Boston Cutting Property Deals with Charters, Charters Recruit Top Scorers, Private School Students

[Hannah Bell]

What is that smell wafting up over the Charles River this morning? Oh, it's the stench of corruption as a whole bunch of public schools are shuttered, kids are dispersed, communities blown up, and fat cats in in the corporate foundations get ready to carve up the empty school properties for their corporate welfare charter schools.

And while the BPS tries to figure out how to close the 63 million dollar hole in its budget largely created by the $55 million it will pay out to charter schools, the corporate charters are already sending recruiting letters to high-flying students from the closing public schools, while getting ready to put out the welcome mat for private schoolers, too. Special ed and ELL students? Need not apply.

The Globe has a story this morning about backroom deals to carve up the real estate before the announced closing even reached the parents and kids affected:

The Boston Teachers Union is accusing city and school leaders of “meeting secretly’’ last week to offer charter school officials the chance to lease city schools slated for closure, even before parents and students at those schools knew their fate.

In fliers that its 7,000 members will receive today, the union said charter school leaders “are salivating at the possibility of leasing ‘surplus’ Boston School buildings.’’

Richard Stutman, president of the Boston Teachers Union, said he was taken aback by the meeting.

“I don’t get shocked by much, but I was shocked that they met with these folks prior to a School Committee vote and having meetings with the schools,’’ Stutman said yesterday...

You expect this kind of corrupt privatization in areas where disaster capitalism has used economic or natural emergencies to rush in with its shock and awe solutions, but here in the shadows of MIT and Harvard? How unseemly, indeed. Tsk tsk.

http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2010/12/boston-cutting-property-deals-with.html