To win over Albany, charter advocates begin organizing parents

This is GREAT to see – it’s CRITICALLY important to organize our parents, which we reformers have done a miserable job of, though we’re getting better:

Burned by Albany funding cuts, charter school advocates are turning to a political base that they’ve long left untapped: parents.

In mid-October, a dozen charter school administrators gathered in a conference room at the Times Square Marriott for a seminar on the role of parents in charter school advocacy. Kenneth Peterson, a director of strategic partnerships at the New York State Charter School Association told the group that the charter school movement has a secret problem: it has almost no grassroots parent advocacy.

New York State’s political climate had changed, Peterson explained. Last year, legislators froze the amount of money that charter schools receive for each student they teach, effectively cutting their budgets. A fragile majority of charter school supporters in the State Senate made it imperative for charter school advocates to win over individual senators, rather than relying on friendships with a few party leaders.

“Crisis has a way of galvanizing folks around the need to act,” said Jeff Maclin, vice president for school advocacy at the New York City Charter School Center. “I think the ‘freeze’ in education funds to public charter schools this year was a wake up call to schools to make sure something like this does not happen again.”

For years, the Center has piled hundreds of parents onto buses and driven them to Albany for lobby day, but the conversations with lawmakers were brief and easily forgotten.

Now the Center is creating the Charter Parents Advocacy Network, or CPAN, an organization that Maclin said will familiarize parents with the legislative and financial problems their schools face and turn them into political activists. The goal is to have parents know what issues are important to charter schools’ success, have their legislators on speed dial and show up at community education council meetings ready to hold their own against charter school opponents.

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To win over Albany, charter advocates begin organizing parents

by Anna Phillips

http://gothamschools.org/2009/11/09/to-win-over-albany-charter-advocates-begin-organizing-parents/