Charter Advocacy Day

By: Jeannie Infante, Associate Director of Family and Community Engagement
February 16, 2018

On Tuesday, February 6th, Inwood Academy for Leadership joined hundreds of families in Albany to advocate for our school and celebrate 20 years of positive changes in public education. The New York City Charter School Center and the Northeast Charter Schools Network co-sponsors this annual event and  Inwood Academy has participated for 3 consecutive years.

This year we joined families from TEP Charter School in the morning to travel to Albany together. Every politician in Albany works for us and this was the perfect opportunity to exercise our civic duty and fight for all charter schools. Ms. Nilma (Thay) Baez, parent of a student at Inwood Academy said, “There are 47,800 students on charter school waitlists and families in our community should be given the privilege to choose what school they want to send their children to.” Other parents from our group outlined Governor Cuomo’s executive budget proposals and shared the personal impact their child’s school has had in their lives with our local elected officials –  Senator Marisol Alcantara and Assemblywoman Carmen N. De La Rosa. We all agreed that the cap should be eliminated because charter schools work for the students we serve in Washington Heights and Inwood, and they work for about 114,000 students in New York City.

Equity for all schools means that if charters are providing a great education for its students and their families then they should receive the same amount of funding as any traditional public school.

Charter schools are public schools and equal funding could help with family programming, books, school trips, extracurricular activities, and more. Charter schools like Inwood Academy who do not share space with a DOE school, receive even less funding, as we are not reimbursed for all of our building expenses.