“It is a fact that city schools are overcrowded which is one of the reasons why they are failing. The city would have to construct new buildings to be able to take in ALL the yeshiva students”
SOME city schools are overcrowded. There is a high school near me that used to have 6,000 students, but today has under 2,000. The city could quickly reopen wings of buildings like this, and rent lots of portable classrooms.
“By law, you cannot use public funding to pay for religious schools in New York. It’s in the State Constitution. “
There was a very serious attempt to change that provision in the NY State Constitution in 1967. A Constitutional Convention, with a Democratic majority (surprising since both houses of the New York legislature were Republican, as was the governor) proposed a package of Constitutional revisions that included the repeal of the obnoxious Blaine Amendment. I have read that a major force behind this was then-Sen. Robert Kennedy, and the Catholic Church went all out for them. But Gov. Rockefeller only offered lukewarm support and most other Republicans actively opposed it. In the end, fewer than 30% of the voters voted for the changes.
Since then, many politicians have dangled false promises of aid to religious schools. What is needed is a full scale effort to get rid of the Blaine Amendment — and to prepare voters for the higher taxes that would be needed to support religious schools. The latter will be very difficult as property taxes in the suburbs already approach confiscatory levels.
“one way they solved the problem was to have 2 shifts of the school day – I think it was like 7-12 and 12-5?”
This was done in Maryland when I was growing up. I avoided the double shifts but my brother drew the second shift.