Quinn's Hollow Support For NYC's Parents

This week we saw two large demonstrations made up of parents who are sick and tired of the way Mayor Bloomberg has run the city's schools. While Joel Klein is spinning up in Albany trying to keep mayoral control as is, down here people are pissed off that their preschoolers have been kicked out of day care and into overcrowded city schools or they have kindergarten-age kids who have been placed on wait-lists to attend public school. Each scenario is a testament to how Bloomberg has failed the city's children and instead of trying to remedy the problem, he mocks the parents' complaints.

With all of that, I was surprised to see Council Speaker Christine Quinn show up at one of the events to speak:

Christine Quinn, the City Council speaker and usually an ally of Bloomberg’s, said that all the major players need to come together and honestly assess the number of seats needed and then figure out how to create them. “It’s later than it should be, but it’s not September,” she said.

The paragraph seems to imply that Quinn is on the side of the parents, but that is hardly the case. Quinn is pretty much a solid ally of Bloomberg and when it comes to mayoral control and its' side-effects, she's completely on board for all the damage that's been done. She supports mayoral control and wants to continue it. She's also given her full support to developers who build and build yet does not require them or the city to increase classroom capability in order to handle the influx of school children.

Being in front of the camera and being mentioned by a newspaper or two for showing up may look great, but having her in office doesn't do those parents any favors.

Bloomberg Mocks Parents Outraged Over His Mayoral Control

With mayoral control up for debate in Albany, it might be prudent for Bloomberg to show that he stays in tune with the parents that send their children to his unilaterally run schools. Yet after the Mayor decided to pull five year old children out of the city's daycare centers and place them in the larger public school system, parents were up in arms and held two separate demonstrations yesterday denouncing the change. With so little space available in the city's schools for these children, the move makes it even harder for parents to find their kids a space in their neighborhood school. So what was Mayor Bloomberg's reaction to the upset parents?

From The NY Daily News:

"They complained about a couple of hundred kids not being able to get into the schools that they wanted to get into," he said.

"I can tell you how to fix that: just lower the quality of the schools," he said. "Isn't it wonderful that kids want to get into schools?"

Told of the mayor's mocking, Sal Browne, a mother of two at Public School 116 in Murray Hill and toddler twins said, "That's the most absurd thing I have ever heard."

"This is not something to be shrugging off and joking about and saying this problem isn't really a problem," she said.

If the Mayor thinks that he can simply get away with this behavior and not pay a political price he'll be sorely mistaken. He can spend tens of millions of ads to numb the minds of this city but when you scorn a voter over the education of their child, there is no better way of helping your opponent than creating a cadre of pissed off parents.

Thompson Rails On Bloomberg For Pulling 5 Year Olds Out Of Daycare

The issue of mayoral control in the schools is heating up as Albany decides on what to do about the issue. Bloomberg's latest decision to yank five year olds from city daycare centers and placed into crowded public schools was a unilateral move that has enraged parents. It was also a golden opportunity for City Comptroller and Mayoral candidate Bill Thompson to slam Bloomberg for the move.

City Budget Cuts Hit Low Income Kids And Parent First

As the holidays rapidly approach, people are getting ready to buy presents for their loved ones and the city is getting decked out in trees, lights and department store displays. As festive as the city will look however, essential cuts to day care facilities are going to hit New Yorkers hard, not only for Christmas but the coming year as well. As usual, the least amongst us get the shaft as the rich keep everything but the rapidly devaluing stocks they own.

From The NY Times:

While officials made it clear that the sites would not be closed, critics charged that the reductions would have the same effect, by destabilizing the centers to the point that they would be forced to shut down.

The reductions are part of $62 million in cuts being made by the Administration for Children’s Services that will affect day care services used by struggling working families across the five boroughs.

The agency’s commissioner, John B. Mattingly, said in a press briefing that some hard choices were necessary “to avoid a train wreck” in the city’s day care programs during a time of fiscal crisis. “If we do not make these changes,” he said, “we could push the system to a point where we would be forced to shut the doors of child care centers throughout the city that are currently serving thousands of children.”

The rest of the cuts in the child welfare agency’s day care budget will affect school-age children, who will be served instead by Department of Education programs, he said. By the start of the next school year, for example, Children’s Services will no longer pay for day care slots for 3,300 5-year-olds who can be served through kindergarten and after-school programs.

This isn't all Mattingly's fault of course, he's just the commissioner, not the one who has the final say on the agency's budget. That comes straight from the top at Gracie Mansion. The Mayor was hailed as a smart and bold manager of the city's budget by calling for across the board cuts. However, when the budgetary axe falls uniformly on all city services and not part of any progressive scheme, the biggest losers do not happen to be Bloomberg's contemporaries but the ones he tells to go wear a sweater on those cold nights.