By failing to provide our students with timely and fair access to public space, you are denying opportunity to New York City’s highest need children.

This quote is from a letter to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio from what the Daily News called the city’s “biggest charter school networks under an umbrella group called the Coalition for Education Equality.” The Coalition claims that the NYC Department of Education is allowing 150,000 seats in city schools to remain empty, despite state law that requires traditional district buildings to either offer space to charters of pay the costs for charter facilities.

The de Blasio Administration’s refusal to oversee co-locations will cost city taxpayers $40 million in fiscal year 2017.
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One of the signatories of the letter is Success Academy founder Eva Moskowitz, who currently runs 34 charter schools that enroll 11,000 students in four of the five boroughs of New York City. She plans to add 60 more schools within the next 10 years and, according to the Daily News, will “hire 500 employees in 2016 just to keep up with her network’s expansion.”

De Blasio’s approach to co-location is diametrically opposed to the Bloomberg Administration’s openness  to sharing underused or empty facility space with independent charter schools.