27 public charter schools were among the city’s 50 highest-performing schools in math, while 21 were among the top 50 in English Language Arts, the Charter Center said.