By Jacob Kornbluh

June 24, 2015

After locking arms and working as unified force to push for the Education Tax Credit Bill over the past few months, Orthodox Jewish community activists and organizations swallowed on Tuesday some anti-nausea pills and praised Governor Andrew Cuomo for throwing some meaty bones to private schools and Yeshivas.

Gov. Cuomo and statewide legislative leaders announced Tuesday afternoon that they have reached a framework of a deal on key legislative issues. To the dismay of many the tentative deal, pending approval by the Assembly and State Senate, did not include the governor’s initiative to provide $150 million in funding for education tax credits for nonpublic schools.

Instead, Catholic, Jewish and other nonpublic schools got an unprecedented influx of $250 million of state money to pay up for owed money on mandated reimbursement services.

“Nonpublic schools are important because they manage about 400,000 students in this state,” Cuomo told reporters at a press conference in Albany. “Everybody knows that you have schools that are closing, parochial schools that are closing. If we allow those schools to continue to close and those students start moving over to the public school system, you will place an impossible burden on the public school system. So managing both is very important, both for their individual sake as well as the collective sake.”

Click here to read the rest of the article in JP Updates.