Tons Of Kids Unexpectedly Show Up For Public School One Day (NY), What's the Law?

Factual Questions
1

I’m in the middle of a debate with some people regarding education law in NYC.

Some background: New York City has lots of kids in private schools (yeshivos, Catholic schools, etc.). These schools generally do not receive funding from the state due to a Blaine Amendment in the state constitution. Parents, therefore, generally pay tuition for these children.

A scenario has been floated (hypothetically – it would never come to pass for various reasons) that if these tens of thousands of kids all show up at the public schools, the state would have to find places for them. Since (it is assumed) the schools can seat so many kids unexpectedly, the state would have to find some way to send them back to their private schools and provide funding for them.

I objected to that on the grounds that, in the event that the schools are suddenly and unexpectedly overwhelmed like this, that they could turn away the kids for a short period until arrangements could be made.

Others said that I was wrong and that the kids must be seated on the day they show up, regardless of extenuating circumstances.

My question is this: would the schools be mandated to actually make sure that every kid has a seat on that very same day, regardless of whether or not there are facilities in place for them? Or can they say to them “you registered late and in a very large group. It’ll take us X days to arrange accommodations” and send them home for those X days?

Thanks in advance,

Zev Steinhardt

2

WAG: I would assume that since they were not registered, the school would have no way of knowing if they were even supposed to be there, if they were in the right school for their address, what grade they should be in, if they have special education needs, etc. Therefore, it would be unreasonable (ludicrous, really) to expect the school to just start moving folding chairs into the classrooms (or paying private schools).

I would ask someone to give you the chapter and verse of the law they think applies here. I’d guess that they can not. It’s hard to even try and look this up if we don’t know if they’re referring to a law, line in the state constitution, public school mission statement or what. Put the onus on them to prove their claims.

Now, if tens of thousands of kids started registering for classes, I’d bet that the school board would look into temporary class spaces (trailers, rented facilities, etc) and calling all the substitute teachers in their black book. If nothing else, pretty soon there should be a surplus of unemployed private school teachers (and empty school buildings) on the market.

3

Here is the (PDF) Regulations of the Chancellor regarding admissions to NYC public schools. I just started skimming it but, while it says that no student can be turned away from a school where they are registered, I’ve seen nothing yet promising immediate registration and placement.

4

Thanks, Jophiel.

The closest I got was this:

and

I, however, argued that this is merely the state mandate to educate, not necessarily that they must have everyone seated on the first day.

In any event, your objection is the crux of my disputant’s point – it would be impossible for the state to seat the students. Since they must educate the children by law, he argues, the state must find some alternate solution – and the only one that ensures that kids are seated on that day is to fund the private religious schools (Blaine notwithstanding).

Zev Steinhardt

5

From the linked Chancellor’s Regulations:

Presumably if there is NO space permitting, the school may make other accommodations and those accommodations may take (a reasonable) time to make. The sections for elementary, middle and high schools say the same general thing.

6

I don’t know how the law in New York is worded, but in Missouri the law simply states that there will be “free public schools.” I have looked through pages and pages of state statutes and there doesn’t appear to be any direction as to how that requirement is to be met.

My suggestion would be that you all try to find the specific law that says a student must be given a desk, in a classroom, provided with books, taught by a teacher, in a school building on the very first day the student shows up.

7

Jophiel

Thank you very much! Where is the link?

EDIT: D’oh – the link is above. Sorry about that!

And could it be argued that the above quoted State Law or section of the State Constitution would trump the Chancellor’s Regulations?

Zev Steinhardt

8

I’ve heard of several situations where the school board can’t keep up with demand because of the time it takes to approve and build a new school. Typically, this happens in boom/bust resource towns, like the Alberta oil patch. They simply have one group of students during the morning and another in the evening (i.e. 8-2 and 2-7)

Admittedly it won’t happen in the first day, since nobody warned the school they were showing up. If I were the principal, I’d divert the extra students to the cafeteria and auditorium until the shift could be worked out. Maybe some would be bussed to other less crowded schools.

Maybe those empty parochial schools would rent their space to the public school board temporarily. I have heard of several schools in the Toronto area that were traded or “borrowed” between the public and “separate” (Catholic) school boards during emergencies or changing demographics.

9

Almost all of these sorts of legal arguments are fallacious at best. They’re about like the tax protesters who claim somehow the IRS & revenue laws don’t apply to them because they spell their name in all-caps, rendering them a country, not a person. That’s not law and logic, that’s magical thinking.

The law almost certainly does not have such a stringent requirement as to educate, for the rest of their childhood, anyone & everyone who shows up unexpectedly on a certain day. What it does almost certainly have, is a generalized provision describing the idea that resident kids are entitled to a taxpayer funded education in accordance with certain rules.

The idea that 10,000 or whatever private school customers could all show up at public school on a Tuesday, and suddenly hey presto!! Gotcha Mr. Goverment, the school system owes them private school on the public dime is nonsense. It’s the same sort of magical thinking as the tax protester.

Even if the letter of the law said exactly that such kids must be seated & schooled, as a practical reality upon the onslaught of the 10,000 the law or the policy executing the law would bend to logistical & political reality.

It always amazes me how people can be so monstrously cynical about government motives and government operations. And yet somehow believe in one certain circumstance, one that *just happens *to be very, very beneficial to themselves, that the government will follow all its most niggly rules to the letter, even if doing so is vastly difficult and harms its own larger scale mission statements and governing principal laws.

*Gotcha *is not a legal principal.

If it were, they could simply file a class action lawsuit saying that clearly the pubic schools can’t house all these private school kids. So in effect, as a group they’re being denied the promised free education. So just pay us parents of the class & we’ll go away. It seems pretty obvious that suit wont’ fly.

Wanting something for nothing & happily stealing from other taxpayers is certainly ingrained in some folks.

10

I assume worst case the city can emergency expropriate all these empty private schools to house their students.

Also look up “duty to mitigate”. A group dumping children onto a school system, surprise, surprise, with no warning won’t have a very good case if they then file suit the next day saying “the school system wasn’t prepared”. As LSLguy says, there are no magic words. The judge will apply “what is reasonable” standard, and the reasonable person would have registered a month early like the rules say, to give the board time to prepare. Deliberately hurting yourself (“my child could not stay in school, I had to miss work”) does not create damages the other party is liable for.

11

Thanks, md2000.

This may sound like a stupid question, but here goes:

From my (admittedly quick) searching on the term, it looks like the duty to mitigate is a part of contract law. Would that apply here as well, considering that the schools would not technically be in breach of contract (because, well, there is no contract), but rather, perhaps, in breach of regulations?

Zev Steinhardt

12

A lesser version of the OP’s scenario played out in the Hempstead, Long Island school district earlier this year. It was covered heavily in Newsday (but the stories may be behind a paywall). Basically, a large number of new immigrant students showed up at the beginning of the year and, the school district being largely dysfunctional, were given no place to go for several weeks. Then, they were put in a hastily arranged annex and not properly tested to determine what levels they were. It was a complete mess.

The state Board of Regents investigated and came down hard on the district. It also prompted the Regents to adopt new regulations (pdf) a couple of weeks ago regarding registration of students. In particular, it says: “When a child’s parent(s), the person(s) in parental relation to the child or the child, as appropriate, requests enrollment of the child in the school district, such child shall be enrolled and shall begin attendance on the next school day, or as soon as practicable.”

13

Thank you, Topologist! That seems pretty clear. However, I’d like to ask the same question I did above - to wit:

Could it be argued that the sections of state law and the state constitution which I quoted above (in post #4) are mandates that children must be educated immediately and that, therefore, they would overrule any Commissioner’s Regulations?

Zev Steinhardt

14

That isn’t how transfer registrations are done, anyway. You cannot bring a kid to school and demand a schedule. Transcripts have to be provided, birth certificates, proof of vaccinations, etc. Even if we assume 10,000 kids showed up with their paperwork, counselors or administrators have to review it to make appropriate placements. Moreover, there is no such thing as showing up all at once–someone would be first and someone last. The wait times between the two would vary dramatically. Some kids would be admitted in one day, others would take longer. Some kids might be sent home with a District-provided laptop and Internet connection to participate by camera for a couple weeks. Shoulda registered in August.

15

I’m not a lawyer (I’m a topologist), but I assume the Regents outrank the NYC Commissioner. As I said, they didn’t think much of how the Hempstead Board and Supervisor handled things. The Regents’ new rules come pretty close to saying that a child must be educated immediately. Of course, the phrase “as soon as practicable” is where the rubber meets the road.

In reply to Grotonian’s post (which appeared as I was preparing this one), those new rules go on to say that documentation is to be reviewed after the child is enrolled. So, the emphasis really is on getting the kids into class as soon as possible.

16

My IANAL interpretation - who is complaining about what? If the parents complain to the school board or the state legislature, all they will get is polite nods and then the authorities will mutter to themselves about asshole parents when they get somewhere private. So presumably, the “revenge” of the tax dolts would be to sue the state for failure to comply with the regulations. “Duty to Mitigate” simply would mean the parents suing because the state failed to live up to its end of the bargain would face tough questions about why they deliberately tried to put the state in the situation where they would obviously have difficulty keeping their bargain. Note the “as soon as practicable” escape clause in Topologist’s answer quoted below.

Exactly. There’s a difference between “we weren’t prepared today” and “we have no clue what to do and nothing has happened for weeks”. I remember attending classes of 35 to 40 students; doubling class sizes is an option. There are plenty of substitute teachers waiting to be called if teachers are sick - you could call in a dozen of them to handle some extra load; seat several classes in each corner of the auditorium or cafeteria or library (or gym). Nobody expects the situation to be magically solved the first day, but several weeks of buck-passing, paralysis and eye-glazing stupidity is not an appropriate answer either.

Of course, google wil find that the school district was told their finances were questionable in an audit, plus this gem:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/18/nyregion/school-district-on-long-island-told-it-must-teach-immigrants.html?_r=0

Not so much a surprise as the district chose not to allow (illegal?) immigrants to attend, basically shirking their duty instead of accommodating the rush.

17

It’s worth mentioning that the school is no more prepared to start cutting checks for tens of thousands of private school tuitions than it is to pull tens of thousands of desks out of thin air. So anyone who thinks this fantasy scenario would end with publicly paid private tuitions is kidding themselves regardless of what they think the law says.

18

No idea what the position is of the people you’re arguing with, but the argument I’ve typically heard is not so much that they have an obligaton to seat them that day but that they have an obligation to educate them period. The thinking is that if faced with a sudden obligation to educate 10s of thousands of new kids at a cost of 100s of millions of dollars, some way will be found to funnel some smaller amount of money to the private schools instead.

19

I predict this wouldn’t work out well for the students who tried this gambit. If there are 10,000 kids in good private schools who want to remain there, many parents aren’t going to take the risk that this strategy will work. They will leave their kids in the private schools. So now we’re down to something less than 10,000 students participating. The private schools, in the meantime, have their own policies about refunding tuition. Just because 10,000 kids have decided to enroll in public school doesn’t mean that the private schools will give them their money back. So the private schools can continue to operate. They can even use the money to give scholarships to the best students from public schools.

But what if the temporarily-public would-be private school students don’t pay their tuition at all before the school year starts? Well, again, the good schools will simply fill up classes with the best kids on the waiting list who will pay before the school year starts. The would-be private-to-public-hopefully-back-to-private students will quickly find that they have no spots to go back to at their old private schools.

As other have pointed out, the public schools’ response to this would likely be to accommodate the new students as best they can in the best way “practicable.” In auditoriums and gymnasiums at first covered by substitute teachers who are mostly keeping them from killing themselves. Later, students would filter into over-stuffed classrooms as books and seats become available. The students could sue for their right to a suitable education. The suit would take months, courts would be largely unsympathetic to the parents’ whose coordinated and intentional actions deliberately created the problem, and the students’ conditions would be improving by the day. Schools would slowly file the new students into classes and give them the books left by the students who took their places at the private schools. They would also hire some new teachers, buy some new books, and rent some new class space.

What about the not-so-good schools with no waiting lists? Those which don’t demand prepaid tuition and which would have trouble attracting new students? Well, they would probably close. How is that going to help students pulling this gambit attend them later for free?

20

I don’t have a cite, but it seems that every year in NYC I hear about kids who don’t have a seat on the first day of school- either they moved to town over the summer , or kids somehow didn’t get assigned to a high school before the first day of school or they were invited not to return to a private school at the end of the previous year or *something *. But not having a place immediately happens every year, and the parents certainly weren’t offered private school tuition. And making it 10,000 kids suddenly appearing instead of a couple hundred will make courts more lenient not less - because the other factor those people aren’t considering is that even if they were correct it would take a lawsuit to determine that (because no school district is going to just start cutting checks to private schools for thousands of kids without a court order) and even if the case is super-expedited, the time it takes will give the district a chance to find room.