The stage was set for the candidates’ forum. Andrew Baumann, one of nine candidates on the ballot for a school parent council in southwest Queens, was the first person to arrive.
Andrew Baumann, with his son Anthony on a playground in Queens, is running for the parent council in his children’s school district.
And he was alone.
“Not a single person,” Mr. Baumann said disgustedly of the recent nonevent in Community School District 27. “One candidate showed up. Me.”
Elections begin on Monday for the 34 parent councils that replaced New York City’s community school boards when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg won control of the school system in 2002.
The councils are intended to give parents a voice in running the schools, and to be even more representative of their interests than the old school boards, which were often criticized as rife with political patronage and corruption.
But with parents fuming that the councils have no real authority, no power to institute policy and no influence with the Department of Education, the elections, which run through May 8, have been foreshadowed by skimpy attendance at candidate forums. And in some cases, there is a distinct lack of candidates to run for vacant seats.
While there are nine elected seats on each council, in at least two districts only four or five candidates are on the ballot. (Two additional members of each council are appointed by the borough president.)
So few parents wanted to run that the deadline to become a candidate was extended this year. Two weeks ago, the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council — a citywide parent group separate from the district councils — urged a boycott of the vote until the Department of Education “modifies the present election process” to do things like better inform candidates.
Unlike the old school board elections, open to all registered voters, current state law restricts this election so that only the top three officers of each school’s parent association vote for council members. Parents serving on the district councils are ineligible to be officers in the parent associations of their own schools.
Many parents who have been elected to the councils say they feel out of the loop, disrespected by an education department that, they say, decides first and asks later.
And several council presidents said they were frustrated by a perceived lack of support from school principals, many of whom do not even know who their council members are.
“The principals feel they don’t have to deal with the education councils,” said James Dandridge, the council president of District 18 in Brooklyn. “It’s like: ‘Who are you? You can’t hire or fire me. You have no pull.’ ”
The Department of Education says that it is trying to improve the councils, and has scheduled a meeting for May 22 between Chancellor Joel I. Klein and the council presidents. It also hopes to increase voter turnout in the coming election.
“There clearly is more work to be done,” said Tom Huser, the director of the councils at the Department of Education. “There definitely is some sense out there that we need to do a better job of bringing the parents into the fold and reaching out to them as we plan programs and make policy for the department.”
But in a sign of how useless even the most active parents consider the councils, some districts with long legacies of heavily involved parents have shown the least interest in the coming elections.
In District 2, covering the East Side and much of Lower Manhattan, only two people attended a recent candidates’ forum, said Michael Propper, the district’s council president.
“By and large, parents don’t even know the council exists,” Mr. Propper said, adding that he would not be running for another term this year.
Rob Caloras, the council president in District 26 in northeast Queens, a district known for its excellent schools and high levels of activism by parents, said that only five people were running for the parent council.
“It’s kind of sad,” Mr. Caloras said. “We’ve lost people who were on the council. They went back to the PTA because they feel it’s much more important to be active in their children’s schools than waste their time here.”
According to David Cantor, a spokesman for the Education Department, the first parent council election in 2004 attracted roughly 1,200 parents who signed up to run. In 2005, more than 1,000 parents signed up; this year, there are 744 candidates.
In several districts, the list of candidates is unusually long. District 17 in Brooklyn has 67 parents on the ballot; District 7 in the South Bronx has 44 candidates; District 22 in Brooklyn has 34.
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