BP ADAMS, PARENT ADVOCATES, SCHOOL LEADERS, AND PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL SUPPORTERS DEMAND CITY HALL AND DOE PROTECT FAMILIES’ ACCESS TO LOCAL SCHOOL INFORMATION
(NEW YORK) – Parents, school leaders, and public charter school supporters today demanded that Mayor Bill de Blasio and the Department of Education (DOE) commit to keeping a policy in place that protects NYC families’ access to public school information.
For over 12 years, the DOE has allowed public charter schools to utilize a department service – through a third-party vendor, known as Vanguard – to send informational mailings to parents in their neighborhood. These mailers are designed to notify parents about the public school options available to their children.
Charter schools that utilize the service do so at their own expense and are given NO access to student data or information ever. In fact, charter schools are only allowed to designate two demographic parameters – age and zip codes – ensuring that charters are marketing to all students. At least 100 public charter schools currently utilize the service, and it is the single most efficient way for schools, particularly new schools and charters serving middle school grades, to communicate with local parents.
Mayor de Blasio and the DOE were set to quietly reverse the longstanding policy, effectively limiting parents’ ability to find out about local public charter school options. But last week, the administration indicated publicly that no decisions had been made about the policy.
Now, parents, school leaders and charter advocates from across the city are speaking out to protect the twelve-year-old policy allowing NYC families to receive information about their local school options.
Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams said: “Outside of guaranteeing basic health and safety, there can be no greater priority for our families than empowering them with choice and fairness. My call is for maintaining that fairness and for strengthening that choice for all parents, regardless of the schools their children attend. As City Hall reviews its policy pertaining to the third-party Vanguard direct-mail provider, I stand with parents, teachers, and administrators of New York City students to call for continued access. I’m also proposing a new option for families to opt out of mailings and correspondence; if families don’t like to get mail, they should have the choice to opt out. Let’s come together on priorities we share: choice and fairness.”
Melissa Plowden-Norman, Charter Parent, Excellence Boys Charter High School said: “Both district and charter schools are public schools and parents have the right [to know]. It’s already hard enough to navigate the system and find a good school. Choice is what we need.”
Crystal McJunkin, Parent of 10th Grader at Benjamin N. Cardozo High School said: “I deserve to know my school option and nobody, no parent or elected official, should take that away from me. I just can’t believe we even have to come here and make this argument. It’s hard enough to find a great school for your kid, why is the city trying to make it any harder? Knowledge is power and all our parents need to know about the options for their children.”
“Last week, we were pleased to see the city hit the pause button and do the right thing by tabling this plan. But that’s not enough. Charter schools continue to deliver extraordinary results, and parents deserve to have more information about them – not less. If they shut down this route to inform parents, it would represent a deliberate effort to limit families’ access to information about all of the public schools they might consider and impede efforts to increase the number of students getting a first-rate education. Make no mistake: Mayor de Blasio’s efforts are designed to hurt the charter sector, which, given its success in getting children to and through college, is bad enough, but that it will come at the expense of students is simply unacceptable. It’s time for the mayor to do the right thing,” said NYC Charter Center CEO James Merriman.
Ambrosia Johnson, Founder & Head of School at Ivy Hill Preparatory Charter School said: “I grew up six minutes from where Ivy Hill Prep is opening, and when I was going to school, my mother bused me out an hour to go to school because there were not enough high-quality school options in our neighborhood. As I have the honor and privilege of coming back to my neighborhood, opening up a school for our children, it is my duty to ensure that all parents have access to the same information, to know what schools are offering, so that they can make the choice for their child.”
Arthur Samuels, Co-Founder and Executive Director MESA Charter High School said: “MESA was founded to give families another option for their children, and since charters don’t have zoned students, Vanguard is a critical tool for us to let families know that we exist and that they have that option. At the same time, the current system protects the privacy of families. In the entirety of MESA’s existence, I have never once seen a child’s name, address, or any other information.”
Currently, the DOE contracts with a third-party vendor called Vanguard (a separate and distinct organization from the large brokerage firm with the same name). Vanguard handles agency mass mailings of all kinds, including notifying NYC parents about a variety of the DOE’s programming. Since students are not zoned for charter schools, and these public schools are alternatives, the DOE has allowed them to utilize Vanguard’s services, for nearly 12 years, to send information to prospective parents in their neighborhood. Vanguard possesses and maintains accurate and up-to-date DOE lists of local students – absolutely no student information is ever shared with the charter school. The ability to use Vanguard’s services is critical for new charter schools as they open, for instance, to notify parents of new school options in their neighborhood.
How It Works
To send a mailing, a charter school works directly with Vanguard; the school sends the vendor its flyer/mailer and requests the zip codes and age-ranges of the families it would like to reach. (These are the only two parameters that a charter school can specify.) The school then pays Vanguard directly, in full. There is no cost to the DOE for charters to use this service. Also, at no point does a charter school ever accessed any kind of personal student information – the arrangement does not allow for it – and there has never been any kind of data breach. Indeed, this structure was set up precisely to ensure that charter schools would not have family information.
Why It Matters
Mailing to parents via Vanguard is the single best and most efficient way for parents to find out about the public charter school options in their neighborhood. The policy, which can also be utilized by district schools to attract students if they choose, was put in place over a decade ago to allow parents to gain the full range of information about local schools. It is used by charters of all kinds including independent schools, replicators and networks. It’s particularly important for new schools, that need to alert parents to their existence, and charter middle schools, some of which start in 5th grade. Since most parents might start their middle school search process in 6th grade to align with DOE admissions, without the ability to utilize Vanguard’s services, they may not otherwise know about public charter options that start a grade earlier.
Critically, informational mailers themselves do not convince parents to send their children to a particular charter school, but rather give parents notice that they have a choice when it comes to which school their child attends. Parents then decide for themselves whether they want to know more about specific schools through open houses or visits. To deny public charter schools access to Vanguard services is ultimately to deny parents information about the educational choices in their communities.
Because schools using Vanguard can only specify two demographic parameters — age of the child and zip code — it is also the best way to ensure that charter schools are marketing to all students, regardless of any disability, native language or academic ability. Every child in the age range within a zip code gets the same information about the school and the same invitation to learn more. In turn, this ultimately helps charter schools increase enrollment of multi-lingual learners and students who are receiving special education services. Denying access to Vanguard will hamper charter schools’ ability to recruit students with special educational needs.
Now, however, the DOE has indicated it could potentially reverse this long held and well-working arrangement allowing charters to utilize Vanguard’s services – and consequently, limit parents’ access to information, while fundamentally undercutting charters’ ability to attract students.
The Facts
- Charter schools’ utilization of Vanguard services comes at no cost to the district or the DOE.
- Contrary to what opponents claim, New York City is not the only locality in the country that operates this way. By law, Massachusetts allows charters schools access to the district directory in order to notify parents of their school options.
- Charters schools do not receive lists of any kind, but rather can only request that mailers be sent, via Vanguard, to families with children within certain age ranges and zip codes. There has never been a data breach, and charters never access any kind of personal student information. Those lists are held by Vanguard on behalf of DOE, which itself spent over $12 million in 2018 on the service.
- The policy is completely legal and has been in place for nearly 12 years.
- If Vanguard services are taken away, in the absence of other ways to alert parents and recruit students in an efficient way, public charter schools could turn to commercial lists to reach parents with school age children. This will ultimately be far more expensive. By closing off access to the highly-targeted population that Vanguard has access to through NYC DOE, schools will be forced to use precious dollars on marketing in highly inefficient ways. Taking actions to divert public dollars from the classroom is bad public policy. In addition, this change will almost certainly hurt small, independent new schools far more than large networks.
- There is no reasonable rationale for this policy change other than to force parents to only enroll their children in district schools (many of which are low performing) and which, understandably are struggling to attract families. Because DOE has proven unable to actually improve many of these struggling schools their only remaining option to increase enrollment is to take any step they can to stop parents from exercising their right to find a public school, including a charter school, that is the best option for their child. This change, of course, puts the bureaucracy and its needs over the needs of parents to get the best education they can for their child.
