City Hall dropped a ball and 150,000 school kids may get stranded

Credit the Legislature’s steady eroding of mayoral control, a union’s quest to protect outrageous perks and disarray at City Hall for a standoff that threatens to strand 150,000 city kids by week’s end.

The proximate cause: Amalgamated Transportation Union 1181’s demand for employee-protection rules that violate state law.

The union has convinced enough members of the Panel for Educational Policy, which oversees the city Department of Education, to refuse to renew yellow-bus contracts for the normal five years until they mandate illegal and costly “seniority privilege” rules.

The PEP instead has voted month-by-month temporary contracts since June, in hopes the Legislature will pass a state law to legalize such rules (though it has refused for more than a decade) — and City Hall’s been