The Bill outlining the restructuring and takeover of the schools is an unprecedented one because it eventually outlines the process for the conversion of nearly half of Buffalo Schools into charters.
This is happening nationwide from Louisiana to New Jersey, the wholesale of public school districts to outside entities and the public has taken to the streets to protest it.
In Buffalo New York, a rally calling for the "Refuse" Receivership has been planned on Wednesday, September 2, at 3:30 PM at McKinley High School, 305 Elmwood Avenue---100 signed up on a Facebook page to attend about 1,000 invited.
While thousands have already been spent on attempting to overhaul the schools through Race to the Top funding , Governor Andrew Cuomo with a mere allocation of $75 million expects to do more or better and schools failing to show "demonstrable" academic gains in one year or less than three are taken over by outside entities.
Sadly, many of the public schools in the City of Buffalo were recently renovated under the biggest school reconstruction project ever in the history of the system, costing an investment of billions of taxpayers funds as much as $1.3 billion described as the buffalo's largest historic preservation project ever.
And at a time when there could have been an unprecedented improvement of the schools with the financial resources the state had committed to the Campaign for Fiscal Equity in Foundation Aid funds to public schools, though the state still continues to take the Gap Elimination funds imposed in 2010-11, instead there is a coup d'état , a takeover of the public schools in poor communities.
According to An Alliance for Quality Education report August 2014:
"New York State owes its public schools $5.9 billion in Foundation Aid and Gap Elimination Adjustment funding. Systemic underfunding is leaving a generation of students in high need schools without access to the “sound basic education” which is their constitutional right."
