I wonder whether the people who devised this clever-clever plan have run it by the administrators of the private and parochial schools in NYC. I imagine they were/would be laughed out of the room, proving that even the private schools are PART OF THE CONSPIRACY.
When I was in school (60’s 70’s) and even since then, “portable classrooms” were a common thing - basically trailers or prefab rooms, and the space between them covered to provide an indoor corridor. (The school down the road from me has a few right now, until the new school opens next month) Ugly, but they get the job done. As I said, the city could expropriate those empty parochial schools too.
Basically, we’re still back to “Gotcha is not a legal principle” as **LSLguy **says. You cannot spring an awkward situation on a school board and then sue and complain in court that they are not living up to their obligations because you made a mess and they did not fix it the first day. If your lawsuit would have any merit, it would only be so if the school board was so incredibly, painfully, stupidly slow in its response that no reasonable person should put up with it. (The parents pulling this trick don’t qualify as reasonable).
(I’m reminded of the Foghorn Leghorn cartoon where he complains to the hound “What am ah doin’ outside the fence? I’m out, boy! I escaped! Ah demand you put me back in…!” At which point the dog forces him through a tiny knothole in the fence. You can’t complain about someone not fixing a mess right away when you’re the one who caused a mess that could have been avoided. )
The other point is that they have registration weeks in advance simply to plan for upcoming capacity. Failure to register, then springing the kids on the school the first day, would basically negate any claim the board had failed you and your kids. No judge is going to listen beyond that point.
According to my mother, during WWII, in some places, some public school buildings were given over to the military for barracks, training, or processing stations.
Students then had to double up, by being assigned either to an AM or PM program that was slightly shorter than the old school day. If the old day had been six hours, from 9-3:30 (lunch included), then the new day was five hour, and the AM group attended from 7am-noon, and the PM group from 12:30-5:30. No lunch served. Not sure what kindergarten did.
Schools could probably work out something like that. I know in Indiana, for a normally 6 hr. school day to count as a day (ie, it doesn’t have to be made up), students have to attend for at least four hours, so Indiana schools could juggle nine hours of student attendance with two 4.5 hour student blocks-- there is a mandate to serve lunch.
It’s one solution, that would work better than paying for private schools. Teachers would either be offered overtime, or some classes would be taught by subs in the elementary grades (or you could still have the classroom teachers there for the core hours, and have subs for the first 90 minutes and the last 90 minutes, or something). In the intermediate and middle schools, regular teachers would still teach six classes a day, and would have the choice to begin their day as soon as the school opened, end it as soon as the school closed, or teach their usual hours. Subs and some new hires would pick up the the slack.
It probably wouldn’t last long, because as soon as people realized it didn’t work, either the private school students would return, or their places would have been taken up, as someone said, by waitlisted and new scholarship students, who would leave the public schools.
If it did come down to public schools paying private schools, I’m sure what would happen is that the public schools would offer the private schools exactly the same amount of money that they would otherwise spend on educating these children on the public school budget, and not whatever the private school asks. The private school, if it accepted just to stay afloat, would be forced to drop a lot of the programs that set it apart from public schools. Teachers’ salaries would be cut. Many would quit. Some schools would survive, some wouldn’t. The ones that did would not invite back the students who caused the crisis.
Good answer, except that my impression is the private schools don’t pay anywhere near union rates. Especially, the religious schools exploit their fellow religionists - “How dare you demand more money from your mother church for the privilege of teaching young minds to be good Catholics! We’re all poor here, except the bishop in his Buick.”
But seriously, I don’t see the state permitting the school boards to pay religious schools anything simply due to this sort of blackmail. Since it would take a law change, I imagine it would be weeks before anything happened, followed by a court challenge by atheist groups resulting in an injunction against it on constitutional grounds.
I have a another issue with the hypothetical. If the 10,000 students show up and the Board of Education decides it needs to pay for private schools for the overflow, and even decides somehow that it will put kids into religious schools, who says that the kids it sends to the private or religious schools will be the ones that arrived in the influx.
The school system has to find 10,000 new seats, but it doesn’t have to put the new students into the new seats. It would almost certainly be illegal to determine where to put a student based on his or her religious background, so if all of the Yeshiva students (Catholic school students, etc.) in Brooklyn showed up at their local public schools one days, and the now-empty Yeshivas said that they would take public school students, the students they would be assigned would be a mix of students from the neighborhood, and the former Yeshiva students would be mixed into the public school.
More significantly, even if the Yeshivas became some sort of instant charter schools, they would be prohibited from religious education for the public students they took.
These are both very important points to recognize.
We actually know what will happen when 3,000 students suddenly have no place to sit: Stuyvesant high school was shutdown after 9/11.
We also know what happened to solve the problem: the students were moved to Brooklyn Tech and both sets of students were placed on shifts. At no time did the city consider paying Dalton (an elite private school) to take on Stuyvesant students.
I would note that as a Mayoral agency, the bd of Education lacks the authority to make any such payments without the approval of the Comptroller anyway. As a separately elected official not beholden to the mayor (and typically, a political opponent) the Comptroller would not agree to make such payments simply to solve a problem that’s the Mayor’s responsibility. Nor could he, unless there was a legitimate case that it was the most fiscally responsible solution.