Photo by: Upstate NYer

The headquarters of the New York State Education Department in Albany.

A proposed charter school favoring a combination of classroom learning and virtual instruction, and having ties to a for-profit company with links to a top state education official, has abandoned its push to win state approval this year, City Limits has learned.

The New York Flex Charter School was one of 16 proposed schools selected out of a wider pool of applicants to submit a final charter application to the New York State Education Department.

But the New York City Department of Education announced yesterday that an October 18th hearing on the proposal had been cancelled. The State Education Department now says NY Flex did not submit its final application on time.

A spokesman for the proposed school, Roberto Gutierrez, says the committee backing the proposal “agreed to defer its application to NYSED and resubmit it in the next application cycle.”

“Unfortunately, we did not complete the application and therefore could not submit it in time,” Gutierrez adds in an emailed statement. “We will continue refinement of our application for the NYSED 2012 [request for proposals] cycle. … Our founding group, community leaders and parents are committed to opening a highly innovative, blended-learning charter high school in New York City.”

City Limits reported last week on the unclear nature of NY Flex’s relationship to K12 Classroom LLC, a publicly traded firm that provides curriculum, and the uncertainties around what process would govern the school’s charter application given that Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch is married to the brother of K12’s chairman.