Chalkbeat

NYC paraprofessionals’ $10,000 pay bump becomes law as City Hall vows a legal challenge

2026-08-19T19:41:35+00:00

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A bill guaranteeing paraprofessionals a one-time $10,000 pay bump became law automatically on Wednesday after Mayor Zohran Mamdani declined to sign or veto it.

But within hours, City Hall announced plans to file a legal challenge, arguing the legislation improperly sidesteps the collective bargaining process.

The confrontation puts Mamdani in an awkward position because he supported similar legislation to boost paraprofessionals’ pay during his campaign, which focused on affordability issues. At the same time, allowing the legislation to stand could weaken City Hall’s power to manage labor costs if other unions began clamoring for legislation mandating pay raises.

Paraprofessionals, school aides who typically support students with disabilities, are among the lowest-paid employees of the city’s public school system with starting annual salaries of roughly $33,000. The $10,000 pay bump — known as the “respect” check — passed without a single dissenting vote in City Council last month.

Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, vowed an “all-out war” if the mayor tried to derail the bill and has argued it is consistent with state law.

“We are prepared to engage in a legal fight for the RESPECT check and the paraprofessionals who keep our schools running,” union officials wrote in an email to members on Wednesday.

City Hall spokesperson Matt Rauschenbach acknowledged that paraprofessionals are “indispensable” and “they have not been fairly compensated for their essential work.”

But Rauschenbach said in a statement that legislation sets a “dangerous precedent” and allows “politicians to bypass workers and their unions and dictate the terms of employment themselves.” He added: “The City is filing a lawsuit to protect the right of every union to negotiate on behalf of its members.”

City lawmakers swiftly criticized the administration’s lawsuit against the council.

“The Respect Check passed the Council by a vote of 49 to 0 because members across every borough and every political perspective agreed these workers deserve better,” Eric Dinowitz, chair of the council’s education committee, said in a statement. “Rather than build on this consensus, the administration has chosen to sue the body fighting for our paraprofessionals.”

City Council estimates the total cost of the $10,000 payments, issued in four installments between January and August 2027, will be about $325 million. Roughly 25,000 paraprofessionals are eligible in addition to substitute paraprofessionals, whose pay bumps will be prorated based on the number of days they work.

The union argues the pay increases are essential to begin addressing a shortage of roughly 1,600 paraprofessionals. Those vacancies can have severe consequences for students with disabilities, some of whom are not able to ride school buses without an aide.

The legislation has strong support from many paraprofessionals who say they deserve wages that reflect their importance to the school system and must work second or third jobs to make ends meet.

Undrea Polite, who has worked as a paraprofessional for 30 years, said she was disappointed that the city is fighting the pay bumps in court. She said she planned to use the money to help equip her sister’s house with a ramp so her elderly mother could get in and out more easily.

“I am so sad that the city is choosing to fight us — and fight some of the most underpaid, dedicated workers that they have,” she said.

Yet others argue the one-time payments aren’t a long-term fix and are frustrated the pay bumps won’t count toward their pensions.

“I’m all for getting more money but this does not solve the problem,” said Marie Wausnock, a union executive board member who co-founded a slate called Fix Para Pay, which largely opposes Mulgrew’s Unity Caucus. “The paras are pawns in this political game.”

Alex Zimmerman is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

NYC is acting faster on special education legal orders but still misses most deadlines

2026-08-10T19:20:52+00:00

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New York City has long failed to quickly provide special education services even after families won legal orders for them, generating more than two decades of litigation.

Three years ago, city officials embraced a federal court order requiring dozens of reforms to more swiftly provide services like speech therapy, tutoring, or tuition payments for students who can’t be properly served in public schools. But a key question has been surprisingly difficult to answer: Is the city actually providing services to students with disabilities more quickly?

New data from independent auditors offers good news and bad news: More families are getting services and other payments within court-mandated deadlines — but the Education Department still blows past the legal timeframes in the vast majority of cases.

“There has been some improvement,” said Rebecca Shore, the litigation director at Advocates for Children, which brought a class action lawsuit in 2003 that sparked additional court oversight. At the same time, she said, the city is “nowhere near” full compliance.

When families believe they aren’t getting the right special education services they can file a legal complaint against the city that is adjudicated by an administrative judge, known as an impartial hearing officer. Caregivers were on track to file under 16,000 cases last school year, officials said at a City Council hearing in June. When families prevail, the Education Department typically must comply with the order within 35 days, the deadline established in a 2007 legal settlement, unless a hearing officer offers a different timeline.

Orders for services like speech therapy, counseling, and transportation were implemented on time in just over 36% of cases according to a recent audit that focused on cases with deadlines in January. That’s up from a compliance rate of 7.2% during the first months of 2023, just before a Manhattan federal judge ordered the city to make a series of reforms to speed up the process.

The Education Department provided on time payments — which can offer funding for private school tuition, outside evaluations, and tutoring — in just under 13% of cases in January. That represents a jump from early 2023, when orders were implemented on time in just 4.1% of cases. (The regular quarterly audits are running roughly two years behind; the auditor conducted a narrower one-month review of cases with deadlines in January.)

“We have made substantial progress by improving core processes, increasing staffing capacity, and advancing critical technology upgrades, all of which support a stronger and more responsive system,” Education Department spokesperson Onika Richards wrote in an email.

She added that the city remains “committed to meeting our obligations” but did not respond to a question about whether the city plans to reach full compliance. In some cases, officials contend that delays stem from families or their advocates not submitting paperwork on time.

Delays continue in most cases

Still, many families continue to experience delays after receiving a favorable ruling from a hearing officer, according to caregivers and their legal advocates.

Nilda Ferrer, a Bronx mom, said she had to wait for the Education Department to line up transportation for her teenage daughter, who has autism and anxiety and struggled with claustrophobia. Her bus ride to a private school in New Jersey, which she attends at no cost because there isn’t an appropriate public school for her, sometimes stretched roughly two hours, Ferrer said.

Bronx mom Nilda Ferrer and her 17-year-old daughter, Nilda.

After unsuccessfully lobbying for the city to find a more manageable transportation option, she filed a legal complaint seeking a taxi service with help from a lawyer at Legal Services NYC. She was thrilled when the family won the case last December.

“I thought that that would be the end of it,” said Ferrer, who works as a home health aide. Instead, it took weeks for the city to implement the service in response to the order. Her daughter wound up missing school as a result, compounding existing struggles with school refusal. (Citing privacy concerns, city Education Department officials declined to comment on the case.)

The family will likely have to file another legal complaint this coming school year, as the city did not include the taxi service on her daughter’s special education learning plan. “Now we have to fight it all over again,” Ferrer said. “It doesn’t make sense to me because her situation is not changing.”

NYC has yet to complete 21 court-ordered reforms

It remains to be seen whether the city will continue making progress on implementing special education orders more quickly.

Officials have been slow to comply with the 2023 order requiring the city to modernize its special education implementation system, after a court-appointed special master found it relied on antiquated technology and manual data entry.

City officials have yet to complete 21 of the 51 reforms required under the 2023 federal court order, according to a special master report released last month, including a technology overhaul of a case management system that missed its March launch date and does not currently have a timeline for completion.

David Irwin of Thru Consulting LLC, the court-appointed special master, credited the city with hiring staff, committing resources, and making some technological progress, including launching a customer service portal for families and their attorneys that offers case information.

“The leadership in DOE is very engaged in this,” Irwin said, noting that he meets with Chancellor Kamar Samuels every month.

Still, city officials are simultaneously trying to revise some of the requirements that stretch back to a 2007 court settlement, arguing the terms of that agreement are outdated.

The Education Department is pushing to loosen the 35-day legal window, according to a recent court filing. They want to exclude certain private school cases from the court settlement’s requirements, including timelines and auditing rules. And they are pushing to scale back the independent audits that measure their performance, such as assessing only a sample of cases for timeliness, in part because the audits are expensive and delayed. The auditing firm cost the city $6.6 million in 2025 alone.

Lawyers representing families, including Shore of Advocates for Children, criticized those proposals in a court filing.

“Rather than focusing on improving its implementation rates,” the lawyers wrote, “the DOE is asking this Court for shortcuts.”

Alex Zimmerman is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

NYC revamps how schools handle school avoidance under legal agreement

2026-08-03T12:00:00+00:00

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New York City’s Education Department is changing how it responds to students who are chronically absent due to school avoidance, according to an agreement officials signed last week with the legal team that brought a class action lawsuit over the issue.

School avoidance, or school refusal as it’s sometimes called, is when students miss large stretches of school because of social or emotional disabilities, such as severe anxiety or depression.

The lawsuit, filed in October 2024 on behalf of four students with disabilities who stopped regularly attending school, claimed the nation’s largest school system had no policy or procedures to ensure students received the “free appropriate public education” they were entitled to under federal law.

The city spent more than a year hashing out an agreement with attorneys from the Legal Aid Society and Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. The agreement signed Friday creates systemwide guidance and support, including a new mandate that every school across the five boroughs designate a school avoidance liaison.

The shift involves “amending policy, doubling down on training, and creating awareness,” said Flavia Puello-Perdomo, deputy chancellor for family partnership and community support.

“If we’re able to intervene earlier and address the needs of students and really get to the root cause of why students are not coming to school, then we are going to be able to address chronic absenteeism much better,” Puello-Perdomo said. “What is affecting that student from coming in? Is this related to anxiety? Is this related to depression? Is this … simply refusing to come to school because oftentimes not coming to school is, as we know, signs that kids are struggling.”

The Education Department began working on the agreement with the lawyers before a judge ultimately dismissed the lawsuit, believing the claims for each plaintiff could be handled through individual due process hearings. The lawyers, however, planned to appeal because they were challenging a lack of a systemic policy. But they continued working with the department instead, seeing the city was approaching it in “good faith,” attorneys said.

Building systemwide consistency and intervening earlier

Researchers estimate between 1% and 15% of children exhibit school refusal. Parents and educators believe the problem was exacerbated after the pandemic forced schools to shift to remote learning. Education Department officials said they don’t collect specific data on how many chronically absent students are avoiding school because of social or emotional issues. Overall, roughly 33% of city students were chronically absent in the 2024-25 school year, and officials hope the shift in approach will help address school-avoidant students before their absences pile up.

“The moment that we see that student attendance is dipping down, or that students are showing any of these types of behaviors, then we can intervene earlier and ensure that students are remaining engaged with school,” Puello-Perdomo said.

When students don’t show up to class, they often fall behind academically, which can make returning to school harder. Without official guidance on how to respond to students struggling with school refusal, the city’s nearly 1,600 schools have responded unevenly, Chalkbeat previously reported. While some schools have developed strong partnerships with families to create plans that gradually bring children back to campus, others have blamed parents for their children’s attendance problems and refused to help students who weren’t in the building, several families told Chalkbeat.

Under the agreement, schools must designate a school avoidance liaison — a teacher, school administrator, or other pedagogue — by Oct. 31 each year and provide that staffer with annual two-hour training on behaviors that lead to school refusal. The liaisons, or other staff at the school, must provide families information about mental health programs and options such as special education evaluations or reevaluations.

The agreement requires the Education Department to create training materials for district and school staff, including liaisons, by Jan. 1, 2027. The materials must include guidance on talking with parents about school avoidance behaviors and resources like sample plans for bringing students back into the building gradually.

Schools should not expect students exhibiting school avoidance behavior to immediately have perfect attendance, Puello-Perdomo said. Schools instead will have to provide individualized plans to reintegrate the student, working closely with their families.

Experts say, for example, a student might first just enter the school lobby, then spend a morning with the guidance counselor before attending a favorite class. The student could gradually build toward a fuller return, with accommodations for easing back into class and catching up on missed work.

The goal, Puello-Perdomo said, is to “make it so that they can also experience a level of success.”

The Education Department also will post resources on its website to help parents address school avoidance behaviors.

Schools shift from blaming parents to addressing root causes

Susan Horwitz, director of the Legal Aid Society’s Education Law Project who worked on the class action suit, said the agreement will help schools look more closely at the reason kids aren’t showing up and shift the conversation from “What’s wrong with this parent? Why can’t they drag their kid into school?” to “Why is this happening?”

Most importantly, she added, “There will be consistency between schools in how they address school avoidance.”

The agreement tackles another major issue: Often, when students refuse to attend class, their schools say they can’t evaluate them for special education support since the child is not on campus. Now, schools will consider accommodating students at an Education Department-approved location closer to their home or approving an independent evaluation.

“So many times we hear from parents that when they say, ‘I can’t get my kid to go to school, she won’t get out of bed,’” Horwitz said. “The school says, ‘Well, we can’t do any evaluations because your kid’s not here.”

Jeffrey Metzler, a litigation partner and co-leader of Pillsbury’s education group, praised the Education Department for an agreement that is not only in the “the best interests of the kids, but that’s something that’s actually implementable.”

“I don’t think it’s realistic to expect even with training for every school liaison officer to become an expert in all of the potentially complicated issues that could result in school avoidance,” Metzler said. “But they know enough, and they’ll have the resources to escalate to people who do have that expertise.”

The Education Department must report to the legal team by July 31 whether each school in the system has designated a liaison and whether each liaison has completed the training.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Council approves $10k perk for public school paraprofessionals

2026-07-16T21:26:51+00:00

This story was originally published on July 16 by The City Reporter. Sign up here to get the latest stories from The City Reporter delivered to you each morning.

The City Council voted unanimously to approve a one-time $10,000 payment to most of the public school paraprofessionals on Thursday, an effort to boost retention and recruitment for the badly-needed – but low-paying – jobs with students.

But Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who could try to stop the bill, said it is in “direct violation” of state labor law.

The bill was sponsored by nearly every member of the Council, and passed 49 to 0, with two members absent.

$244 million price tag

“This is a mandate from the entire city of New York. This is a mandate because we heard the numbers — $32,000 starting salary, in the most expensive city in the world,” Councilmember Carmen de la Rosa, the bill’s lead sponsor, said at a press conference earlier in the day.

“We know that we are in the throes of an affordability crisis, the way we can quell some of the issues of poverty is by putting money directly into people’s pockets,” De La Rosa said. “And this is what this bill does.”

The “Respect” check, as it’s called, would give public school paraprofessionals $10,000 in four installments, starting on Jan. 1, 2027, and going through Aug. 1 of the same year. Substitute paraprofessionals would have their money pro-rated based on how many days they worked.

The cost to the city would be around $244 million for payments to an estimated 26,000 paraprofessionals. The starting pay for paras is around $34,000, and rises to a top rate of more than $56,000 within 15 years, according to the United Federation of Teachers.

Labor law conflict?

Mamdani — who, as a candidate, supported an earlier version of the bill — expressed concerns as mayor over any payment made outside collective bargaining while also praising the work of paraprofessionals.

“I have been clear that questions of compensation are best resolved through the collective bargaining process that respects workers and their unions,” he said in a statement after the vote. “However, the Council’s passage of this legislation is in direct violation of the Taylor Law. Our administration is reviewing the final language carefully and working to determine the appropriate next steps.”

The mayor could veto the bill, but given the strong support in the Council they could then vote to override his veto.

United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew said Thursday that the bill was written in a way to not run afoul of the state labor law. The bill, he said, is a last-ditch effort to help his workers.

“We would prefer to do this through collective bargaining, but you need a willing partner on the other side,” Mulgrew said.

Katie Honan covers New York City Hall for The City Reporter and is co-host of the FAQ NYC podcast.

NYC expands high-demand special education programs into preschool for the first time

2026-07-14T17:22:12+00:00

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New York City officials are expanding a slew of the city’s highest-demand special education programs into preschool classrooms for the first time, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced Tuesday.

The expansion this fall is meant to help address the city’s longstanding failure to provide classroom seats to every preschooler with a disability — a legal requirement — even as officials created universal preschool for typically developing 3- and 4-year-olds. Mamdani framed the effort as part of his broader push for universal childcare.

To help close the gap, Mamdani said Tuesday that the city will expand five popular programs that already serve K-12 students with autism and other disabilities as part of a $67.5 million investment included in the city budget. The expansion will add 250 total seats to the Nest, Horizon, AIMS, Path, and ACES programs in 26 schools across 14 of the city’s 32 local districts.

“Universal has to mean exactly that — it has to mean universal,” Mamdani said at a press conference at P.S. 5 Ellen Lurie in Inwood. “Having a child with a disability or a special need should not make families the exception to that rule.”

Eric Adams, Mamdani’s predecessor, promised to provide a seat to every preschool student with a disability. His administration made some progress by opening hundreds more seats. But some students still sat at home without a placement, which can be detrimental to children with disabilities early in their development. A Mamdani spokesperson did not say whether the latest expansion is enough to guarantee a seat for every child next school year.

Mamdani emphasized that the expansion will enable children to attend programs closer to where they live in classrooms that often include typically developing peers. Children have long been forced to travel outside of their neighborhoods to access appropriate special education programs. The city is also hoping to keep more students in the public school system rather than paying for private services when families can’t find appropriate placements.

City officials said many of those programs produce strong academic outcomes for students with disabilities, who tend to post much lower test scores and graduation rates than their typically developing peers.

About 97% of Nest and Horizon students, which serve children with autism, ultimately graduate high school, officials said. Students who attend are more likely to be proficient in reading and math than peers in other programs, officials have previously said. They also tend to have higher attendance rates. At the K-12 level, thousands more students could benefit from those programs than there are available seats, even as city officials have incrementally expanded them.

The announcement represents one of the few education initiatives Mamdani has advanced since taking office, and advocates praised the investment.

“This funding is urgently needed as the city works to ensure that all preschoolers with disabilities get the evaluations, services, and programs that they need,” said Randi Levine, policy director at Advocates for Children, an organization that helps families navigate the special education system.

City officials also pledged to strengthen other support for preschool students with disabilities who often go without the services they’re entitled to even after securing a classroom seat. Only 63% of preschool students with disabilities received all of their mandated related services, including speech and occupational therapy, Education Department officials said at a March budget hearing.

The $67.5 million plan includes hiring hundreds of additional staffers, including teachers, psychologists, social workers, and therapists. Officials said the hires will help reduce wait times for special education evaluations. The Education Department is also expanding a program that places special education teachers in general education preschool classrooms, allowing more students with disabilities to access instruction alongside their typically developing peers.

Here are the 26 schools that will receive new special education programs, including which program they will operate. Education Department officials did not immediately identify specific programs for seven of the schools.

District 2: P.S. 042 Benjamin Altman, Nest
District 5: P.S. 133 Fred R. Moore, Horizon
District 6: P.S. 005 Ellen Lurie, Horizon
District 7: Academy of Exploratory Arts, Nest
District 9: P.S. 028 Mount Hope, Horizon; P.S. 058, AIMS; P.S. 070 Max Schoenfeld, Path; P.S. 063X Author’s Academy, and Lucero Elementary School
District 10: P.S. 310 Marble Hill, AIMS; PS 023 The New Children’s School, Horizon; Rose Hill Pre-K Center
District 11: P.S. 068 Bronx, Horizon; P.S. 111 Seton Falls, AIMS; P.S. 121 Throop
District 12: P.S. 006 West Farms, Horizon; Samara Community School, Nest
District 14: P.S. 147 Isaac Remsen
District 15: P.S. 015 Patrick Daly, ACES; P.S. 024, Horizon; P.S. 958, AIMS
District 20: D20 Pre-K Center
District 21: P.S. 212 Lady Deborah Moody
District 30: P.S. 152 Gwendoline N. Alleyne School, Horizon; P.S. 171 Peter G. Van Alst, AIMS
District 31: P.S. 054 Charles W. Leng, AIMS

Alex Zimmerman is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Can they do that? Council sets vote on $10K perk for paraprofessionals

2026-07-13T20:45:33+00:00

This story was originally published on July 13 by The City Reporter. Sign up here to get the latest stories from The City Reporter delivered to you each morning.

The City Council will vote this week on a bill to boost underpaid paraprofessionals in the city school system with a $10,000 payment that’s separate from their negotiated salary – even though it sparked concerns from the mayor’s office over whether it’s legal.

The bill, which was re-introduced in February by Councilmember Carmen De La Rosa, would approve a “workforce stabilization payment” of $10,000 to thousands of Department of Education paraprofessionals until they reach a contract with a raise that’s greater or equal to that sum. The funds would be doled out over four payments.

The starting pay for paras is around $34,000, and rises to a top rate of more than $56,000 within 15 years, according to the United Federation of Teachers, which represents the workers.

The UFT argues that the low pay makes it hard to recruit the crucial staffers, and that a current paraprofessional vacancy of around 1,600 hurts students with disabilities the most.

But the annual cash infusion could also run afoul of state labor rules, known as the Taylor Law, which says raises and other payments must be negotiated through collective bargaining.

Daniel Pollak, the first deputy commissioner for the Mayor’s Office of Labor Relations, testified during a March hearing that, while the administration supports the bill, they had concerns.

“We have significant legal, practical, and fairness concerns with an approach that would provide a substantial pay increase for these employees through local legislation,” he said.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani supported an earlier version of the bill which proposed the same $10,000 bonus, calling it “critically important.”

“I supported it in the primary and I continue to support it today,” he told The City Reporter before he was elected in the fall. “And the reason I do is that we have an increasing number of vacancies of paraprofessional positions within New York City. Part of it is because we are paying people a wage they cannot afford to live in New York City.”

He dialed back that support as mayor in an interview with The City Reporter in April.

“I think that it’s still something that’s critically important, that those who work for the city can afford to live in the city, I also think we want to look at the process by which we do this to ensure that it’s sustainable and that it’s tenable,” he said. His spokesperson did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Speaker Julie Menin said the payment is needed to boost recruitment and retention for a critical job, and doesn’t violate current labor rules.

“I pushed to address this during the budget process, but the administration failed to make this workforce a priority both in its budget and at the bargaining table,” she said in a statement.

“We can’t sit idly by as our public schools suffer from a workforce retention crisis of paraprofessionals who earn just $32,000 a year,” she said, noting that the city pays more than $1 billion on settlements over students who haven’t received required services — and more paras could help stop that.

“Investing in the workforce that helps deliver mandated services, strengthens school stability, and improves student outcomes is one of the smartest investments we can make,” she said.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew said the payment is to help rectify an emergency situation, not skirt labor laws.

“We’re very protective of the Taylor Law, which is why we made this part of a program and not collective bargaining,” he told The City Reporter.

He thanked the City Council for its work but said the mayor hadn’t done enough to rectify the issue.

“The mayor, throughout his entire campaign and since he’s been in office, has said he wants to fix this problem,” Mulgrew said.

Some paraprofessionals, though, feel the payment isn’t enough and doesn’t address longstanding issues that they say have been ignored by the union.

Marie Wausnock is a paraprofessional on Staten Island who also co-founded Fix Para Pay, a union caucus slate that opposes Mulgrew. Some paras leave for other city jobs that require less training and have better pay, she said.

“How do you give respectable pensions and dignity to paras when you want to give them non-pensionable money?” she said. “Paras are so underpaid. We get crumbs every time.”

P.S. Weekly live: Student reporters reflect on covering NYC Schools

2026-07-01T15:00:00+00:00

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It’s a wrap on P.S. Weekly’s third season, and to cap it off, we have a special live-recorded episode from Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Branch.

This season, P.S. Weekly student reporters investigated some of the biggest issues shaping New York City schools, from school mergers to sports access, teacher diversity to equity in admissions, and more. In this episode, the students behind those stories take the mic to reflect on what they learned, what surprised them, and how their reporting affected their own schools and communities.

Hosted by assistant producers Zana Halili and Katelyn Melville, the conversation features P.S. Weekly reporters Jeremiah Dickerson, Rayleen Laloi, Jasper Mallorca, Zoe George, Ermione Aleah Raymond, Mateo Tang-O’Reilly, and Noa Salas Adam, with reflections from Roberto Bailey.

Together, they discuss what it means to report on schools they know personally, how young journalists can push adults to listen more closely, and why student voices belong at the center of conversations about education.

P.S. Weekly is a collaboration between Chalkbeat and The Bell. It’s available on major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Reach us at PSWeekly@chalkbeat.org. New episodes drop on Thursdays.

P.S. Weekly is made possible by generous support from The Pinkerton Foundation.

Transcript

P.S. Weekly Live Episode

Maria: Hi, P.S. Weekly listeners. My name is Maria Robins-Sommerville, and this season, I had the delight of serving as the senior producer for P.S. Weekly I helped our student producers take their ideas from topic to story, to set up their interviews, and transform the issues they cared about into episodes for all of you.

Maria: The students did an amazing job this season, and I am so proud of them. So if you haven’t listened to all of our episodes yet, I highly encourage you to go back and check them out. Recently, we celebrated their work with a live recorded episode of P.S. Weekly at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Branch.

Maria: The event featured a student-led conversation about pressing issues in the New York City school system, and highlighted original reporting from the high school student journalists behind the P.S. Weekly podcast. It was a chance to listen to our students reflect on their own experiences and share the impact their reporting has had on their own schools and communities.

Maria: So in this episode, we’re bringing you inside P.S. Weekly Live. We hope you enjoy.

Sabrina: Good evening, everyone. Um, thank you so much for being here tonight for P.S. Weekly Live. My name is Sabrina DuQuesnay, and I am the student program manager here at The Bell. So before we get into it tonight, did anybody watch the game last night?

Sabrina: Yeah. Guys, guys,

Sabrina: My word, my blood pressure was through the roof.

Sabrina: I feel like we were down 29, right? And at that point, I’m not gonna lie, I, I was ready to throw in the towel, right? And then Brunson, Brunson came in. Brunson threw it up. And then, like, it was about to miss, but you know what? OG Anunoby swooP.S. in. Knicks won by a point.

Sabrina: The crowd went wild, and it was a great game. It was legendary. And tonight is our finals game, right? Tonight is our championship. Um, and no sports involved, but we are so excited to show you guys what we got planned. So, um, for those of you who are new to our work, The Bell is a nonprofit organization that is building the next generation of journalists and civic leaders.

Sabrina: And we do that through our audio journalism internship programs for New York City public high school students, and through the Youth Journalism Coalition, which brings together students, educators, journalists, and advocates working to expand access to journalism education across the city. And we’re so excited to be here tonight celebrating the work of our P.S. Weekly student reporters.

Sabrina: Tonight is a chance to hear directly from them about their standout reporting and the impact of their work.

Sabrina: And now, I’m gonna pass the mic to our amazing emcees for the evening, Zana and Kaitlyn. Please come up.

Zana: All right. Can y’all hear me? Yes. Amazing. Hello, everyone. My name is Zana. I am currently a senior at NYU, but I’m a proud graduate of Baruch College Campus High School

Katelyn: And I’m Katelyn. I am a rising sophomore at the City College of New York and a proud alum of the Brooklyn Institute for Liberal Arts

Zana: And we were the assistant producers for this season of P.S. Weekly.

Katelyn: All right, guys. So we wanna get to know the audience a little bit, okay? So I’m hoping we have all five boroughs in here, but don’t worry, we’re gonna find out. So if you guys hear your borough, I want you guys to cheer, okay? Okay. All right, let’s start with Manhattan.

Katelyn: All right, all right. Okay, okay. How about the Bronx? All right,

Katelyn: Okay. Okay. All right. Staten Island?

Katelyn: Okay, okay, okay. Brooklyn?

Katelyn: And I’m biased because, you know, it’s where I’m from. We got any Queens in here? There we go. There we go. All right. All right.

Zana: Right. So glad to get to know all of you. But now it’s time for you guys to get to know us a little bit better. So Kaitlyn, how did you get involved with The Bell?

Katelyn: So it was the summer of my junior year, and I started the Summer Youth Podcast Academy.

Katelyn: And after that, it’s been a long journey, and I’m still here. So I did Miseducation, and then I did P.S. Weekly last spring. I reported on teacher turnover, chronic absenteeism, all sorts of things. What about you, Zara?

Zana: Yeah, so I got started with The Bell also in the Summer Youth Podcast Academy the summer before my senior year of high school, which was all the way back in 2022.

Zana: I know, I’m chopped, I’m unk, it’s okay. Um, my episode was about Citibikes.

Zana: Um, and then the summer after I was an assistant on the next cohort of SYPA, and obviously now I’ve been back assistant producing. Um, so we’ve been student journalists. We’ve been mentors for the student journalists. So what has been your favorite part of working with P.S. Weekly, and what’s been the most unique part about it for you?

Katelyn: I think my most favorite part about P.S. Weekly, the program as a whole, is that it gives students the opportunity to be a part of every single process in the journalism industry. You know, we’ve had students who’ve done audio engineering, um, writing, reporting, interviewing. Like, these students, who you guys are gonna hear from, they’ve done it all.

Katelyn: They’ve ... Like, I will not be surprised if we have some future podcast producers, audio engineers, journalists. Like, we got everything here. So that’s me. But what about you, Zana?

Zana: Yeah, I’ve just ... It’s so inspiring getting to work with these students, not to play as you guys too much. But, like, they really are so much more passionate and of the things going on around them than I was when I was their age.

Zana: And getting to be a part of that process and helping them report on the stories that they are passionate about, it’s just ... It’s been very fun, and it’s been very rewarding for me. Yeah.

Katelyn: All right, guys. So now we’re gonna have a little overview of the evening. So here. All right. So first off, we’re gonna have Zana hosting a conversation with half of our student reporters, and then we’re gonna pause for a little trivia.

Katelyn: Then I’ll lead a panel with the other half of our student reporters. Then we’ll have more trivia, and then we’ll open the floor to audience shout-outs, and then our own Q&A. So you guys should see index cards and pens nearby. I want you guys to use those index cards to write down shout-outs for our student reporters, and we’ll get to share them at the end of the session.

Katelyn: Um, after the program, I hope you’ll join us for the reception in the lobby with some light refreshments. It’ll be a chance to congratulate the students, connect with one another, and learn more about The Bell’s work. And if you wanna stay connected, check out the postcard. Please sign up for our newsletter, follow up, share our work, and help us continue creating opportunities for New York City students to tell stories that matter to them. All right. Over to you, Zana.

Zana: All right. Amazing. I’m gonna ask our first four student reporters to come to the stage: Jeremiah, Rayleen, Jasper, and Zoe.

Zana: All right. So before we get into the nitty-gritty of your episodes, I’d love for all of you to just first introduce yourselves. So please state your name, your school, your grade, and as a fun icebreaker, your bodega order. You can learn a lot about a person from their bodega order.

Jeremiah: Okay, so I’ll start. Hi. Hi, everyone. Um, my name is Jeremiah Dickerson. I’m a senior attending Williamsburg Charter High School in Brooklyn, and my favorite bodega order is, like, cream cheese bacon. It’s very affordable. It hits the spot. It keeps you fulfilled. And yeah, that’s my favorite bodega order. I’m super happy to be here today.

Rayleen: Hello, my name is Rayleen Laloi. I go to the Brooklyn Institute for Liberal Arts, and my bodega order, I’d say honey turkey on a roll, lettuce, cheese, yeah.

Jasper: I’m Jasper Mallorca. I go to the High School of Art and Design. My bodega order is probably something simple like chopped cheese, you know.

Zoe: Um, my name is Zoe George. I go to Bard High School Early College Manhattan. I’m a senior, and my bodega order is a chicken cutlet on a roll, um, lettuce, ketchup, cheese.

Zana: Now I’m hungry. Okay. Um, so before we dig a bit deeper into the reporting, I do just wanna say as a little note, please refrain from applause for the duration of the panel. We’ll have a moment at the end for you all to applaud all of them, but just to keep things moving along. If you wanna, like, give a little snap or something when you hear something that you really love, go for it.

Zana: But just generally, please keep the applause to the end. Thank you. Um, so let’s start off with Jeremiah over here. Hey. Um, your episode sheds light on Success Academy, which is the largest charter network in the city, and was a school that you had previously attended. Um, and for your episode, you talked to your friend Sasha, who was also a fellow student, fellow former student at Success.

Zana: So let’s hear a little clip from that episode.

Jeremiah (Clip): And even though Sasha and I both left Success Academy and are happier in our new school, Sasha felt conflicted like me.

Sasha: In certain aspects, I’m grateful for, like, how they’ve made me who I am as a person, but sometimes I be taking a step back and I’m like, “Oof. Babe, that, that, ooh, I’m, I’m a little damaged,” like, um, like sometimes I would talk to my parents and, like, obviously every conversation with your parents, it’s not gonna be a great one, so you know, we’re dis- we had a disagreement, and I kinda just shut down.

Sasha: Like, I stopped talking. I was just looking at them, and it was like, “You’re not gonna say anything?” ‘Cause obviously, like, you know how we’re talking right now. I’m a very verbal person. If something’s wrong with me, I’m gonna tell you. So I’m just sitting there, and I’m just, like, not saying anything, and they’re like, “Are you okay?”

Sasha: Like, “You’re not gonna say anything? You don’t agree, disagree?” I’m just like, “I don’t know. That’s...” And I was just shutting down. And looking back on it, it definitely is like I, I had to deal with that from Success. When you got in trouble at Success or you’re trying to talk to a teacher to change a grade or why you were late to class, it’s never a conversation.

Sasha: It’s a monologue. They’re talking at you. They’re not talking with you. So I feel like that aspect of it, it definitely affected me. I feel like there’s obviously certain aspects of Success Academy where their intensity of certain things, it helps, but also it definitely did take away from my childhood and actually, like, becoming my own person naturally.

Zana: Tough to hear.

Zana: Um, obviously Success Academy has a very large presence in our city. People have very strong opinions about them, whether they are pro or against. And I know as a former student, you definitely had your own, um, strong opinions on the network, so-

Jeremiah: Absolutely.

Zana: Yeah. Um, what did you learn from speaking in depth with someone who had their own success story that was maybe a little different to your own?

Jeremiah: Um, I felt like I didn’t just learn from it, I also felt like it was very inspiring to me, because for a long time as a prior Success Academy student, I felt like kind of like ashamed of my past at Success Academy because even though Success Academy is popular in the education world, it’s not really the same when you’re speaking to your peers.

Jeremiah: Like, when you speak to your peers like, “Hey, I went to Success Academy,” it’s kind of like you’re coming from a horror story, you know? So, um, I kind of learned that my experience at Success isn’t just like something that I experienced alone, that other people, regardless of what campus they’ve gone to, have experienced similar things to me.

Jeremiah: And it also like allowed me to feel more comfortable speaking to my friends about it openly, because it’s something that other people have went through besides myself.

Zana: Yeah. And so what has the response been towards your episode?

Jeremiah: The response I can say has been like very interactive, like especially with the Chalkbeat post. There’s so much debates. Like, I feel like that’s the most inspiring thing, because I feel like especially as a journalist, your job is to get the news to people, and then also for people to make decisions about the news that you’re giving them. So like just seeing people have debates about, “Hey, like I’m a Success parent. I didn’t quite have this experience, but you know, this person did, this person didn’t,” I feel like it’s just like it’s reached a broader audience that really allowed them to think more deeper about their children’s connection as long- along with their own as well. But also I’ll say as Success Academy is expanding in Florida, it’s also served as a basis for people to really like taste what Success Academy can be like for students.

Jeremiah: So it hasn’t been something groundbreaking, but it’s also helping on that front as well outside of the city.

Zana: Yeah, it’s definitely more relevant than it has been in a really long time. Yeah. Yeah. Um, amazing. So now we’re gonna move over onto Rayleen.

Zana: Now, your episode talked about school mergers and your own experience with mergers when your school, the Brooklyn Institute for Liberal Arts, merged with the School of Human Rights.

Zana: And you talked to Osei Alfred, a student who had attended the School of, um, Human Rights before it became a part of BILA. So let’s hear a clip from that episode.

Rayleen (clip): What do you think was lost in the merging of SHR and BILA?

Osei: Honestly, that feeling of like, oh, this is my family. That feeling’s gone. I feel like a lot of teachers do try, especially now, to kind of be a lot more human or show that they are kind of a lot more human. But a lot of kids don’t really see it as that. Like, even if you were a quiet student back in SHR, you would still feel like family ‘cause, like, I knew a kid there. They said, like maybe what? Six words the entire semester, and I knew more about them than I know about half the students in BILA. Like, they said about six words, but Ms. Babb and the rest of the teachers, I can’t remember their name for the life of me for some reason, but they all made sure to interact with that student.

Osei: I know I’ve seen it. They all made sure to interact. “Good morning. How are you? How’s your mom?” You know, stuff like that. I don’t see that at BILA. I don’t see, “Hey, how’s your family?” But I always got asked, “How is your mom doing? How’s your sister doing?” at SHR.

Zana: Yeah. So our current schools chancellor, Samuels, has been a strong supporter of school mergers, and he has been for a very long time. And you actually had the opportunity to interview him earlier this semester on the topic, and he emphasized that importance of minimizing the feeling of loss when schools are merged.

Zana: And obviously, you asked Osei in this clip about what he felt like was lost from SHR, but I wanna throw that question back to you. Do you feel like BILA lost anything when SHR merged with them? And how have students adapted to this change?

Rayleen: Personally, for me, I don’t feel like I lost much in the merging of BILA. Honestly, I feel like I gained more in a way. I feel like when SHR and BILA merged, at first, honestly my whole sophomore year, I barely got to know any SHR students, so it never felt like we were really combined, or it never really felt like we merged.

Rayleen: But now that I’m in my junior year and I’ve gotten to know more of them, they’re in my classes and things like that, I feel like BILA has shifted away from some of its strictness and has tried to incorporate more of the culture and just tried to incorporate more liveliness into the school that wasn’t there before SHR.

Zana: Yeah. And so how has your school rep- responded to the episode? I heard there was some ninth and 10th graders that might have learned something by listening to your episode.

Rayleen: Yeah, so in my school they’re doing some lessons on podcasting in ninth grade. My teacher, my 10th, my ninth grade teacher, Ms. Nahar, they’re doing a podcasting unit and she played my episode for them. Yeah. Oh. And my 10th grade teacher, Ms. Hudson, she also played my episode for them, and they were confused about SHR because they weren’t there for the merging of SHR and BILA, so they were like, “What’s SHR? What happened? What is the situation that we’re talking about?” So I thought that was interesting because I never really saw it that way as like, “Oh, I’m keeping track of, like, history.”

Rayleen: But I think it’s interesting how I’m just giving them a perspective on something they didn’t even know happened.

Zana: Yeah, it’s almost like you’re keeping SHR alive somehow- Yeah ... through your episode, and that’s exactly what we’re all setting out to do, isn’t it? Um, awesome. Okay, so moving on down to Jasper.

Zana: Uh, your episode talked about the Public Schools Athletic League, which coordinates sports for public schools in the city. Your episode specifically focused on the Access program, which allows students at schools that lack sports teams to play for teams at nearby schools. Um, both you and your interviewee, Noa Moore, who is also a senior at Art and Design, have played on teams for other schools, and you talked about your experiences, so let’s hear a clip.

Jasper (clip): I have fun doing my sport, but like that-- I also wanna like have fun with the, the team. Like- Yeah ... how important do you think it is to like be able to go to practice and be like smiling to see everyone? You know what I mean? ‘Cause don’t you think that makes the sport more fun too? It definitely makes the sport more fun, and especially if you’re-- if everybody’s having fun, it unites people.

Noah: So then you start building those bonds ‘cause you’re sitting there, you’re smiling, you’re laughing with other people, you’re joking with other people, and you really start to form a bond between teammates. ‘Cause once the fun aspect is gone, you really don’t wanna be there anymore. And so then you stop trying ‘cause you’re just like, “I wanna get through practice to go home.”

Zana: So your episode focused a lot on Noah and his experience playing sports at other schools, but I wanna hear a little bit more about your experience as a student athlete, both at Art and Design and at the other school that you played for. So why is having access to sports important to you?

Jasper: I think it’s, like, important just, like, with anything. Like, the idea of having more opportunities for students because, like, when you’re a teen you just wanna try out a lot of things. So I know a lot of kids that wanted to do cross country and, like, they- they’re just getting into it now, and I’m telling them, like, “Maybe you could’ve joined the team.”

Jasper: And they’re like, “Oh, I, I never even, like, knew I could do it.” So it’s kinda just that thing, like, you could really explore new things, like, during your teenage years only if you really have access to it. So with, like, the All Access program, like, for me at least, like, I mean, I... It was kind of the same sport I’d been playing.

Jasper: But there’s a lot of people that at least I know and, like, a lot of teens are just adventurous and, like, they wanna, like, do new things. So, like, if they know about these programs, like, they would do them, and they could just get better at sports and things like that, so.

Zana: Yeah. And I know you and Noa are both very grateful for the program to have access to the sports that you didn’t previously have. But what changes would you like to see within the program or within the PSAL in general?

Jasper: I mean, definitely just, like, promotion because I feel like if they promote this All Access program more, or the Access program, you can get more people from the same school that can come, and, and it wouldn’t feel like you’re going to a new school and having to, like, meet new people and all that stuff.

Jasper: Which, I mean, for me, like, it was kind of fun at first ‘cause it’s like a new, like, a whole new world and stuff. But, like, it’s also fun to have, like, that personal connection to your school. Like, like, if I was running for Art and Design it would probably be better ‘cause, like, I have that personal connection to my school and I’m, like, trying to, like, run the best for all the people there.

Jasper: So if there’s, like, more promotion, like, you know, more people would kinda be, like, on each other’s side. And that’s not to say, like, like, no one’s on each other’s side if you’re going to a new school, but there’s a lot more of a... You see it, like, when you’re going to a new school, like, all of them are running for, like, for me, they’re all running for Lab.

Jasper: And, like, if, if it was at Art and Design, we’re running for Art and Design. But you’re in this, like, weird middle ground where it’s, like, a whole new thing, so it’s just like-

Zana: Yeah. And I think your episode is definitely acting as a sort of promotion the more l- people listen to it. So I think you’re the first step, hopefully, in getting more people into the program.

Zana: Um, now we’re gonna move on, last but not least, to Zoe, whose episode actually came out today, this morning actually. Um, your episode talks about your school’s diversity initiative, and you talked to Jasmine Coombs, who is a Bard alum, who now actually also works at the school as the Director of Equity and Inclusion Programming, whose job it is to create safe spaces for historically underrepresented students on campus.

So let’s listen in

Zoe (Clip): I think it’s pretty selfless that you let 204 be more of a student lounge.

Jasmine: Well, I know how important it is to have a space, again, as a past student, to go and, and, and have your person be there or have a person who you really connect with, your trusted adult on campus, just from experience. So I would never-- Like, I know, I, I say sometimes, like, “It’s too loud,” or like-

Jasmine: “Quiet down,” ‘cause it is my office and I have to get work done. But I, I really do believe in offering a space on, specifically at Basic Manhattan, for my students, my Smart Scholar students, to come to and to really decompress. Um, because I know how stressful it is in those classes. I know how stressful it is to, like, be cold called on a day where you’re just not feeling it, or to not come to class prepared, or to, like, have just finished a test where you thought that you were gonna do well, and then you finish and you were like, “Mm, that didn’t go too well.”

Jasmine: So I know how, how it feels to, like, need a space. I think that the safety, in my eyes, has a person connected to it, and I’m happy to hear that that’s me for you. Like, it can’t just be a space without someone kind of making it intentional, if that makes sense.

Zana: Yeah, so I absolutely love this episode. You and Jasmine just have such a great rapport. Yeah. Um, you guys talk about the importance of safe spaces. What does a safe space look like to you, and what do you think teachers and admin need to know or need to do in order to create one?

Zoe: Um, yeah, I think I got into that in the episode a little bit, um, that a safe space is a place that somebody can go, or multiple people can go that, um, are not only seen but heard.

Zoe: I think seen is the first step, but being heard is the second. And not only just being heard as well, but also being understood and knowing that people can relate to you. Um, I think that it doesn’t necessarily have to be a location, but having a space, like a physical space helps, and having a person attached to it helps a lot more to have someone guide you through that situation or the, um, system in which that you don’t feel safe and need a safe space is, is helpful.

Zoe: I do personally believe that, um, we should be working towards making all safe s- all spaces safe, um, and not needing necessarily a safe space if all of them feel like you can be heard and understood. But that is a very long process that, like, this help, episode helped me understand. So I do think that maybe schools and administrators, um, can kinda like...

Zoe: I hope that this episode resonates with them and can, um, recognize the importance of safe spaces in their schools and know that that’s the first step to making our students feel not only physically safe, but also emotionally and mentally and even intellectually safe as well.

Zana: Yeah. And I also know that you’re very passionate about the idea of third spaces, um, first of all, I would love for you to talk a little bit about what third spaces are and why you think that they’re necessary for young people.

Zoe: Um, yeah, so the saying goes your first space is your home, um, then your second space is your work or your school or whatever, like, um, institution you have to be in, and then your third space is a space that you can go to kinda be authentically you and be yourself or relax or kinda take a load off or just work through whatever you need to.

Zoe: And think the conversation that me and some of the people in this program were having was, sorry, that many times teens are banned or barred from these safe spaces. Like, we referenced, um, like things like the mall and like closing out teens or like after COVID cafes shutting down and there being like spaces for two to six-year-olds and then there being a gap.

Zoe: There’s elementary school spaces, um, but there’s a gap in like s- for students who are teens and how I think that we need to have a reemergence of that in the city. We have a lot... We have a big student population in the city. We have a big teen population in the city, and I think that there’s certain institutions being, d- doing the work to open them again.

Zoe: But again, we constantly face kind of, we are one of the biggest groups that constantly face getting barred when you talk about age, like getting banned from places ‘cause we’re seen as rowdy or rebellious, and I think that many take a certain group of teens and kind of make them the Um, figurehead for the entire population, which shouldn’t be done. Just my personal opinion.

Zana: Yeah. And I mean, it’s a great - conversation to have in a place like this, as we are currently in a library, which is in fact a third space. Um, so now I’m gonna go into just one big question for all of you. You can answer however you’d like. Um, all of your episodes focused on, on an issue within your school or within a school that you had previously attended.

Zana: What message would you like to leave for the teachers or the administrators in the audience tonight about your experiences?

Jeremiah: Um, I’ll keep it short. Like, honestly, just to say, like, administrators and teachers, you should just, like, value the opinions of students more, you know? Because I feel like even with my experience reporting with The Bell on countless other stories, there’s been times where teachers just haven’t been receptive to me, like, saying, “Here, I’m here to report,” or, “I’m here to interview you.”

Jeremiah: But just, like, regardless of, like, what age someone is that they’re interviewing you, it honestly takes a lot of courage and dedication to do so. So all I’m saying is just, like, give the child or whoever’s interviewing you that amount of respect regardless of their age

Zoe: Um, similarly that’s, similar to that I’ll say, like, check your bias at the door. Um, I think that whether that’s your age, your, your race, your gender, your ideas, I think that many kinda shut off towards that type of, um, environment or just that space. And make sure, like talking about my episode, that students feel more safe to communicate and, um, express their ideas

Jasper: Um, I think like the teacher’s goal shouldn’t be like fully to make the students like the best student. I feel like they should kinda go in like, “Oh, I want the student to know like they could really do anything.” And I mean, for me personally, like I think again, the idea like promote these sports teams, like make like the, the teens like feel like they want act- like they could actually do what they want in a way.

Jasper: Like don’t shut them out of certain things and really make sure like the teens could do what they want and have like all these different opportunities. But like even beyond that, like I mean, some episodes are about like AP calc. Like make it like beyond like the math. Like really like, I don’t know, like talk about like real life.

Jasper: Like make the teen feel like connected to the subject and interested and realize it’s like beyond school. It’s like, it’s about making connections, like trying to build out your future and like trying to really just be happy. And I think it’s beyond just academics.

Rayleen: I’d say teachers shouldn’t be afraid to push students out of their boundaries when it comes to being inclusive and diversive, diverse, you know what, yeah, in school. I feel like too many times teachers just allow students to sometimes be too, to themselves and not push them to do things and meet people and interact with people that they maybe wouldn’t before or do things that they wouldn’t before.

Rayleen: I know that, you know, last year, I don’t think I would have ever done this, and my advisor, Ms. Nahar, she just let me know about this program through, you know, texting the Google Classroom and things like that with opportunities. So I feel like teachers just shouldn’t be afraid to try and push students out of the bounds of what they think they can do or what they should do.

Zana: I hope all you teachers in the audience were taking notes. All right, so that is it for our first panel. Can we please get a round of applause?

Zana: We are going to transition into the first trivia moment, whoo., of the night. Um, so this is how it’s going to work. Um, I’m going to pose a question to the audience, and whatever student, student in the audience thinks that they know the answer can stand up. And if you are the first p- person that I see to stand up, I will call on you, and you will have the opportunity to answer the question.

Zana: Um, if you get it right, um, our lovely manager over here, Sabrina... Stand up, Sabrina, so everyone knows you. She- Come find her at the end of the night. This is an opportunity to win fun merch and other prizes for the night. So, all right, are we all ready for the first trivia question? Okay. Early in the season, our students interviewed a really important figure.

Zana: What is the first and last name of the current New York City Schools chancellor?

Katelyn: Yes, you know it.

Zana: Yes, that is correct. For those of you who may not have heard, it is Kamar Samuels. Uh, our second question, New York City’s largest charter school network, Success Academy, recently announced that it is expanding to which state?

Zana: Yes. Okay. All right, so you two please find Sabrina at the end of the event. Awesome. So now we are going to be transitioning into the second panel of the night, so come up, Katelyn.

Katelyn: All right, guys, how are we feeling? Nice to hear it. All right, so now we’re gonna hear from the other half of our student reporters. So Ermione, Mateo, and Noa, can you please come up?

Katelyn: All right, guys. So I want you guys to just go on rapid fire. I want your name, your grade, your school, and then for our little icebreaker question, can you guys tell me your favorite train line?

Ermione: Hi, my name’s Ermione Aleah Raymond. I go to Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice. And this is a hard question, you know, ‘cause numbers, letters. Um, I would say the 2 5 simply because I’ve lived in the Bronx and I now live in Brooklyn, and it’s a easy, direct route.

Mateo: My name is Mateo Tang-O’Reilly. I’m a junior at Central Park East High School. And I would say the A because, like, I take it every day, and then also the 7 ‘cause the views are nice.

Noa: I’m Noa salas Adam. I’m a junior at Stuyvesant High School, and probably the B. I take it the most often.

Katelyn: All right, perfect. Thanks, guys. Well, those are better answers than I would give, ‘cause I’d say the Long Island Railroad, but, you know, whatever. All right, but let’s get to these clips.. So, Ermione, your episode sheds light on the importance of teacher diversity in schools.

Katelyn: You interviewed a college student named Isaiah, who’s part of New York City Men Teach, an initiative that supports men of color on their journey to becoming New York City public school teachers. Let’s listen to a clip.

Ermione (clip): You’re in your first year of college. Yes. You’re in this Men Teach program. Can you walk me through a typical day-to-day in the program?

Isaiah: Yeah. So basically under Men Teach, I have schooling in the morning, of course, and then 1:00 I will go to the school that I’m assigned to for the last hour and a half of, you know, the school day. Then I will transition to the after-school program with, you know, with the school, and I’ll help teach the kids there as well.

Ermione (clip): Hmm. So in a way, you’re both getting the educational background of teaching, but you’re also getting the hands-on experience. What mission do you feel like you’re contributing to by being a part of this Men Teach program?

Isaiah: Paying it forward. You know, they can see a face that looks like them. You know, I would say just giving them like a, a good image, a good positive role model. You know, that’s important to me for them to see that, okay, this guy looks like me. He, he works in the same way that I can work. I could become him in the future. Just to pay it forward so they can see that, oh, they can become me, or they can do something similar to pay it forward.

Katelyn: All right. Perfect. Thank you. So Ermione, a theme I noticed in this clip is the importance of students feeling seen and supported. Through your reporting, did you come away with a different understanding of why having teachers who reflect the background and experiences of their students is so important?

Ermione: No, I didn’t come away with a different understanding. I felt like it reinforced, like, interviewing Isaiah reinforced the same idea in a sense, simply because his program is very similar to what I was trying to find or seek out through my podcast.

Ermione: I was looking for something to help alleviate the, the gap of teacher diversity. And I think that hearing his passion and hearing his story to teaching reinforced the idea that teacher diversity is important, and it reaffirmed my, I guess, desire to continue fighting for this passion.

Katelyn: All right. Perfect. Thank you. And just a quick little follow-up, did you have, like, a personal experience that drove you to report on this story?

Ermione: Yes. Um, so my favorite teacher, love him to death, but he would call me a grade grubber. And I thought, like, grade grubber, negative connotation, and a lot of high-achieving students get that kind of joke o- oftentimes.

Ermione: And it really center- it kind of centered my learning ‘cause senior year you care about your grades, colleges, this, that. Like, it’s a very important time, and you shouldn’t be looked down upon for caring about your grades. But I felt like oftentimes high-achieving students, instead of getting the support they need, they tend to get brushed aside, which is understandable.

Ermione: Our education system, teachers are overworked, but where do we make room for students who actually do care about their learning and wanna further it? So his kind of joke kind of spiraled into, like, the podcast, and me think about how he wa- he is a white teacher, and my school is majority white teachers, and how that differing understanding contributed to me.

Ermione: I’m a Caribbean student. Um, I’m ... I was raised by a single mom, lower income. I meet all the kind of brackets for not succeeding in higher education or education in general, so just understanding how my background and his are different, different, and how that contributes to our different understanding of what learning means to me.

Katelyn: All right. Thank you, Ermione. All right. So Mateo, you interviewed Dash, an AP Calculus teacher from Young Women’s Leadership School of Brooklyn, and a member of Math for America. Your episode talked about the usefulness of AP Calculus and its usefulness beyond standardized testing. Let’s hear a clip.

Mateo (clip): So for students who have no plans to become engineers or any profession that uses advanced math, what do you think the benefits of a calculus class are?

Dash: It’s true that once you get beyond, like, eighth grade Algebra 1 level math, you’re not learning a lot that’s gonna come up in your everyday life, but that’s okay.

Dash: That’s the case for your other classes, too, right? You’re not necessarily doing literary analysis or explaining mitosis or the Seven Years War or whatever. A lot of what we learn in school is not directly applicable to our lives, but it’s still valuable. It’s still part of our shared knowledge. It’s a way of discovering what you want to pursue, right?

Dash: You’re not gonna know what you wanna do as a career until you’ve seen it at least a little bit, and that’s part of why we want to introduce students to all these things. So I think there’s value there. And as I was saying, I think with a lot of this more advanced math, even if you’re not using it in your life, somebody is.

Dash: Like, there are jobs out there that are relying on these things that do affect you in different ways. Whether it’s, yeah, the space program or disease control or finance or whatever else, there are ways that these things get used, and if it does affect you, then I do think it’s worth understanding

Katelyn: Thank you. All right. So I will say I’m a little bit biased being a student who kind of pivoted into, like, STEM because of really great, um, really great teaching from, you know, my teachers and everything like that. So I wanted to explore what Dash was talking about, how most subjects’ curriculums are not also directly real-world applicable. Did speaking to him change your perspective on the way that other subjects are taught as well?

Mateo: Honestly, I would say no. It kind of confirmed what I was already thinking, just because, like, obviously a literary analysis or, like, cellular respiration is not as applicable to our lives than, like, learning how to do your taxes.

Mateo: But I feel like it’s easy, I guess, for me at least, to see, like, how that unfolds in the real world. Like, you can see that it affects our day-to-day. I think for calculus, it was a bit harder, and what he said kind of made me realize how important it is that we know, like, where calculus is applied. Like, in the episode, he talked about, like, calculating income inequalities across countries.

Mateo: Like, I had no idea that was happening with calculus, and it just feels comforting to know that, like, something like calculus doesn’t really seem like you can apply it to your life, does have a use outside of, like, boosting your GPA or, like, appealing to colleges, you know? So I feel like it’s, like, a sense of comfort for me, and I hope other students in the audience or who listen to the episode also share that sense of comfort.

Katelyn: All right, thank you. And a little follow-up because I know your episode received a lot of positive response. I know I showed it to a lot of people. So can you talk about the response that you received from your episode?

Mateo: I feel like it was both expected and unexpected, like the response I got. It was expected because the goal of the episode was to kind of like appeal to other calculus students who may feel like what they’re learning is not really applicable to their lives if they’re not going down like a STEM route, and that was kind of the response I got from students.

Mateo: I think the unexpected part was like how many people came up to me, like students I’d never talked to, like DM’d me or talked to me like in my calc class. And then my history teacher came up to me and she was talking about how like one of her teacher friends from Long Island sent it to her on WhatsApp, and I was like, wow, like Long Island, like that’s like- you know? But yeah.

Katelyn: All right. Thank you, Matteo. All right, so now on to you, Noa. So you spoke to Lucas and Paulette, a mother-son duo who experienced the issue of inadequate school busing and how much it impacts students with disabilities firsthand. Listen to a clip

Noa (clip): Yeah, Lucas, could you tell me about that feeling of being left out when your friends are at school, but you couldn’t be there because of the unreliable busing?

Lucas: Well, let’s just say I just, I didn’t like it when I was left out, and because of that, I felt, well, lonely because I wasn’t there, and it’s, it’s definitely not fair.

Lucas: It’s literally, like, not fair to be left out. I mean, what the heck?

Paullette: It still hurts you now.

Lucas: Mm-hmm.

Paullette: And you’re, you’re 18. It was 10 years ago. So it’s like these are, these are the kind of scars that nobody sees on the outside, and, you know, sometimes I don’t even realize, like, how raw it still is for him, you know, until I hear the anger in his voice, just like I did just now, and hearing him say, “I felt lonely.”

Paullette: Like, no mom ever wants to hear that, you know, from their kid, and- Mm ... and not being able to fix it, so.

Lucas: Yeah. That’s what’s going on with my life with busing, busing problems and stuff. I just really wish I was there back then.

Paullette: Yeah. And I know, I know that also makes you more empathetic to your friends, too.

Paullette: Like, when, when you’re, you, you come home and you tell me that one of your other friends wasn’t able to get to school ‘cause the bus didn’t show up, like, I know that you know how that feels, and you worry about them, and you worry about how they’re feeling. And yeah, it hurts, no matter how old you are.

Paullette: Whether you’re in third grade, in middle school, in high school, it just sucks not being able to, to be part of, you know, everything that’s going on, especially this being your last year of school, too.

Lucas: Yeah.

Katelyn: All right, Noa. So for you, and just like a little anecdote, I got to see like Noa firsthand put this episode together, and I will say that she practiced so much intentionality in the message that she wanted to put through to our listeners. So when you were putting the episode together, what did you hope listeners would understand about disability and accessibility that they might not have understood before hearing Paula and Lucas’s story?

Noa: I think that a lot of the time issues like this where you’re talking about a big system, you know, the school bus not coming, being late, a lot of it is in, like, numbers, which that’s important, right? Even the fact that 43% of the 145,000, um, New York City public school kids who rely on the bus each day, um, have disabilities, that’s important.

Noa: That’s a big number. But I think with this episode, the power was really in hearing a specific story, and so I was so grateful to be able to talk to Paulette and Lucas together, how they kind of build off of each other, and getting both of those perspectives because it really helps you realize, like, these are, this is an issue that impacts someone, so many people every single day.

Noa: I mean, it makes me, like, sad hearing now even, again, Lucas saying that it made him feel lonely to miss the bus, you know, or the bus missed him. But, um, yeah, it just, it really humanizes something that can seem so large. And to think he, in third grade, he missed 56 days of school, I think. And so when you hear that, you’re like, it’s just inc- credible.

Noa: Um, so instead of maybe thinking about a big system and the problems, when you can hear very specifically, like, he’s 18 now, and it still really affects him. I think I just wanted listeners to be able to hear some- something like that ‘cause I didn’t really realize how big of an issue that unreliable busing was for students with disabilities until I worked on this episode.

Katelyn: Yeah. And I just want to follow up, kind of like talking about how, you know, you weren’t aware of this issue. You know, very briefly, if you can kind of like take me through how you settled on this, um, issue for your episode and that kind of light bulb moment that you had.

Noa: Yeah. It was kind of a, it was an interesting process because I met a group of parents of students with disabilities who are also advocates at an event, and then I realized, like, this is what I wanna report on.

Noa: But I wasn’t sure. I knew it can so easily just be like a topic, so I knew that I needed an angle. Um, and I was originally thinking maybe, you know, getting into, um, more advanced classes maybe with an IEP, um, which is in, which, you know, would have been a great topic as well. But then I spoke to one, I did so many pre-interviews, and, um, I learned about busing and how that was a big issue that nobody really seems to talk about.

Noa: And so I interviewed many different angles and then was connected with, um, Paulette and Lucas. And being able to talk to them as a mother and son, I think that was probably the most powerful thing, and realizing that I needed something really specific to really show how important the issue was. Perfect.

Noa: Thank you, Noa.

Katelyn: All right, guys. So as you can see, we do have an empty chair right here. So unfortunately Roberto couldn’t make it here today, but his clip comes from his interviewee, Kassidy Khuu, a junior at Hunter College High School and an organizer of Hunter College High School for Equity, a student-run group created in order to address the equity issues in admissions at Hunter.

Katelyn: Roberto’s episode takes on a unique perspective, being that he himself is a student at Hunter and also a part of Hunter High School College for Equity. Um, he has been since his elementary education, and yet still finds the equity issues glaringly obvious among the school culture. Let’s hear a clip

Roberto (clip): So if you could leave listeners with one message about equitable admissions processes, like what you want them to kind of take away from this, what would that be?

Kassidy: I think my message would be an action, and I think the action should just be talk to people in your life about this issue. Talk to how, especially if you’re invested in equity in other ways in your adult life, if you’re an adult listener, talk to people about how education is such an instrumental part of that.

Kassidy: And if you’re a high schooler, talk to the people in your school about what they think about the structure of your school and the structure of how they got to that school, what the system is in New York City as they’ve moved through it, because I feel like it can definitely open exciting conversations on how we can change the situation we have right now and how everyone is connected to this movement.

Katelyn: And just to speak a little bit about his episode and things that, you know, I’ve heard just from, you know, seeing him work and just, you know, being his friend as well, um, I think it’s very brave of him to kind of explore this issue at a school that he already goes to. You know, he had spoke to me about how administration definitely pushed back on him.

Katelyn: Even his own friends and classmates pushed back on him, you know, and he felt a lot... He felt like very, like stigmatized, you know, for speaking out about this, you know. Being a very high-- like being a student in such a prestigious and high achieving high school, you know, he was talking about how students are expected to kind of just like fall in line and go along with everything that’s happening and kind of see themselves as being the elites.

Katelyn: But he was like, “That’s not necessarily true.” You know, you can’t be a New York City high, high school. You know, when New York City is the melting pot of the United States, you can’t be an equitable and responsible high school, you know, and preach that you have the best students in the entire, in the entire city when you don’t have an equitable amount of Black and Brown students and students with disabilities and, you know, minorities.

Katelyn: So he also shared with me a quick reflection. So he says, “I think my biggest reflection is about using journalism to make an impact. A ton of people in the school community listened and talked about it. Students came up to me saying they never knew this about Hunter High School, and overall, I think it mean- meaningfully drove conversations about equity at Hunter.”

Katelyn: All right, guys. So just to wrap up, I’m going to pose a question for all of you, and I’d love to hear your responses. So across all three of your episodes, I noticed a very common thread. Students learn best when they feel supported, whether that’s through representation, meaningful learning experiences, or accessible systems.

Katelyn: Did reporting on these stories change your understanding of what schools owe students beyond academics?

Noa: I can start. I think that, you know, the care and education that kids get at school is so important, but also making sure that kids can get to school is even, you know, is really important. And something that I learned is that, um, former Comptroller B- Brad Lander released an audit last year, um, basically assessing the situation of, um, busing and the Office of Pupil Transportation, and he found that many issues aren’t resolved.

Noa: So I think that ... Well, he called for the new position of a bus czar, which is some- a position that still has not been filled. And so I think that that is something that the Department of Education owes to its students to make sure that, um, the busing system is kept accountable. Thank you.

Mateo: I can go. Um, I think for me it would be, I think the school system also owes us students... Actually, I don’t know how to phrase this. I’m so sorry. Like, the why behind the learning. Like, I think we shouldn’t just be learning, like, the facts and being able to, like, cram for these tests. Like, I think there should be a clear line of reasoning of why we are learning what we’re learning, because I think it just makes it, like, mean a lot more to us.

Mateo: Like, it- I feel like it makes the classroom feel like a completely different place, and I’ve felt the difference between, like, a class where I see where what I’m learning, like, how it applies to the real world. And, like, before, you know, I did this episode, like, on the other hand, calculus, where I felt like it didn’t apply at all.

Mateo: And I think, like, also just after the episode came out, like, I’ve felt that difference, you know? So I feel like they also owe us that

Ermione: Um, I feel like education owes us two things. One, more teachers of color, a more diverse teaching staff, but also beyond that, I know that there is a huge deficit in teachers of color in the United States. I think that we need to, as, as teachers, um, I think teachers need to respect the backgrounds of their students and where they come from.

Ermione: Oftentimes, our backgrounds are what shapes us, and our experiences are what shapes us. And if you’re not a teacher who comes from my background, the least you could do is, like, respect my culture and my background, like my why for why I’m in the classroom. We each have our own whys. But I think also, like, with my interview guest, like, his passion was so clear in, like, why he wanted to become a teacher.

Ermione: I think investing in more people who have that passion, who have that desire, because at the end of the day, you can’t just put someone in a classroom who doesn’t have the desire or doesn’t have the care. Ultimately, that results in students of color feeling less supported. So honestly, more teachers of color, but if we can’t, or if that goal is more so for the future, inc- having workshops where teachers could learn about different teachers’ backgrounds and gain that deeper personal connection to better the teaching field.

Katelyn: All right, guys. Thank you so much. It was such a pleasure speaking with you guys. You guys can stand up. Can we get a round of applause?

Katelyn: All right, guys. So now we’re gonna move on to the second segment of our trivia. So just to reinforce what Zana said, we are only taking answers from students, so you guys get ready.

Katelyn: So for this question, the first three students to stand up will have a chance at answering this, okay? So, New York City public school enrollment has dropped sharply since the pandemic. Approximately how many students has the system lost?

Trivia speaker 1: I’m gonna say 45?

Katelyn: Okay, 45,000. Got it. Perfect. 45. All right. Anybody else? If you get closer, you’ll win it.

Trivia speaker 2: 30,000.

Katelyn: Okay.

Trivia speaker 3: I’ll say 55,000.

Katelyn: Okay. All right, guys. Well, the actual answer is more than 123,000 students. So, all right, and then for this question, we’re gonna be taking one. So school mergers and other big decisions that affect New York City schools must be approved by a body known as the PEP.

Katelyn: What does the PEP stand for? I know these are, these are hard ones. Well, here, let’s hear it from a teacher. Not for a prize, but if you have a say, you know?

Trivia speaker 4: Panel for Education Policy

Katelyn: Yes. Thank you. All right. So what is the largest New York City high school?

Katelyn: You are correct. It is Brooklyn Tech. Okay. And I’ll give you guys one more. Jay-Z, the Notorious B.I.G., Busta Rhymes, and DMX all attended which Brooklyn high school?

Trivia speaker 5: George Westinghouse high school

Katelyn: It is, yeah. Okay. All right, guys. So I’m gonna have Zana come up here, and then we’re gonna start doing a little Q&A and shout-outs.

Zana: So we have a bag full of questions. When you guys RSVP’d to this event, you should’ve been able to submit a question. So we have a bag full of all of those questions that you all submitted, and so we’re gonna pull some out at random and have our students up here answer. So. Okay, okay.

Katelyn: Cheers whoever said this.

Zana: Yeah. If you could change one thing about how traditional journalism has been done in the past to set it on a different course for the future, what would it be?

Jeremiah: All right. I would say just, like, watching a lot of news, especially with, like, the thing with a lot of female reporters and anchors going up against Donald Trump when they’re interviewing him. I just wish, like, journalists were more, like, able to express themselves freely when they’re disrespected. I wish they had more outlets to really, like, protect themselves.

Jeremiah: I wish they didn’t have to sit there and take disrespect from political officials, people on the street, sit there, be targeted, just like all the ICE protests and certain things like that. I’ve seen so many videos of journalists being the ones getting attacked, caught in the crossfire when they’re just there to show the world what’s happening.

Jeremiah: There’s been so many situations where journalists have been getting killed in certain countries covering wars and certain things. So I just wish journalists had more tools and more, you know, just leeway to sit there and act and fight back in a way that actually will help us and protect us in the future

Zoe: Um, I guess I would say more diversity in journalism. I think that when journalism first started, it was a very, like, male, white male-predominated field, and I think that we are getting a little bit better, and there’s obviously still work that could be improved on. But I think that if we would’ve started with it, we wouldn’t, like, face stigmas, or we’d have more stories on more diverse cultures and communities being shared, and a lot more problems would be shared as well.

Speaker 7: All right, our next question is: What do you think is an aspect of the school system or the city in general that is under-reported on or needs more coverage?

Noa: Well, this is, um, this wasn’t what I ended up doing my episode on, but there’s an initiative called Green Healthy Schools, um, whose mission, thanks Jeremiah, is to, um, basically renovate school buildings because many of them have, you know, broken ACs or even sometimes like asbestos, um, basically conditions that are not conducive to learning, and I think that’s definitely under-reported on.

Noa: Um, I didn’t end up going with it for the episode, but I think that definitely not many people know about the plans or even the issues in many of these old buildings. Um, I’m pretty sure the average school building i- in New York City is 75 years old, and they’re dealing with a lot of these issues.

Ermione: Um, with schools in specific, I would say college preparatory staff at schools. I think oftentimes we rely on guidance counselors to be the ones to guide kids in college and guide kids into career paths. But, like, I know my school in specific, we have a college and career office, and that’s very rare, and we have

Ermione: And a nonprofit funds it. But oftentimes the nonprofits, they’re seeking money from outside sources that don’t nec- that can’t always provide consistent money. So I would say, like, requiring a college and prep- preparatory office in all schools and having distinct funding, funding for that, because I was a part of different programs that guide me towards that, but what about students who don’t have that drive to seek out a specific person or a specific program?

Ermione: How can we help those students? And those students are also the ones who are most vulnerable of not going to college or not knowing the resources they have .

Jeremiah: Um, I’ll add on because something that Zoe said really stuck out to me earlier. We were talking about this before. Um, what Zoe mentioned was just the lack of third spaces in New York City in general.

Jeremiah: Like, for example, can my friends who go to my school raise their hands? Yes. Okay. Right. There you guys are. All right. Um, so, like, in Williamsburg, we go to school in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and commonly we go to, like, fast food spots like McDonald’s, Taco Bell, you know, just... We all eat there. So but I’ve seen...

Jeremiah: I’ve noticed a trend since, like, there’s been fights and certain things, but every time you look at something that’s happening, it all leads down to the fact that teens have nowhere to go. So when they do have somewhere to go, they act out because it’s just like they don’t know what to do, you know? So that leads to them, I feel like, overpolicing in our communities because how is it fair that I walk into a McDonald’s or a Taco Bell and I’m being asked for my ID and verification, and then I’m telling them that I’m 18 years old, and they’re saying that, “You don’t believe me.”

Jeremiah: How are you gonna tell me how old I am, you know? So then it’s just like, it’s crazy that I have to pull out my ID and basically be, like, policed and screened just to spend my money. When you go in whiter, richer neighborhoods in Manhattan and certain things like that, and it’s the exact same group. I travel with the same people every time.

Jeremiah: We never have a problem. But then in our neighborhoods, it’s always a problem. But then you look back and it’s like, look at the neighborhoods that they’re overpolicing. It’s for a reason, right? So I just, like, feel like there’s not a lot of stories that really talk about this age verification thing because I feel like the main starter of it all was Target, where they banned, um, a lot of kids from going into Atlantic Terminal Mall.

Jeremiah: Like, I remember one time for a senior sleepover, I had ordered, like, a air mattress or something, and I went to pick it up, and they’re like, “Hold up. Are you 18?” Mind you, I was two months away from turning 18, so yeah, I had to lie. But it, it’s unfortunate ‘cause you should never have to do that. So I definitely think there should be more reporting on that.

Zana: Okay, this will be our last question for our group here. By stepping into your own power as a journalist, what is one surprisingly positive thing that you learned about yourself? Give one example of when you thought you might fail but didn’t, for example.

Mateo: I think for me, this actually happened last year when I did P.S. Weekly for the first time. I think last year, like, I wasn’t, like, as confident as I am now, and, like, when the episode came out, I honestly wasn’t really expecting, like, anybody to care about it, like, even people at school. But I got, like, a lot of, like, positive feedback on my episode, and a lot of people were like, “Oh, I listened to it and I felt represented,” and like, “You’re doing really great work.”

Mateo: And, like, it just felt really moving, and I think this year I kind of, like, leaned into that a little bit more, and I think that surprised me, and it helped me become, like, more confident. Like, there are people out there who, like, will care what you’re doing and, like, see the impact you’re making.

Ermione: So my, my journey to getting an interview guest was kind of filled with turbulence, and I kinda was dismotivated in a sense. I knew I cared a lot about my topic ‘cause I have been dealing with the same teacher and the same issues for years, but I kinda... Halfway through, I kinda lost sight of what I wanted to talk about and whether or not it was important.

Ermione: So it kinda showed me that, like, I have perseverance in other fields and other ways in a sense, ‘cause usually I think of, like, academics having perseverance and resilience to academics and life. But it’s in journalism. I don’t intend to major in journalism, but I did it as a way to push me outside my box, and I definitely saw a different side of myself and the desire to get an interview guest and push myself.

Ermione: So just seeing that side of me, even though I’m not quite passionate about journalism, but I am passionate about the topic itself, and letting that take over and seeing that side of myself was something that was very different.

Rayleen: Um, I’d like to agree with Ermione. I just feel like in doing P.S. Weekly and SYPA, I’ve learned that, like, I can kind of turn off my introvertedness and, like, nervousness when it comes to talking to people and just expressing myself. Because when I’m passionate about something, I can speak up about it. When I like something, I will speak up about it.

Rayleen: So I feel like being here has just helped me really learn how to do that for myself.

Jasper: Um, I’d say just like embrace being a journalist, ‘cause I don’t know, like at first I was kind of afraid to show that I was a journalist and whatever, like in school and stuff. But like, I was helping Mateo with his episode and I was doing like those Vox interviews in like AP Calc, and then like everyone was actually like interested and I was like, damn.

Jasper: I’m like, we’re going in the hallway. I’m like, talk. Yeah, and like, you know, people actually like being behind the mic and I realized that. And also like, I don’t know, eventually like I got more comfortable. Like I started posting more about The Bell, like actually collaborating with them. And then, I don’t know, those reels, like the share counts are kind of scary, but you know.

Jasper: Like it was just like, it’s just really fun and it’s like I’m actually pretty proud of it now. I used to be emba- a little embarrassed, but now it’s like something I could see myself doing in the future, and I realize people like it.

Jeremiah: um, I’ll just say quickly, I di- like, I discovered that I have a great passion for storytelling and interviewing. Um, because before P.S. Weekly, I actually did The Bell’s flagship podcast, Miseducation, on its eighth season, where I talked about, like, credit recovery systems in high schools, which we’ll learn about another time.

Jeremiah: Go check it out. Um, but honestly, when I first, like, started, when it came to, like, interviews and stuff, I was very nervous. I just felt like I wasn’t educated enough about the subject that I was talking about. I felt like that I was gonna mess up, or even sometimes still, I still get nervous. But now I feel like I’ve developed the confidence to actually know that I’m capable of interviewing someone, like Sasha, I see you back there.

Jeremiah: Um, interviewing someone successfully and actually getting their story across. Um, as well as just, like, storytelling, because I feel like my main passion behind journalism is I don’t see it as a hobby, I see it as an essential service. I see it as something where you’re not only telling a story, you’re bringing, you’re bringing underrepresented issue to the forefront, and I kinda see P.S. Weekly and Miseducation, whichever one it is, as a platform that brings those stories to the forefront.

Jeremiah: So I’m just, I’m so grateful to have been a part of it. Yeah

Katelyn: All right, guys. Can we give it up for our student journalists?

Katelyn: Okay. So we have this kind of tradition that we do at the end of every single session and we call it “Shout Outs”, where at the end of the day we give shout-outs. We have the students, staff, everybody just gives shout-outs to someone, somebody that they feel like shined, you know, that day. You know, maybe if their episode came out, just to, you know, put them under the spotlight because, I mean, they do such amazing work.

Katelyn: So we’re gonna bring it out to the audience, and I wanna hear some shout-outs for our student reporters. So I think here’s what we’ll do. Um-

Taylor: Raise your hand.

Katelyn: Yeah. And then Taylor will come over to you with the mic and give it to you

Audience member shoutout 1: . Um, I have two people I wanna shout out. I firstly wanna start off with Zoe. I am so proud of you, and I’m glad I got to know you at the Apollo Theater and to see you grow and be amazing. And we need more Black women esp- um, in journalism, especially during this time.

Audience member shoutout 1: And to start at such a young age, I’m truly amazed, and I cannot wait to see what else you do as well. And then as for Jeremiah, like I’m gonna try not to cry, but I think I first met you, like, in 2023, um, through CUNY. And so to see you grow, um, from I think when you were a 10th grader all the way up to senior year, now you’re going to Pace University, it, it makes me so happy to see you follow your dreams and achieve your dreams and be in these spaces.

Audience member shoutout 1: Because sometimes, um, society systemi- um, systemically try to keep us out of those spaces, and you continue to push through. And you do not let your hardships define you, and I’m very proud of you for that. And I also cannot wait to see what else you do, especially at Pace. And I, I always make sure to show up for you because I want you to know that I also aspire to have such amazing confidence in what you do and changing the world as well, so thank you.

Audience member shoutout 2: Oh, am I supposed to carry on? Hi. Um, I just, I’m gonna try to be brief. I just wanna say, um, I’m so impressed at how you’ve done more with your high school life than I think I did with the first half of mine, at least. And, and I also just feel like what impresses me so much about how you tackle the things you see in your life is when you see something that’s wrong, an injustice, something that’s not right in the world, you don’t just sit with it.

Audience member shoutout 2: You don’t just let it happen to you or let it happen to those around you. You actually decide to tackle it, and it’s such an inspiring thing to see, especially in somebody so young. Can’t wait to see where you go next. It’s gonna be amazing. Thank you so much.

Audience member shoutout 3: Hi, um, my name is Masnur. Ooh, sorry, I’m not in school. My name is Jui. Um, and, uh, my shout-out is for Rayleen. Uh, your episode was just so insightful. I was so excited to share it with everyone, and I just loved that you have been pushing yourself so much this year, um, actually ever since I met you.

Audience member shoutout 3: And I really appreciate how you were able to preserve a piece of history that, like, it, that school no longer exists, and you really helped, um, preserve Jose’s voice and other students’ voices. So I’m so proud of you.

Audience member shoutout 4: Okay. Hi, my name’s been thrown around a little bit tonight, but my name is Sasha. Um, I’m obviously giving a big shout-out to my friend Jeremiah. I am extremely proud of him and proud of our podcast. Um, I... When he first asked me, I was a little bit like, “Ooh, you’re asking me about what?” So I was a little nervous, and especially going into it when, you know, we first started asking each other questions.

Audience member shoutout 4: I was very nervous at first. But being able to actually, like, talk to him and get different inputs from him, and also, like, share my own stories and about the stories about people around me, it was very inspiring. And seeing what he’s able to do and the impact that he’s able to have on his, not only us, like, as his friends, but, like, again, the people that are here tonight, his friends that are also up there, which I’m also very proud of y’all, too, though.

Audience member shoutout 4: Y’all are all amazing. But it’s so inspiring, like, you know, watching who you’re gonna become, and I’m so proud of you, and I’m very glad to be your friend. Um, I also do wanna give a shout-out to Noa, because you were also on my podcast that I didn’t know about, and then I listened to your podcast, and your podcast was actually, like, amazing.

Audience member shoutout 4: Um, I think that your story was something that I never would’ve, like, looked into before, you know, hearing your podcast. So getting to hear about it and actually hearing, you know, from a mother and a son, I thought that that was very impactful and very important.

Audience member shoutout 5: Oh. Um, I’m Kelsi . I wanna shout out all of the lovely podcasters that are on stage. You guys did absolutely amazing. And shout out to The Bell for giving you guys this medium for you guys to ask the questions that you want to ask, to have a stage to showcase the issues that you’ve seen in your schools, and actually, like, be able to, like, as, um, I think it was Mateo, like, you said, like, your podcast got so much traction because people care.

Audience member shoutout 5: And had it not been for your care, had it not been for, like, The Bell to give you guys this medium, there... Like, more people wouldn’t know that you guys actually care. So again, shout out to you guys. You guys did absolutely amazing work. You are all so incredibly intelligent and passionate, and you all will forever have a supporter in me and from The Bell.

Audience member shoutout 6: Hi, everyone. My name is Catherine. Um, uh, I think you all were just so lovely today in hearing from all of you, and I’m not gonna shout out anyone specific. But, um, I think what’s just coming up for me, not that I’m that much older than you all, I’m 25, um, is you feel like a manifestation of just, like, how much progress we’ve made.

Audience member shoutout 6: Because to think about there was a time where truly, like, young people, kids were meant to be seen and not heard, and now you have entire platforms where you are making yourselves known and your opinions known, um, and that the youth are fully fledged people, even we were all kids once. Um, and it is so beautiful to hear and to hear the call for not only seeing children, but then hearing us and then understanding us.

Audience member shoutout 6: Um, because just to think, like, even my own parents, like, you know, they were-- you went, you went to school. You did what you were told by your parents. You didn’t ask any questions. You didn’t make any concerns. And to see you all come into your own, it just really makes me feel so inspired to see that in the midst of all of the other terrible things that we could complain about in the world, like, we have young people like you who are really showing up, um, and are so eloquent and are so impassioned by these things that we are all impacted by at the end of the day.

Audience member shoutout 6: So thank you all so much.

Audience member shoutout 7: Hi, I’m Gwen. Um, I work in the central office at New York City Public Schools, and I’m really just incredibly impressed by all of you, and I want you to know that your voices really do matter and that I have been in team meetings where we listen to these episodes, and we use them to anchor discussions.

Audience member shoutout 7: So definitely keep doing what you’re doing, and your voices do matter. Um, and tell your peers that their voices matter as well

Audience member shoutout 8: Um, hi, my name’s Clark. Um, I wanted to give a shout-out to Zoe specifically, and also to The Bell. Um, Zoe, I know that we always joke that the Black girls at Bard always do the same exact programs for journalism, but it really is so important to have those experiences and to have those programs, and to have that community.

Audience member shoutout 8: Um, I haven’t gotten a chance to listen to the episode yet, but trust on the bus home, you got me. Um, and just n- even from hearing the clip, just hearing about the experiences that we’ve all had, um, not only as students at Bard, but as students at high school, just really, like, I don’t... It, like, it was really impactful to me, and I really appreciate, um, like, everyone here for being here.

Audience member shoutout 8: Um, Kelsey, you didn’t tell me you were gonna be here. Um, but yeah, I just, I’m so appreciative of you, um, and everyone here. Yeah

Audience member shoutout 9: Well, hello. My name is Venice, and actually, um, recently I was accepted into SYPA program. So being here, very happy experience, but moreover, I just wanted to highlight how well-articulated you guys all are, and how inspiring just being here has been. It’s really made me think about how I want to go into my own podcast journey. And yeah, I just really wanted to highlight, you guys did such a great job, and I feel very inspired and impressed.

Audience member shoutout 10: Um, hi, my name is Anya, and I wanna give a shout-out to Noa, of course. I’m really, really proud of you, and I just know you take on so much, and you do it all with, like, so much grace and so much intentionality, and I’m really, really proud of you and everything that you’ve done. Um, and I also wanna give a shout-out to Mateo because, um, I just signed up to take Calc BC next year, and I’m, I’m really scared, but you made me w- more excited about it

Audience member shoutout 11: Hi, my name is Safiya. I wanna give a shout-out to Jeremiah. I love him s- I love you by the way, Jeremiah. Ever since, like, ninth grade, I’d say, I’ve been able to see him flourish, and just seeing him, like, ex- like, do so well during the Success Academy podcast, which I showed my parents, and they freaking loved it.

Audience member shoutout 11: And hearing more people, like, speak more about it, it made me, like, wonder, like, how does he have the confidence to go up there? But then I realized you’re a very bubbly, very bright individual, and I’m glad to have you as a friend, so I love you.

Audience member shoutout 12: Hey, y’all. Um, uh, sorry. Despite my height, I’m, like, the same age as him, but, like, um, not to glaze, but I’m gonna glaze you. I’m so proud of you, Jeremiah. I’m, like, so proud, and all of y’all as a collective, like, you guys are so brave speaking about things that are, you know, not really spoken about. Um, speaking of, like, everything that everybody’s, you know, fearful of speaking about really is, like, brave.

Audience member shoutout 12: Um, and I feel like keep doing what you’re doing because, you know, this is really rare in this generation in particular because, you know... Anyway, besides that, uh, I’m just proud of y’all. I’m just want, I just wanna say that I’m proud of y’all.

Taylor: All right, we got time for maybe two more. So we got one here, one here, and Sabrina, why don’t you find one more on your side?

Audience member shoutout 13: Uh, yeah, my name is Spencer Malorca. I’m the younger brother of Jasper up there. Uh, I just want you to know I’m really proud of you, and I’m glad you’re doing this ‘cause you have a really strong voice that you don’t use a lot.

Audience member shoutout 13: I see you at home, you know, you’re making music, you know, you’re doing a lot at home, but you’re not using that voice, and I know that you have a really strong voice, and doing this, uh, journalism thing is, like, really important for you. You know, I don’t gotta say too much ‘cause you know how I feel about you, but yeah.

Audience member shoutout 14: Hi, um, I’m Annika. I’m also here to shout out Noa, because I think that we all see you put 110% of your effort and energy into every single thing you do. Oh, sorry. Um, you go, you go. You go. Sorry. I come back.

Audience member shoutout 15: I just, I think you’re one of the most motivated and, like, put together people any of us know at all, and it’s such a pleasure to know you. That’s why we’re all here. Oh, my God. We’re all really excited to see you succeed, and excited to see you go into this next chapter of your life as well, I guess.

Audience member shoutout 15: And it’s also been so wonderful to hear everybody else’s opinions about everything. Everybody here seems so excited to learn new things, and talk about new things, and spread information about things that I never would’ve heard about. And this has been such a pleasant experience to listen to all of you guys and all of the hard work you guys have done

Audience member shoutout 16: I’m Emma. I’m also, I also wanna shout out Noa, and I think ev- like, two days a week after school, she’s like, “I’m going to The Bell,” and I’m like, “Okay, have fun.” Um, and I, I feel so lucky to be here and get to celebrate all this hard work and care and dedication that she’s put into this to make such a touching… I think we were all so moved when we heard that, um, interview clip. So, you guys.

Audience member group: Three, two, one. We’re so proud of you, Noa!

Audience member shoutout 17: Hi, everybody. I’m Alexander. I’m over here. I just wanted to shout out the lovely MCs. You did such an amazing job. So professional. So, like, amazing. I, like, wish I had, like, the courage and the eloquence that, like, I... Like, at your age, you, you all did, like, an amazing job. I also just wanted to shout out the audience.

Audience member shoutout 17: It’s really hot in here, and you still showed up for everybody, and you’re supporting amazing student journalism. So I just wanted to say, like, thank you for participating in this community, and, like, a shout-out to everybody that’s on the stage. Everyone should be incredibly proud of your- yourselves. And just, like, power to you guys.

Katelyn: Okay. All right, guys. Well, thank you so, so much for that. It, it means the world to all of us that you guys would come out here and shout out these amazing student journalists.

Maria: PS Weekly is a collaboration between The Bell and Chalkbeat, made possible by generous support from the Pinkerton Foundation. A special thank you to Robin Lester Kenton, Kelly Thornwell, Jennifer Thompson, Greg Richards, Karen Keys, and the entire team at the Brooklyn Public Library for hosting us in their beautiful Central Branch space.

Maria: The senior producer for this show is me, Maria Robins-Somerville, and our technical director is Jake Lummus. Our executive editors are Amy Zimmer and Taylor McGraw. Additional production and reporting support was provided by Mira Gordon, Sabrina DuQuesnay, Zana Halili, Katelyn Melville, and our partners at Chalkbeat.

Maria: Music is from Blue Dot Sessions, and the jingle you heard at the beginning of this episode was created by the one and only Erica Huang. Thanks for tuning in and see you next season.

We make transcripts available for our episodes as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.

Private schools, public dollars: A staggering racial gap in NYC special education tuition payments

2026-05-06T21:54:26+00:00

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As Mayor Zohran Mamdani scrambles to plug a multi-billion dollar budget gap, his administration is looking more closely at the money New York City spends on private school tuition for students with disabilities.

The payments — which topped $723 million last school year, up more than 300% from a decade earlier, according to the Independent Budget Office — have long generated intense debate about which families are benefitting. Now, according to data the Education Department previously declined to share, officials have revealed a staggering inequity: The vast majority of students who have access to that money are white.

Families may receive funding for private school tuition after going through a legal process to show their children can’t be adequately served in the public school system. Nearly 71% of students who won tuition payments last school year were white, a population that makes up 12.5% of students with disabilities in the city’s public schools, according to Education Department data that the City Council pushed the agency to disclose last year.

Black and Latino children, who make up about 75% of students with disabilities, represented just 24% of children receiving tuition reimbursements. (About 1 in 5 families did not disclose their race.) The families who benefit from those tuition payments are also much more likely to live in wealthier zip codes, the data confirms.

The statistics may add fuel to the debate about how to make the special education system fairer and rein in growing costs, an issue that has drawn scrutiny in recent months. Many families say the tuition payments are a lifeline, helping them secure specialized instruction they couldn’t otherwise get in the public system. Last school year, the city made tuition payments on behalf of nearly 7,600 students, which cost roughly $100,000 per child on average, city officials said.

Those students have disabilities that range from dyslexia to more complex challenges. About one-third of students who benefit from tuition payments have autism; their tuition costs are about $144,000 a year on average, officials said.

Families of color and those who live in higher-poverty neighborhoods are often shut out of the reimbursement process. Caregivers may not know they are eligible for private placements funded by the city, have legal help to file the necessary claim, or secure outside evaluations to bolster their case for a private school placement.

“The people who have the resources can afford better representation and have better opportunities to engage the legal system,” said Nelson Mar, an attorney at Bronx Legal Services, which handles special education cases for low-income families. “This is what plays out in the legal system in America.”

Private schools often expect families to pay for some tuition costs up front while their legal claim plays out, a strain even on more affluent households. Those are known as “Carter cases” named for a U.S. Supreme Court decision that affirmed the right to those payments.

Low-income families can request that the payments go directly to the private school without the family paying up front, which are known as “Connors cases.” But those opportunities can be limited because “there’s only a few schools that are willing to really take on that type of risk,” Mar said, noting the family may not end up winning their legal case for payments.

In addition to those tuition cases, state law also requires the city to pay for services such as speech therapy and tutoring for students who attend private schools and never considered a public school. Those families aren’t eligible for tuition payments and are excluded from the racial demographic data in this story.

Including the payments for those services, which officials said costs roughly $400 million, the city now pays well over $1 billion a year on tuition and services for students in private schools — roughly $1 in every $40 of the Education Department’s budget.

The city is attempting to tackle the rising cost of services for students in private schools who aren’t seeking tuition payments in part by instituting “fraud controls” to deal with providers who have reportedly billed for services that were unnecessary or weren’t delivered, said Liz Vladeck, the Education Department’s top lawyer. (Many of those services are provided in neighborhoods with large Orthodox Jewish populations where many students attend yeshivas.)

Budget crunch prompts renewed debate about private school payments

The exponentially rising cost of private school special education has attracted attention from City Hall as Mamdani scrambles to fill a projected $5.4 billion gap in the city’s budget.

In a bid to secure more funding from the state to help ease the deficit, city officials have floated private school payments as a potential area for savings, a spokesperson for Gov. Kathy Hochul confirmed.

Vladeck declined to comment on the specifics of those negotiations in an interview with Chalkbeat, but said she is troubled by the racial inequities and growing costs.

“I see it as an urgent problem,” she said, “that’s very challenging for policymakers to get their arms around because it is complicated.”

City officials say they can save money by educating a greater share of students in private placements in the city’s public schools, a promise officials across multiple administrations have made even as tuition costs have continued to grow.

“It used to be a fair critique that special education programs and services in New York City public schools were spotty,” Vladeck said. But she stressed that the city’s compliance with students’ special education learning plans has improved, and the Education Department has incrementally expanded programs for students with disabilities, including those with autism. The city is also overhauling literacy instruction, including for struggling readers.

Vladeck contends the city’s programs can cost dramatically less than what private programs charge and that private schools generally don’t share achievement data, making it difficult to know if they are more effective.

Will the Mamdani administration take action?

It remains to be seen how Mamdani will approach the issue and past mayors have taken radically divergent approaches.

Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg hired an army of lawyers to fight tuition reimbursement requests, which are adjudicated by administrative judges. The goal was to avoid unnecessary placements and plow more money into the public school system as a whole, but the strategy drew criticism from parents and advocates.

His successor, Bill de Blasio, took a less aggressive stance. In response to pressure from lawmakers, he made it easier for parents to seek reimbursement from the city in part by settling cases and not fighting families over the same school placements year after year. He framed the effort as a matter of equity for parents who may not have the resources to repeatedly mount aggressive legal cases.

“That was well intentioned, but it had some pretty damning consequences,” Vladeck said at a City Council hearing in March. In the years that followed, the number of special education complaints seeking payments for tuition, services, and other special education requests grew significantly and costs exploded.

A February report from the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute argued the reimbursement system is “financially unsustainable” and urged rolling back some of the de Blasio-era reforms, among other changes.

But not everyone is convinced that bringing more students with disabilities into the school system would be less expensive without reducing the level of services students get in private programs.

“I really disagree when people say that this is an unreasonable cost for the DOE to bear,” Mar said of the Education Department spending on private school tuition.

His clients who have private tuition paid by the city have generally made “significant growth.” Mar said a more equitable system would be less adversarial, noting the city often fights cases even when it’s clear the student isn’t receiving the help they need.

Brooklyn mom Dolores Swirin-Yao said she would have preferred to keep her son Jeremy, who has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and learning disabilities including dyslexia, in the public school system. When it became clear his public school wasn’t successfully teaching him to read, she felt she had no choice but to consider a private placement and file a legal claim for reimbursement.

“People say that this is a way for people to game the system and get their kids in private school,” Swirin-Yao said. But her son’s public school “seemed to believe that he would never read.” Without that skill, she worried he would end up on public assistance.

Swirin-Yao hired a lawyer and fronted tuition payments, straining to take on $125,000 in debt while waiting for the Education Department to reimburse her. She recognized she still had a leg up: access to credit, the ability to make phone calls during the work day, or take leave to attend a legal hearing. Though her son is Black, Swirin-Yao felt she benefited from being middle class and white.

Jeremy ultimately learned how to read. He graduated from The Aaron School in 2024.

Despite the stress and strain of paying tuition up front, it was “the best investment I ever made,” Swirin-Yao said. “My child was able to graduate from high school, go to culinary school, can work in this field, and has a future.”

Alex Zimmerman is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

NYC 2025 graduation rate dips, fueled by declines among students with disabilities and English learners

2026-03-09T19:58:25+00:00

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Graduation rates dipped last year across New York City by just over 2 percentage points to 81.2% — the largest year-over-year decline in more than two decades — as officials have reinstated requirements that were loosened during the pandemic.

Meanwhile, the graduation rate across the state fell by just under 1 percentage point to 85.5%.

The drops in students graduating on time were most pronounced for some of the city’s most vulnerable children. Just 59% of students with disabilities graduated in four years, a drop of 5.5 percentage points. Nearly 52% of English language learners graduated in four years, down by about 3 percentage points.

The data, which state officials posted quietly online without the customary public announcement or press briefing, reveals the graduation rates for the Class of 2025. Those students began ninth grade in September 2021, the first time all students were required to attend school in person after the pandemic hit.

“They entered high school in a weird place,” said Sarah Part, a senior policy analyst at Advocates for Children, a group that provides support and legal help to low-income families. “It is possible that some students started ninth grade not as prepared as they otherwise would have been.”

Still, the city and state’s overall graduation rate remains higher than before the pandemic, when about 77% of city students graduated in four years and 83% of students statewide did.

City officials contend that last year’s dip was largely driven by resuming graduation standards that had been relaxed during the pandemic to account for disruptions to instruction. Some students received waivers from Regents exams or were allowed to appeal low scores.

Nearly 14% of city students relied on a Regents exam waiver to graduate in the Class of 2025, down from a whopping 53% in the Class of 2024, city officials said. (Nearly 53% of students successfully appealed low scores, a similar number as the year before.)

It is difficult to determine to what extent the graduation policy changes have affected the graduation rate because some students may have still graduated even without the more lenient standards.

Aaron Pallas, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College who has studied school performance, said it is possible the policy shifts are having a meaningful effect but it’s important to look at longer-term trends. “My perennial claim is don’t make too much of a one-year change,” he said.

Pallas said other factors could be playing a role. Rates of chronic absenteeism remain elevated, for instance, likely affecting students’ academic performance.

Grad rates drop significantly for students with disabilities and English learners

Andrew Wilder, an English as a second language teacher at Brooklyn’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School, said he was unsurprised that graduation rates for English learners dropped after soaring during the pandemic.

“The fact that students did not have to pass the English Regents — that led to a pretty substantial bump in the graduation rate,” he said. “It’s an English language test more than it is a test of a student’s high school ability.”

Even accounting for this year’s decline, however, graduation rates for that group are up about 11 percentage points since the pandemic hit.

Yet, dropout rates for English learners spiked to 18%, up 4 percentage points, city data show.

The city’s overall dropout rate increased slightly to 5.2%.

One group that bucked the trend: The dropout rate for students with disabilities fell slightly, to 6.7%. That could suggest some students who remain in school but didn’t graduate on time will still eventually earn a diploma.

“It’s possible students are just needing a little bit more time in high school,” said Part, from Advocates for Children.

The data reveal continued disparities in graduation rates between different racial groups. Nearly 92% of Asian American students graduated on time along with 87% of white students. About 77% of Black and Latino students graduated in four years. (Every racial group saw a decline.)

Education Department spokesperson Isla Gething wrote in a statement that the city remains “committed to high-quality instruction and strengthening targeted supports so that every student, especially students with disabilities and English language learners, has equitable access to rigorous instruction and clear pathways to graduation.”

Phasing out Regents offers opportunity to rethink graduation standards

The graduation rate fluctuations during and after the pandemic could hold important lessons for policymakers as they rethink what it should take to earn a diploma.

State officials are in the process of phasing out Regents exams — which have been in place since the mid-1800s — as a graduation requirement. Instead, New York students will need to meet a broader set of criteria demonstrating critical thinking, communication, and other skills known as the “portrait of a graduate.” State officials, however, have not unveiled the specific graduation standards students will be required to meet in the coming years.

Arlen Benjamin-Gomez, the executive director of EdTrust-New York, said the fluctuations for students with disabilities and English learners should prompt a broader conversation about how state officials can set appropriate standards for different groups.

It’s a “real opportunity to think about these two subgroups particularly, because this data really shows us how much they’re impacted by whatever the graduation measures are,” she said. “Having a disability shouldn’t be a reason that you are not able to graduate from high school.”

Still, she noted that officials must be careful to ensure that graduation standards remain rigorous and signify that students are ready for life after high school, including college or the workforce.

Wilder, the English as a second language teacher, was eager for more details and looks forward to spending less time teaching to the Regents exam. The test, he said, is often too far above his students’ level of English proficiency to be a useful measure of their learning.

“They come to believe that their inability to pass the English Regents is somehow a function of them as a student,” he said.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

New city and state bills target lack of transparency in suspensions of students with disabilities

2025-12-17T19:45:37+00:00

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New York City lawmakers are scheduled to vote Thursday on a bill that would force the Education Department to disclose detailed statistics about long-term suspensions of students with disabilities.

A similar bill was recently introduced in the state legislature and would apply to districts across New York.

The flurry of legislation comes after a Chalkbeat investigation found that New York City’s public schools have for years flouted rules designed to protect students with disabilities from lengthy classroom removals.

Under federal law, students with disabilities may not be suspended for more than 10 days if the conduct in question was directly related to their disability or stemmed from the school district’s failure to provide special education services. Schools are required to conduct meetings known as manifestation determination reviews to assess whether either of those criteria are met. If so, the student should immediately return to school, and officials must conduct a behavior assessment.

But the city’s public schools have long failed to consider a student’s disability and how it relates to the suspension, according to a Chalkbeat review of hundreds of pages of special education records, reports from independent monitors, and interviews with dozens of families, advocates, and educators. As a result, some students have served suspensions for weeks longer than allowed.

Last school year, New York City students with disabilities were removed or suspended from their classrooms nearly 14,800 times — representing 41% of all removals, even as those with disabilities only represent 22% of the student body. Black students are also disproportionately suspended, representing 38% of all removals last year and just 19% of city students. (Suspensions ticked down about 2% last year overall, with a larger decline among longer-term punishments.)

In 1,550 cases last school year, students with disabilities were removed from their classrooms long enough to trigger the review process to assess if their conduct was connected to their disability or the school’s failure to provide services, Education Department officials said at an October City Council hearing. In about 23% of those review meetings, schools found that the suspension was due to the student’s disability or a failure to implement their learning plan.

Schools were more likely to find that white students’ behavior was related to their disability compared with their Black or Latino peers, Chalkbeat’s investigation found. (City officials declined to release a demographic breakdown of suspension reviews for last school year.)

Lawmakers say bills would hold school districts accountable

The legislation, which several advocates said would represent a significant step forward, aims to shed light on a process that has not received much public examination. Many school districts across the state, including New York City, do not regularly report suspension review outcomes or even how often they are conducted. The city and state legislation would require districts to disclose those figures every year.

“New York lacks comprehensive, disaggregated data to identify systemic issues or disparities,” said Assembly member Yudelka Tapia, who sponsored the state bill and represents parts of the Bronx.

Suspensions in New York City are typically capped at 20 days, so when students prevail during the suspension review process, they may return to class days or a couple weeks sooner. But in districts across the state, suspensions are allowed to last up to an entire school year, meaning the stakes of the suspension reviews can be high.

The City Council bill, sponsored by Rita Joseph, is scheduled for a vote in the council’s education committee on Thursday and could proceed to a vote by the full council later that day. If it becomes law, the Education Department would also be required to report how often parents are informed of the review meeting and if they are conducted within the required timeframe.

“The main goal right now is to make sure that we have data that will support the future advocacy,” Joseph said, adding that it would help protect the rights of students with disabilities.

Because New York City schools are typically responsible for reviewing their own suspensions, advocates contend that the review process is stacked against families. But since lengthy punishments are usually reserved for the most severe misconduct, school staff frequently say that removing students is important for maintaining a safe learning environment for others.

Families often don’t know their rights at the suspension review meetings, including that they can bring a legal advocate. The city and state legislation would require more detailed reporting on whether families and their advocates are present at those meetings.

The city Education Department updated the materials for families about the suspension review process, explicitly stating that they have the right to bring an advocate and offering a list of potential advocates, a spokesperson said. City officials have also convened focus groups about the process and are updating training materials for school staff.

Some groups that have represented families at suspension review meetings cheered the legislation because it has been difficult to obtain basic statistics about the process.

Michaela Shuchman, a lawyer at Legal Services NYC, said her organization has submitted public records requests to large districts across the state about the suspension review meetings, and several said they don’t collect information. She has been waiting more than a year for a slew of suspension records from New York City’s Education Department, which often drags out public records requests.

“We don’t know what we don’t know, which is why these bills are so important,” Shuchman said. “We need this information to figure out where the gaps are and where we’re falling short.”

City Education Department officials said they support the city legislation and are reviewing the state bill.

“We have to have this transparency,” said Andie Corso, a city special education official, at the October hearing. “The public deserves this information and it will help us do better.”

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

NYC students in juvenile detention often denied the education support they need, report finds

2025-11-17T11:00:01+00:00

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New York City students in juvenile detention often show up with deep learning challenges and frequently don’t get the support they need to catch up, according to a new analysis of city data.

Court-involved youth held in juvenile detention facilities and group homes managed by the Administration for Children’s Services, the city’s child welfare agency, are entitled to schooling through an Education Department program called Passages Academy.

Those programs tend to receive little public scrutiny, though they serve some of the city’s most vulnerable students. In 2023, City Council passed a law requiring officials to release a trove of data about the program. A report released Monday by Advocates for Children, a group that helps families navigate the school system, includes the first detailed analysis.

“Too often these young people continue to struggle to access the educational services and supports that could help them succeed, both while in detention or placement and after returning home,” the report says.

Here are five takeaways from the report:

Black boys are overrepresented, and so are students with emotional disabilities

Over the past two school years, 1,850 students enrolled in Passages Academy. More than 60% were Black, more than 92% were boys, and virtually all were from low-income families, according to an enrollment snapshots from October 2023 and 2024. (About a quarter of all children in middle and high school are Black and 78% come from low-income families.)

Nearly half of all students in Passages had a disability, more than twice the rate across the school system.

Students in juvenile detention were also far more likely to be classified with an emotional disability: 18% of students enrolled at Passages received that classification compared with just 1% for students in middle and high schools across the system, according to the report.

Students arrive with significant learning challenges

When students arrive in juvenile detention, they are often far behind their peers in reading and math. On average, students at Passages who were assessed in reading scored in the 10th percentile in 2023-24 and the 18th percentile the following school year. Math scores were similarly low.

Education Department officials said they’ve expanded efforts to identify students with reading challenges, such as dyslexia. Teachers across the program are receiving additional training to catch students up.

They don’t always get the extra help they’re entitled to

Students with disabilities are entitled to new learning plans that spell out what services they will receive while within 30 days of arriving at a Passages program. But officials failed to provide the plans on time for nearly 17% of eligible students, according to figures for the last two school years.

The Education Department did not provide statistics on what percentage of required special education services were actually delivered, even though that data was required to be released under the City Council law. Officials said it is difficult to collect those figures because students move in and out of the program frequently.

English learners, a group that represents about 12% of Passages students, also struggled to access the support they need. Nearly a quarter of those students received no English as a new language instruction while they were in custody during the past two years, the report found.

The report suggests that some students in secure detention facilities are not always given access to instruction. In 2023, Gothamist reported that some classrooms were sometimes used as cells or for sleeping accommodations.

“If they’re not actually getting to Passages then they’re not getting an education — period,” said Rohini Singh, director of the school justice project at Advocates for Children and a co-author of the report.

Education Department officials acknowledged there are gaps in services and said they are launching afterschool and Saturday programs that include speech therapy and small-group reading instruction at two Passages sites beginning next month.

“We appreciate the advocacy from our partners with Advocates for Children, and we take these concerns extremely seriously,” Education Department spokesperson Onika Richards wrote in an email.

A spokesperson for the Administration for Children’s Services said the agency helps coordinate tutoring. They also help students earn high school equivalency diplomas or complete college coursework, as some people in secure detention are 18 or over and not legally required to attend school.

Once released, students often struggle to reconnect with school

The report details multiple examples of families receiving little or inadequate support enrolling in school once their child was released from detention.

After one 14-year-old student was discharged, his mother visited a nearby school in the Bronx to enroll him. But because her son was not physically with her, the school refused. The teen was not allowed to leave their home at the time under the terms of his release.

“The failure to connect [the student] and his mother with any resources that could assist with the transition back to school upon his release placed them in an impossible situation,” according to the report.

Even when students do enroll in traditional schools once they’re released, their attendance rates are often abysmal. More than half of students discharged over the last two years were absent on at least half of all school days in the two months after they returned to a traditional school. (Those figures only include students who transitioned to city public schools and stayed for at least 10 days.)

Richards said the Education Department is working “to ensure court-involved youth receive the comprehensive transition support they deserve.”

Beefing up support could help make a dent, advocates say

Advocates urged the Education Department to take several steps to prevent students from getting tangled up in the court system in the first place, including expanded mental health and special education support.

And they called on the city to beef up transition services to help families enroll in schools once their children are released from detention. Singh noted that many students might be good candidates for transfer schools, which generally enroll students who are older and behind in credits, though it can be challenging for families to navigate that enrollment process.

More broadly, she said the city must expand access to services for students while they are enrolled at Passages, especially among students with disabilities.

“Our hope,” Singh added, “is the administration will take a closer look at these students and make sure they receive interventions while they’re in custody.”

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

NYC’s digital SHSAT debut goes smoothly for most test takers

2025-11-13T22:18:51+00:00

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For the first time, the Specialized High School Admissions Test went digital this year, and the transition went smoothly, Education Department officials said.

Of the roughly 19,500 eighth graders who took the exam Wednesday at their middle schools, just four, so far, will be taking the test this weekend or next week due to a technical issue with extended time accommodations, officials said.

“We’re pleased to report that the shift to digital SHSAT testing on Wednesday was successful,” Education Department spokesperson Isla Gething said in a statement. “There were no citywide or schoolwide issues and we are working with schools to address the small number of technical issues that arose.”

The Specialized High School Admissions Test, or SHSAT, is the sole basis of entry for eight of New York City’s top high schools, including Stuyvesant and Bronx Science. Students at all standalone middle schools could take the test in school on Wednesday. Eighth graders at 6-12 schools, charters, and private schools will be able to take the test at central locations this weekend. (Ninth graders can take the test on Nov. 22 or Nov. 23.)

Students with disabilities who have extended time to take the test ran into some glitches at Manhattan’s M.S. 104, also known as Simon Baruch middle school. The test clock said these students had three hours for the test — but it should have said six hours.

After about 20 minutes of trying to troubleshoot, someone from the Education Department told the school to reset the exams to correct the timer, according to a letter sent to parents. That took about an hour.

“The students were obviously frustrated by this,” wrote Principal Chris Comparetto in the letter. “I know how important this exam is for families and how much time and effort goes into it.”

He offered the students the option to restart the test or take it on Nov. 18. (Three students opted for the make-up day, he noted.) Comparetto told families that the same issue happened at more than 15 Manhattan middle schools.

Comparetto did not respond to questions from Chalkbeat.

Many students spend months studying for the exam, with some families paying thousands of dollars for tutors or classes to help them prepare. The city approved a contract for the new exam last school year. Before the test, the Education Department provided middle schools with a 45-minute digital SHSAT “readiness” activity so students could practice logging on, confirm accommodations, and navigate the new online features.

Some studies have found that students in general tend to perform worse when taking tests on computers and tablets. But the research is not definitive, experts have told Chalkbeat.

Most students are accustomed to taking exams digitally, however. Students take MAP assessments online three times a year, and all students in grades 3-8 by this spring will be taking computer-based state reading and math tests.

Next year’s SHSAT is expected to be computer-adaptive, meaning that the level of difficulty of subsequent questions changes based on a test-taker’s responses. (This year’s test was not computer-adaptive.)

Last year, 25,933 students took the SHSAT, and 4,023, or 15.5%, received offers to the eight selective schools, according to Education Department data.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy atazimmer@chalkbeat.org.

NYC school bus companies threaten shutdown over contract dispute. Here’s what to know.

2025-10-21T21:30:23+00:00

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New York City’s troubled yellow school bus system is in the spotlight once again, with threats of a service disruption and looming mass layoffs due to a contract dispute with the city.

The city’s largest school bus companies notified the state Department of Labor that they are preparing to shut down operations and lay off employees on Nov. 1 if they don’t receive a contract extension, the New York Post first reported Monday.

Lawmakers, advocates, and city officials immediately condemned the bus companies’ threat, with schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos calling the move “deeply upsetting and an act of bad faith.”

The timing of the bus company’s push, just before November’s mayoral election, for a five-year extension that would outlast the incoming mayor’s first term, “effectively bypassed the oversight of voters and elected officials who manage these vital services,” Aviles-Ramos said.

Mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani agreed, telling reporters at an unrelated Tuesday press conference that the oversight panel in charge of approving the contract “is right to not give in to the threats.”

The bus companies argue they have no choice because their temporary contract is expiring and they can no longer operate without a longer-term agreement.

The episode is the latest in a long history of conflicts over how to manage the sprawling yellow bus system, which relies on a patchwork of largely for-profit companies to ferry some 150,000 students across nearly 19,000 routes each day. All told, the city spent nearly $2 billion on school busing last year.

Parents and advocates hope this clash can draw renewed attention to problems in a system notorious for delayed and no-show buses, long rides without sufficient AC, and a lack of transparency.

“There’s this tug of war over the money,” said Sara Catalinotto, the executive director of the advocacy group Parents for Improving School Transportation. “But this is a service, and without it these kids are discriminated against.”

What’s the history behind these bus contracts?

The current dispute springs from a disagreement over how to handle the city’s “legacy” school bus contracts, which date back to the 1970s and are typically renewed every five years. They most recently expired in June.

In the months before the contracts expired, city Education Department officials signaled they were interested in rebidding the contracts, or soliciting offers from a new set of companies to more efficiently modernize buses, increase service, and strengthen sanctions for contract violations.

Simply renewing the existing contracts gives the city “far less negotiating ability … because we have to continue with this same set of vendors,” Emma Vadehra, the Education Department’s former deputy chancellor, told the City Council in May.

But city officials say they can’t move forward with rebidding without the option to offer something called the “Employee Protection Provision,” or EPP.

That protection — built into the legacy contracts for decades — ensures unionized bus workers laid off by one company are prioritized for hiring by other companies, at their existing wages. Drivers and union officials consider the provision a dealbreaker — and would almost certainly strike without it.

But city officials say a 2011 state court decision prohibits them from inserting EPP into new contracts if they rebid — and only allows them to keep EPP if they extend existing contracts. The only fix, city officials say, is changing state law — an effort that has so far stalled in Albany.

Without that state legislation, city officials faced a choice: inking another five-year extension or pushing for a shorter-term contract in the hopes state lawmakers quickly clear the way for a rebid.

Who is opposed to a five-year contract renewal?

While the city moved ahead with negotiations for a five-year extension, a growing number of advocates, parents, and lawmakers flooded meetings of the Panel for Educational Policy, or PEP — the body that approves Education Department contracts — to push for a shorter-term contract.

“Do not vote yes to extend for some long period of time,” said Christi Angel, a parent leader in District 75, which serves students with significant disabilities who disproportionately rely on busing, at the September PEP meeting. Roughly 43% of students who ride school buses have disabilities. “Don’t reward bad behavior,” Angel said. “This is a broken system.”

Their arguments quickly gained traction in the PEP, where multiple members expressed their opposition to a five-year extension at September’s meeting.

The panel is expected to vote on the five-year extension next month, after the mayoral election, said PEP Chair Greg Faulkner, though he would prefer to wait until the new mayor takes office in January.

“Shouldn’t the mayor-elect have some say in a billion dollar contract?” said Faulkner. “I just think that’s sound governance.”

Why are the city and bus companies at odds right now?

Over the summer, the city and bus companies agreed to two emergency extensions to keep service running, the second of which expires on Oct. 31.

Without a guarantee of an active contract after that date — since the PEP is not voting this month — the bus companies claim they have no choice but to consider layoffs.

The city, however, had “long planned” to offer an emergency extension for November and December, and officials delivered the agreement to the bus companies on Monday, Aviles-Ramos said.

The PEP only votes on those extensions after they’ve already taken effect, Faulkner noted.

The bus companies, he said, are attempting to “create confusion in order to hold us hostage for a longer term agreement.”

The bus companies reject that assertion and say they simply cannot survive any longer on emergency extensions, which don’t allow them the kind of long-term certainty they need to operate their businesses.

“Banks will not finance 30-day extensions, buses can’t be bought, payroll cannot be paid,” said Sean Crowley, a lawyer representing several companies. “Enough is enough!”

The companies claim that they have already worked out the contours of a new five-year contract extension with the city and are just awaiting the PEP’s approval, though Faulkner said the Education Department hasn’t yet presented the PEP with the contract.

What happens from here?

A spokesperson confirmed that several bus companies had received the city’s offer for another emergency contract extension and were reviewing the documents.

Aviles-Ramos said the city is working to get “alternative transportation services” in place if that falls through.

But even if the bus companies and city do manage to avoid a service shutdown Nov. 1, the episode raises larger questions about how to make lasting improvements in the troubled system. Ongoing driver shortages make that task even harder.

The bus companies argue that the five-year contract agreement they sketched out with the city would achieve many of those goals, including stricter accountability to ensure drivers use GPS tracking, more staffing to field parent complaints, and monetary penalties for companies that underperform, according to testimony submitted to the PEP in September.

But critics continue to push for a shorter-term extension to give the state legislature time to pass EPP legislation, and clear the way for a rebid.

Mamdani has not offered specifics about how he would manage the school bus system, but said Tuesday that given the many concerns about yellow bus service, any contract extension deserves a “hard look.”

Some reformers point to changes already underway. Under Mayor Bill de Blasio, the city bought out the largest bus company and turned it over to a nonprofit overseen by the city.

Matt Berlin, the CEO of that nonprofit, called NYCSBUS, and former director of the city’s Office of Pupil Transportation, believes the nonprofit model has “a lot to offer the city” and could expand.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org

Chalkbeat asked: Mamdani pledges to boost special education, focus on vulnerable kids

2025-10-20T22:27:59+00:00

Zohran Mamdani indicated that improving special education, an often neglected part of the school system, would be a priority if elected.

“One of the biggest challenges currently facing the school system is the need to strengthen support for students with disabilities,” the Mamdani campaign wrote in response to a Chalkbeat questionnaire.

Mamdani singled out preschool children who often languish at home without seats and do not receive all the services to which they’re entitled. He suggested too many children with disabilities are attending private schools at the city’s expense.

And he also said the city should redouble its support for the city’s 154,000 homeless students, pointing to a program that pairs homeless students with adult mentors.

The Democratic nominee has not laid out a clear vision for improving the nation’s largest school system, aside from a desire to cede some of his power over it. He recently unveiled a plan to recruit more teachers and said he would phase out gifted programs for the city’s youngest students.

But his campaign’s responses indicate that his education agenda may focus on some of the system’s most vulnerable children, who are often far behind their peers in reading and math, experience elevated rates of chronic absenteeism, and are much less likely to graduate on time.

“It is encouraging that he acknowledges that one of the biggest challenges of the system is around supporting kids with [individualized education programs],” said Lori Podvesker, director of disability and education policy at IncludeNYC, which helps families navigate the special education system.

To improve support for students with disabilities, Mamdani pledged to recruit more special education teachers, a longstanding shortage area. He also vowed to reduce the number of students with disabilities who get private school tuition reimbursed by the city because the Education Department cannot offer an adequate placement.

Those payments were expected to balloon to roughly $1.3 billion last school year — a more than fourfold increase compared with a decade ago — according to figures from the city’s Independent Budget Office. (That includes legal, consultant, and transportation costs in addition to tuition payments.) Previous administrations have also expressed alarm with the growing cost but have failed to address it.

Still, Podvesker said she wished the responses fleshed out what concrete steps Mamdani would take to improve the special education system and how he would approach making schools more inclusive for students with disabilities.

In response to the questionnaire, Mamdani also did not outline any new strategies for improving the city’s lowest performing schools. Instead, he vowed to support a group of more than 400 community schools that provide wraparound services including mental health clinics and may offer additional learning time. The city’s teachers union, which endorsed Mamdani, backs that approach, which has shown some promise.

Mamdani left the door open to experimenting with expanding teacher training and other ideas that are “proving effective.”

You can find the Mamdani campaign’s full responses below.

Chalkbeat posed the same questions to all three candidates on Oct. 1. Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an independent, and Republican Curtis Sliwa did not respond to multiple requests. Early voting starts on Oct. 25. Election Day is Nov. 4.

What is your assessment of the school system’s strengths and weaknesses? Do you think a dramatic overhaul is needed or smaller adjustments?

The strength of New York City’s public school system lies in our dedicated teachers, administrators, counselors, paraprofessionals, and custodial staff who work tirelessly to educate and care for our students. One of the bright spots is Every Child and Family is Known, a pilot in the Bronx to support students experiencing homelessness. One in eight students are experiencing homelessness. By pairing Caring Adults to provide hands-on support to students and their families, Every Child and Family is Known exemplifies the ways that schools can serve as true hubs of our communities by meeting the needs of students inside and outside of the classroom. The pilot has proven to be very successful, resulting in reduced chronic absenteeism and improving students’ sense of belonging and well-being. I am heartened to see the Chancellor’s recent announcement of a $2.8 million expansion of the program. I intend to expand it even further, doubling the number of students and families served, with an ultimate goal to make it a citywide program that can serve every student in the shelter system so that anyone experiencing homelessness in the NYC public school system can access services to meet their basic needs.

One of the biggest challenges currently facing the school system is the need to strengthen support for students with disabilities. More than one-fifth of our students have disabilities and in the 2021-2022 school year, 37% of preschoolers with disabilities went the whole year without receiving at least one of the services the New York City Department of Education (DOE) was legally required to provide. I will improve special education for New York City’s students by increasing special education services for preschool age kids, reducing Carter cases, recruiting special education teachers and equipping them with resources to succeed, increasing evidence-based instructional approaches for students with disabilities, and improving language access for families. These improvements will make general education classrooms more inclusive so that students with special needs are no longer marginalized and can be well-served.

Mayor Bill de Blasio spent nearly $800 million on trying to turn around the city’s lowest performing schools, and eventually pulled the plug after it achieved a mixed record of success. There are few slam dunk methods for improving struggling schools at scale.

How would you approach school improvement? Do you have any ideas or strategies that haven’t been tried before?

While the research on large-scale school improvement initiatives is limited, it is critical to implement strategies that are grounded in data. A 2020 Rand study found that schools participating in the NYC Communities Schools initiative showed significant positive results, including better attendance and graduation rates, student achievement, and family engagement at schools–and less disciplinary incidents. I am a big supporter of the current network of 421 community schools that provide students with critical access to medical care, mental health services, tutoring and academic support, summer and afterschool programs, opportunities for experiential learning, and social services. I will also do a review of curricula based on the science of how children learn, including NYC Reads, and invest in efforts to scale strategies that are proving effective, including investing in teacher training.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

NYC still hasn’t made most special education fixes required by court order two years ago

2025-08-05T20:34:41+00:00

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After a federal judge in 2023 ordered city officials to make dozens of reforms to more swiftly provide special education services to families who won legal disputes, top Education Department officials embraced the extra oversight.

Yet almost as soon as the order was handed down, the city began to miss deadlines. Now, two years later, the Education Department has failed to comply with most of the order’s requirements.

At the time of the ruling, former schools Chancellor David Banks displayed an unusual level of support for a court action targeting his own agency.

“We, too, believe that change is long overdue,” he said. “We are moving aggressively to set a new course.”

But out of the 51 steps outlined in the court order issued by Manhattan federal Judge Loretta Preska, the city has implemented just 21 of them, according to a July report from a court appointed monitor. Some of the requirements are more than a year overdue.

As a result, special education experts warn that thousands of families are likely to continue facing lengthy delays for special education services and payments. There is little evidence that the court order has prompted the city to significantly speed up the process in the vast majority of cases, said Rebecca Shore, the litigation director at Advocates for Children, which brought the lawsuit that prompted the court order. Independent audits have yet to show significant progress.

Shore hoped that the court-ordered reforms “would actually help students get the ordered services that they require more quickly,” she said. “That’s still not happening.”

The court order was designed to resolve longstanding problems with the city’s special education system. Families often wait months or even years for the Education Department to implement services or make payments after they win them from an administrative judge. (The number of special education cases heard by administrative judges has exploded in recent years, with nearly 20,000 alone last school year.)

The delays mean children may go without the transportation, physical therapy, counseling, and tutoring services they’re entitled to — or their parents may be forced to pay out of their own pocket. In other cases, families may not receive tuition payments for private schools they are owed after successfully arguing their children could not be properly served in the city’s public schools.

Implementing orders from administrative judges on time has been the subject of litigation for more than two decades. Under a 2007 settlement, the Education Department was required to implement orders for services or payments within 35 days — unless the judge, also known as an impartial hearing officer, approves a longer timeline.

The city’s track record of complying with those time frames has long been abysmal, according to independent audits. Orders for services like speech therapy or counseling were implemented on time in just 9.5% out of nearly 3,400 cases, according to the most recent data from October 2023 to January 2024. Just 1% of the nearly 5,300 payment orders were fulfilled on time over the same time frame, which includes the initial period after the 2023 court order took effect. (The Education Department has paid about $39 million for regular audits over the last 14 years.)

The audits are reported on a significant lag, and Education Department officials said they are working with the court monitor to make more recent data available. Nicole Brownstein, an agency spokesperson, said the city has made some progress implementing the order.

“We have completed most of the obligations related to process improvements, staffing increases, and technology upgrades, and we are currently working on rolling out the new technology system,” she wrote in an email. Officials have spent $63 million so far to comply with the court order, she added. That figure includes $10.6 million for audits over the past two years and $1.9 million in fees for the court monitor, whose work began four years ago.

Major elements of the order remain unmet

A root cause of the delays in special education services and payments was that the office overseeing the process relied on outdated methods and technology, according to a report from the court appointed monitor, also known as a special master.

David Irwin of Thru Consulting LLC, who was appointed as the special master, found that the office relied on handwritten forms and laborious data-entry practices that involve “simply copying text from one place to another.”

As part of the court order, the city agreed to modernize its systems, hire more staff to process special education orders, and set up a hotline families could call for updates on the status of their cases among other changes.

Irwin told Chalkbeat the Education Department is making some progress, including adding more than 50 staffers to help process cases. But many more tasks remain in limbo. The hotline for families is not yet up and running, meaning parents typically have to send emails into what often feels like “a black hole,” Irwin said.

And one of the biggest technological overhauls that would help streamline the process of implementing special education orders is not set to launch until December, a timeline that Irwin’s report suggests may not be feasible.

“My team remains concerned about the tight timelines and little buffer time to absorb issues that may come up,” Irwin wrote, adding that he was encouraged by the Education Department’s commitment to the project.

The deadlines outlined in the court order were “aspirational” in many cases, Irwin acknowledged in an interview, though he added that “I’m not making any excuses for them.”

Some observers expressed deep frustration that the process has not yet yielded clear results after two years.

Additional court oversight has “failed to make any significant inroad into the NYC public schools’ pervasive failure to deliver the services and programs that administrative law judges order them to provide,” John Farago, a hearing officer who previously adjudicated special education cases in New York City, wrote in an email.

In the meantime, many students are missing out on essential special education services.

“Each day of delay,” Farago said, “is a day of lost and irreplaceable educational opportunity that cannot ever be recaptured.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify the timeframe of the special master’s services.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex atazimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Columbia Secondary School faces student protests and teacher exodus under new leadership

2025-06-30T23:38:50+00:00

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Two weeks before the end of the school year, Columbia Secondary School students packed into their Harlem gymnasium to air their grievances, carrying cardboard signs that read, “Teachers are resigning. Our community is broken,” and “This shouldn’t be our problem.”

The sit-in came one day after students learned that John Beletsky, a beloved ninth grade English and philosophy teacher, would not be returning in the fall.

Beletsky, a nine-year veteran of the school who also led the student band and Model United Nations, was the latest in an exodus of educators at the high-performing 6–12 public school since Principal Vikram Arora took over in March 2023.

The past two years have seen major shifts in the curriculum and culture at the 18-year-old school, which has strong ties to Columbia University. Six current and former staff members and eight students told Chalkbeat that a top-down approach to decision-making, lack of transparency, and concerns about whether students with disabilities are receiving adequate services and support have caused growing discontent. Those issues recently erupted into student-led protests.

By the end of the 2023-24 school year — the first full one with Arora at the helm — 13 employees, or nearly 22% of the staff left, according to Education Department data compiled by the Independent Budget Office for Chalkbeat. That was more than double the citywide staff turnover rate. The school had already lost some staff members after the retirement of longtime Principal Miriam Nightengale at the end of the 2021-22 school year, with 14 total departures that year. The year before, the school lost just two educators, or nearly 4% of the staff. (Data for the most recent year is not yet available.)

“ Students themselves have felt the pain of that,” said rising junior Gwen Zangre.

As the 720-seat school loses teachers, some students have lost access to some of the classes that drew them to Columbia Secondary in the first place. In late May, a student created a widely circulated petition demanding leadership changes. Earlier in June, students planned a walkout, but school security guards blocked them from leaving the building.

Columbia Secondary School students participate in a sit-in on June 13, 2025.

At the June 13 sit-in, multiple students confronted Arora and Assistant Principal Zach Lynn about Beletsky’s departure and what they described as a broader pattern of staff resignations, according to videos obtained by Chalkbeat.

An 11th grader detailed how abrupt changes to the curriculum of her 10th grade global history class had created undue pressure in the classroom.

“Teachers don’t feel listened to, which is why they’re leaving,” she said into the mic, “and students don’t know what’s going on because the leadership doesn’t communicate.”

Another student added, “The teachers who are still here are completely overworked.”

Arora told the hundreds of students gathered in the gymnasium that he and Lynn were taking “this feedback very seriously.”

“I concede to the fact that some teachers may not like what has happened and they might leave,” he said.

In a subsequent letter to families about the sit-in and Beletsky’s resignation, Arora acknowledged that it was “an emotional day” for many students.

“As we look ahead to the new school year, we are committed to creating more frequent, substantive, and consequential opportunities for students to be heard and to help shape the academic, athletic, and cultural life of our school,” he wrote.

Arora and Lynn referred Chalkbeat’s questions to the Department of Education’s press office, which said that a team from the District 5 superintendent’s office in Harlem is conducting more classroom visits and has held meetings with student leaders, the PTA, and the School Leadership Team to hear concerns, monitor progress, and reiterate expectations.

“In partnership with the school community, our central offices are implementing next-step interventions to ensure all students and staff are set up for success,” Chyann Tull, a Department of Education spokesperson, wrote in a statement. “Columbia Secondary School continues to outperform citywide averages, with strong student outcomes and a rigorous, college-preparatory curriculum.”

Columbia Secondary’s evolution in upper Manhattan

Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science & Engineering first opened its doors in 2007 with support and funding from Columbia University. Located north of Morningside Park, the school was conceived of as a way for Columbia — which had drawn scrutiny for its rapid expansion into historically Black Harlem by seizing homes and businesses through eminent domain — to give back to the neighborhood.

Under the agreement, Columbia faculty would help to create a customized curriculum for the school, and students could take courses and explore internship opportunities at the Ivy League institution. As part of its mandate, the school also had to reserve at least half of its seats for students from the surrounding neighborhoods of East, West, and Central Harlem, the Upper West Side, Inwood, and Washington Heights.

Today, more than half of the school’s students are Black or Hispanic, and just under a third are white. About half of Columbia Secondary’s student body is economically disadvantaged, and 1 in 5 students are now classified with a disability. The school currently reserves all of its seats for students from the neighboring areas. It operates out of a co-located building on West 123rd Street, which it shares with KIPP STAR middle school and P.S. 125 The Ralph Bunche School.

From the start, Columbia Secondary built a reputation for its rigorous liberal arts curriculum and high student achievement. All students were required to take political philosophy during their junior year and physics in 10th grade, for example. Rather than preparing for the global history Regents exam during their sophomore year, students undertook a major research paper intended to help them build college-level writing and critical thinking skills.

Signs that trouble was brewing at the school began to emerge in last year’s New York City Schools Survey results. Of more than 2,600 schools that participated in the survey citywide on teacher-principal trust, the school ranked in the bottom 10. Only 24% of staff responded favorably — a steep decline from previous years, according to a Chalkbeat analysis. (The survey results include charter schools and early childhood centers.)

Just 18% of the school’s teachers agreed with the statements, “I trust the principal/school leader at their word (to do what they say they will do),” and “The principal/school leader places the needs of children ahead of personal interests.”

Nine percent said they agreed or strongly agreed that the principal and assistant principals at the school “function as a cohesive unit,” placing Columbia Secondary among the bottom five schools citywide on that question.

One example, shared by Beletsky and others, of a change that affected trust in the school’s leadership involved the 10th grade global history teacher. The teacher was notified at the start of the school year that she would have to scrap her course’s research paper component and replace it with Regents exam prep.

The change sparked swift backlash from students and parents, and several months into the school year, the administration agreed to reinstate the paper. By the end of the year, school leaders and the teacher reached a compromise: Students could choose either to write the paper or take the Regents exam — but the teacher had to teach for both in the same class.

In other examples from students and teachers, the once-mandatory courses in 10th grade physics and 11th grade political philosophy became optional, and the school now only offers AP Spanish virtually. That decision was made without real input from Spanish language teachers, according to another teacher familiar with the changes.

Some teachers have left as a direct result of changes implemented by the new administration.

Last year, special education teacher Leslie Seifert, who also taught the school’s journalism elective, sent an email to his colleagues informing them that he had resigned from Columbia Secondary.

“The event that pushed me over the brink was when the principal eliminated my journalism course without discussing this decision with me, or even informing me of it,” Seifert wrote, adding that he first learned of the course cancellation when it didn’t appear on that year’s list of elective course offerings.

In a recent interview with Chalkbeat, Seifert said he remained unsettled by the administration’s apparent reluctance to engage with staff or to understand the school’s culture.

“It’s not just a lack of communication. It’s a lack of interest and curiosity,” he said.

Staff shortages, special education complaints

Despite the school’s high academic performance, staff and students said they were concerned about the administration’s push toward more Advanced Placement courses without enough teachers to teach the classes.

Beletsky confirmed that he and others taught six periods a day, rather than the contractual norm of five classes, in order to offset staff shortages at the school. Teachers who agree to extra periods of instruction are compensated for it, per contract rules — but several staff members said the additional workload can lead to teacher burnout, take away from other responsibilities, and lower the quality of instruction.

Students told Chalkbeat that the push for more course options, coupled with staff shortages, has impacted the teachers’ ability to give individualized attention and in-depth feedback.

“The quality of classes is really going down, especially in terms of being able to get feedback on your work,” said Susan Leites, a 2025 graduate.

“When we ask them why after they leave, they say ‘It’s not because of you guys, it’s because of the administration. It’s because they overwork us’,” said another recent graduate, Enzo Martinez-Klobnoch, who launched the online petition.

Some students with disabilities, who are entitled to have their classes co-taught by a general education teacher and a special education teacher, have also had to drop that support in order to take AP courses, according to former and current teachers.

In response to the online petition, Arora described allegations that students with disabilities “are being pressured to forgo support services” as “categorically false.”

“Our current special education compliance rate is near 100 percent,” he wrote in a May 26 email obtained by Chalkbeat.

But Beletsky argued that administrators at Columbia Secondary have asked students with disabilities to waive certain services so that the school’s inability to provide that service wouldn’t count against its compliance record.

“They’ve just gotten very strategic about making sure that people opt out,” Beletsky said.

While students with disabilities, who are entitled to having a co-teacher, can amend their special education program to enroll in a course taught solely by a general education teacher, the availability of co-teaching — or lack thereof — cannot determine the service, special education consultant Jenn Choi said.

The lack of co-teaching in AP classes at Columbia Secondary was on her radar, said Choi, who explained that a student’s special education plan “must contain appropriate recommendations for the individual student, irrespective of the availability of the program or service.”

Brandi Kovac, an 11-year veteran math teacher, co-taught three sections of geometry with a special education teacher at the start of the 2024-25 school year. Midway through the year, the administration merged the three sections into two, resulting in larger class sizes.

She said larger class sizes hinder teachers’ ability to provide individualized attention — and she was concerned about the effect on students with disabilities, who require additional attention and support.

“I think you’re sending a message when you collapse the ICT [Integrated Co-Teaching] sections into as few sections as legally possible,” Kovac said.

Kovac was among the teachers who won’t return to Columbia Secondary in the fall.

Some students with disabilities felt they were being shut out of higher-level classes.

Rising senior Terry Grandison feels that the school doesn’t give enough support to students with disabilities who may want to take advanced courses.

“They feel like we’re not gonna be able to keep up because we have certain disabilities,” he said. “While we might process information a little slower, things of that nature, we can still participate in AP classes, because we’re still as smart as everybody else here.”

Student Meigan Waxter stands outside of Columbia Secondary School, where she is a rising senior.

More broadly, rising senior Meigan Waxter felt students with disabilities weren’t valued in the school community.

“I feel like I’m more looked down upon just because of my disability in school,” she said.

The changes at Columbia Secondary have felt jarring to many of its educators. Beletsky believes that a disproportionate share of school resources has been directed toward a small number of students with access to advanced coursework, while students with disabilities have received less attention when it comes to being included in those same opportunities.

Seifert, Beletsky, and others noted the recent departure of former Assistant Principal Erin Flaherty, who left for Beacon High School in May, and the fact that Columbia Secondary had “lost its entire administration in two years.” (Beacon had its own fight between the school community with their principal, who ultimately left the school.)

Had the changes been more gradual and the communication more consistent, the relationship between administrators and teachers might have been better, Beletsky said.

“But these guys basically took it upon themselves to rewrite the culture of the school and the direction of the school,” Beletsky said. “The parents and the faculty and the students have all made it very clear to the district that that’s not what we want. But it hasn’t stopped it.”

Seyma Bayram is a New York City-based reporter.

NYC schools fail to protect students with disabilities from lengthy suspensions

2025-05-21T20:05:14+00:00

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After trading taunts with a classmate one morning in March 2023, Tristan threw a punch that busted the other student’s lip. A teacher who intervened wound up with a bloody nose and swollen lip in the ensuing scuffle.

Then a ninth grader at Brooklyn’s Medgar Evers College Preparatory School, Tristan later took responsibility for starting the fight. “I hit him first — that’s where I was wrong,” said the teen, who requested his last name be withheld for privacy reasons.

School officials suspended Tristan for more than three weeks, among the longest punishments typically allowed under city guidelines. But while the case seemed open and shut, an impartial hearing officer later ruled that the lengthy suspension violated the teen’s rights.

Tristan, who has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, received special education services to address impulse control and anger management. But the school failed to provide numerous counseling sessions that were supposed to help him learn to regulate his emotions, the hearing officer found.

During a legally required meeting to assess whether Tristan’s disability played a role in the fight, school staff did not consider his special education records, behavioral plan, or history of similar outbursts.

“There is no evidence that the [school’s review team] discussed any relevant documents,” wrote hearing officer Patricia Le Goff, who noted the school did not follow the required step-by-step process and Tristan’s mother was not allowed to offer her perspective. The hearing officer found that Tristan’s behavior stemmed from his disability and the school’s failure to provide counseling sessions.

Le Goff concluded that Tristan should not have received a lengthy punishment. But it was too late. Tristan had served his suspension.

New York City’s public schools routinely flout federal rules designed to prevent schools from removing children from class for long periods due to behavior related to their disabilities, a Chalkbeat investigation has found.

To examine the discipline process, Chalkbeat obtained hundreds of pages of special education records and rulings from impartial hearing officers who reviewed appeals from families whose children with disabilities received lengthy punishments. Those records — as well as interviews with more than a dozen parents, advocates, and school officials — reveal a pattern of schools failing to properly consider a student’s disability during the suspension process.

As a result, some students are serving longer punishments than legally allowed, a problem that disproportionately affects Black students. The removals can compound academic struggles among students who are often far behind their peers.

The problem stretches back years. Independent monitors who looked at nearly 1,400 suspensions between 2015 and 2018 found systemic flaws with the review process, according to a Chalkbeat analysis of findings that have not previously been made public.

“There are students who are being suspended weeks and weeks more than they should be,” said Andrew Gerst, an attorney who handled Tristan’s appeal while working at Mobilization for Justice, an organization that represents low-income families. “They should not be kept out of school one minute longer than they have to be.”

Students with disabilities are far more likely to be suspended compared with their nondisabled peers. As a group, they were removed from class 14,000 times last school year, about 39% of all removals and suspensions, despite representing 22% of the student body.

For long-term suspensions, which are less common and typically issued for significant misconduct, federal law requires an extra level of review. Schools must consider whether the behavior in question was related to a student’s disability or a failure to provide special education services guaranteed in their learning plan.

Trisha Clayton, Tristan’s mother, said the suspension review process left her feeling like the school wasn’t interested in supporting her son, and the lengthy punishment knocked him further off track. A different hearing officer later ordered the Education Department to pay for 900 hours of one-on-one tutoring in addition to other therapies to make up for inadequate special education support.

“He missed out on a lot of instructional hours,” Clayton said. “If you have a child with a learning disability or anger issues, they just don’t want to deal with those kinds of kids.”

Education Department officials said they could not comment on specific student cases, and the principal at Medgar Evers did not respond to questions.

Medgar Ever College Preparatory School suspended Tristan for nearly a month. A hearing officer later found it was improper.

School staffers on other campuses who have participated in suspension reviews said there are often good reasons to issue longer punishments, as they can help maintain a safe learning environment for other students and possibly deter future misconduct.

“Holding your teacher against the wall, or punching someone in the face, that’s not necessarily a manifestation of their disability most of the time,” said Anna Nelson, a former Bronx assistant principal who has participated in suspension reviews. “If a kid’s never been suspended before, it’s a message that really sticks with them.”

But advocates and parents say that schools often reflexively dismiss the possibility that a student’s disability played a role in their misconduct.

City education officials acknowledged in an interview with Chalkbeat that implementation of the suspension reviews can be uneven.

Over 600 Education Department staffers have been trained to make the reviews more collaborative, according to a department spokesperson, and officials have revised letters sent to families to better explain the process.

Stephanie Jemilo, a special projects director at the Education Department who oversees the training, said her team works with specific schools when they receive complaints from families. The goal is to make the meetings feel less punitive.

“It really is the process to say, ‘Hey, something‘s not working here, and let’s all come together and figure out what’s not working,’” she said.

Schools have long failed to account for students’ disabilities in the suspension process

All public schools are required to educate students with disabilities alongside their nondisabled peers to the greatest extent possible, a cornerstone of the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The law is designed to prevent schools from using the discipline process to exclude those students.

When a student is suspended for more than 10 days, or if there’s a pattern of short-term removals, school staff must determine if the behavior in question was “caused by or had a direct and substantial relationship” to the student’s disability or the school’s failure to provide mandated services.

If the answer to either is yes, the student is supposed to return to class immediately, and the school is required to conduct a behavior assessment. (There are some exceptions for extreme violence, drugs, or weapons possession.)

To make that decision, school officials must hold a meeting called a “manifestation determination review” within 10 days of the student’s removal from class. Schools must include parents and at least one staff member who knows the student, including a school psychologist or guidance counselor. Families are entitled to request others to join, such as a teacher who works with their child, and they can bring an advocate.

In theory, the process should be collaborative. But the final decision rests with the student’s school, an arrangement that families and advocates say is far from objective.

“It’s like somebody gets arrested and you go to the police station and ask them to have a hearing about whether they think that they were right to arrest the person,” Gerst said. “They have every incentive to stand by their decision.”

Problems with the city’s discipline process aren’t new, according to a Chalkbeat review of legal records and city data that has not previously been made public. A 2002 class action lawsuit filed by the nonprofit group Advocates for Children claimed schools routinely used discipline to exclude students without properly considering their disability.

After a protracted legal battle, the city settled the case in 2015 and agreed to some reforms. They beefed up training and created a mandatory checklist that spells out each step of the process schools must follow.

The city was also required to check whether schools were following the rules, sending independent monitors into nearly 1,400 suspension review meetings, a sample of the meetings held between 2015 and 2018. The monitors found glaring and systemic problems, according to reports obtained by Gerst through a public records request and shared with Chalkbeat.

For example, only 44% of suspension review meetings included “effective” discussion of the incident that led to the suspension and whether it was connected to disability-related behaviors, the monitors found during the 2017-18 school year. In 20% of cases that year, there was limited or no discussion of a student’s special education learning plan, raising questions about how the review team determined whether a student’s behavior was related to a lack of services.

Nicole Tuchinda, a professor at the Loyola University New Orleans College of Law who has written about the suspension review process, called those figures “disturbing” because they reveal schools frequently did not comply with key components of the law.

“It just shows it’s a sham,” Tuchinda said.

Failing to protect students with disabilities from longer punishments could further set back a group that is already disproportionately removed from their classrooms, are far behind their peers academically, and less likely to graduate on time.

One study focusing on New York City found suspensions led to students passing fewer classes, increasing their risk of dropping out, and lowering the odds of graduating. Other research also generally suggests that suspensions are linked to worse academic outcomes. Students who are suspended for more than five days are typically sent to alternate learning centers away from their school, an environment students say is often dull or chaotic.

Problems with the suspension review process are also more likely to affect students of color, mirroring broader trends in school discipline. Between September 2021 and December 2022, more than half of the 1,825 suspension reviews involved Black students, even though only a quarter of students with disabilities are Black, city data show.

Schools were more likely to find that white students’ behavior was related to their disability compared with their Black or Latino peers, according to figures obtained by Gerst.

Education Department officials declined to provide more recent figures and there is no federal data on the suspension review process.

The responsibility for ensuring the city is complying with federal special education laws falls to the state’s Education Department. State officials found some problems with the city’s suspension review process in 2023 that required “corrective action,” according to spokesperson JP O’Hare. He did not specify the nature of the problem or what specific action was required. The state Education Department has “not received any specific ongoing concerns” about the process, O’Hare added.

It is difficult to know how widespread problems with the review process are today: The Education Department stopped sending independent monitors to the meetings after they were no longer legally required.

Melinda Andra, a longtime advocate at the Legal Aid Society who has represented families in the suspension process, said there were some signs of improvement when the monitors were in place.

Now, she said, “Things have kind of backtracked.”

‘Everybody was just on the attack’: One family felt alienated by suspension review

Danet Ferguson’s son, Malachi, faced a monthlong suspension for fighting another student in January, striking two teachers who tried to break them up. She was confident the school would conclude the 13-year-old’s ADHD and oppositional defiance disorder contributed to the incident. The school found such a link in a previous suspension this school year.

In the aftermath of the fight, Malachi was removed from class at I.S. 181 in the Bronx. Ferguson, who runs a day care, was forced to drive him to a suspension center more than an hour away. “I’m stressed out and frustrated,” Ferguson said at the time. “His grades have dropped. … I’m missing work.”

A little over a week after Malachi was removed from class, his school held a suspension review meeting to assess if his disability played a role in the fight. Ferguson and Michaela Shuchman, her legal advocate, pointed to Malachi’s history of aggression and impulsivity, which are well documented in his special education records.

Michaela Shuchman, a lawyer at Bronx Legal Services, is pushing for reforms to the suspension review process.

But school staff countered that Malachi’s behavior was premeditated. They said they could not let the incident slide without significant punishment, according to Shuchman, a lawyer at Bronx Legal Services.

“Everybody was just on the attack,” said Ferguson. “There was no one trying to listen.”

The school ruled Malachi’s disability wasn’t a major factor, allowing his suspension to continue. With Shuchman’s help, Ferguson appealed the case. A hearing officer found several procedural flaws with the school’s suspension review process.

Ferguson wanted Malachi’s counselor and one-on-one paraprofessional to attend the meeting, two people who could have helped interpret his behavior that day. But the school dismissed the request, arguing it came too late to ensure the staff could be there and wasn’t worth postponing the meeting, according to the hearing officer’s ruling.

Hearing officer Tanya White blasted the school for that decision, noting that Ferguson “had a right to designate attendees.” She added: “The two people that [Ferguson] requested would have provided a unique insight into the ultimate determination.”

It was also unclear whether the school was following Malachi’s special education learning plan, an issue that was not sufficiently discussed during the suspension review process, according to White’s ruling.

Malachi is supposed to have a full-time behavioral support aide, who had helped keep his behavior in check in the past, the hearing officer wrote. School staff claimed there was a different aide with Malachi at the time of the incident, though the hearing officer noted the aide’s presence was not included in the official incident report, nor did that person offer a witness statement or attend the suspension review meeting.

“The only two people who placed the covering paraprofessional at the scene are DOE staff members with a vested interest in the answer as to whether the Student’s [learning plan] was being implemented,” White wrote.

White was also troubled that the school had removed references to physical outbursts in Malachi’s behavior plan. Altering the behavior plan “undermines the DOE’s assertion that it arrived at the correct conclusion,” she wrote.

The principal of I.S. 181 did not respond to a request for comment. An Education Department spokesperson declined to comment on specific student cases and did not answer a question about whether the school’s staff have received training on the suspension process.

White ruled in Malachi’s favor, ordering the Education Department to pay for about 126 hours of one-on-one tutoring to make up for the disruption to his education. Malachi still served the monthlong suspension, which would have been nearly three weeks shorter if the school had found the fight was related to his disability at the initial review meeting.

Shuchman said overturning a suspension on appeal after the student has already served it is common, as that process often takes around 40 days to play out and most suspensions are capped at 20 days.

“It’s really justice delayed,” she said.

City officials resist calls for reform

Over the past year, advocates have pushed the Education Department to reform the discipline process but have struggled to gain traction.

A group of attorneys lobbied the Education Department to directly connect families to advocates before the suspension review meetings, as parents often don’t know their rights or how the process works. A handful of public interest legal groups offered to supply pro-bono advocates.

“Just having somebody in the room, just having your back … is really important to families,” said Gerst, one of the lawyers who supported the effort. “When we do advocate, we often find so many other special education issues.”

Some advocates and parents also suggested that school staff don’t review their own school’s suspension decision. The idea has some precedent: At charter schools, the suspension reviews are typically overseen by Education Department staff who don’t work for the school.

So far, the city has rejected the proposal to provide legal representation for families during the process, a decision Education Department officials declined to explain.

But they expressed some openness to taking the process out of the hands of the school that disciplined the student.

“It’s something that we are talking about,” said Jemilo, the Education Department official, “and exploring what an alternative could be.”

If the city made that change “that could be big,” Shuchman said, because the current process creates “a real conflict of interest.”

It is unclear how seriously city officials are considering it, however. An Education Department spokesperson declined to answer questions about who would conduct the reviews or a timeline for making that change.

Trisha Clayton and her son, Tristan, pose for a portrait at their home in 2024 in Brooklyn, New York.

In the meantime, advocates said the process is still stacked against families.

For Clayton, Tristan’s mother, the process was so overwhelming that she pulled him out of the city’s school system.

Even though Tristan won hundreds of hours of one-on-one tutoring, Clayton struggled to coax him to attend. The teen’s experience at school had reached a breaking point, and Tristan wound up getting suspended again, she said.

That was the final straw. “I was like, ‘I’m going to spend half the time at a suspension hearing,’” Clayton said.

So last September, Tristan moved in with his aunt upstate. His mother said he’s doing better in school, landed a job at a local bakery, and plans to go to trade school for plumbing.

The guidance counselor from Tristan’s old school recently called to ask after the teen.

Clayton was thrilled to offer an update.

“He’s really thriving,” she said. “I’m in disbelief.”

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex atazimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

NYC schools get $2 billion from Washington. What’s at risk if Trump defunds the Education Dept.?

2025-03-12T21:05:00+00:00

This article is part of an ongoing collaboration between Chalkbeat and THE CITY.

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New York City parents and school leaders are fearful that President Donald Trump’s administration could cut into the roughly $2 billion the federal government sends to the nation’s largest school system each year.

The U.S. Department of Education cut its workforce in half on Wednesday, and an executive order to dismantle the department entirely is expected to follow.

Trump has long called to dissolve the U.S. Department of Education — starting in his first term. And newly confirmed Secretary of Education Linda McMahon seems poised to help, sending an internal memo to her staff last week where she described the department’s “final mission.”

“My vision is aligned with the President’s: to send education back to the states and empower all parents to choose an excellent education for their children,” she wrote in the letter.

But how Trump might achieve his goal to close the department is not straightforward: Only Congress has the authority to take such action. Still, with a gutted department, educators and advocates worry that major funding cuts will be on the horizon.

“We’ve all been looking at the alignment of the Project 2025 playbook and the first… weeks of the new administration,” Aaron Pallas, a professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, told Chalkbeat last week. Project 2025 calls for the gradual phasing out of certain funding from the federal government, he added.

Federal funding made up about 5% – or $2.2 billion – of New York City Public Schools’ budget for fiscal year 2025, which ends on June 30, according to the city’s adopted budget. (That includes COVID relief money, which was set to expire next year regardless.)

The city Education Department’s share of federal education funds is split across several grant programs targeting students from low-income households, those living in shelters, or students with disabilities, for example.

The Trump administration has already taken steps to withhold funding from certain programs. The department’s Office of Civil Rights sent a Dear Colleague letter last month to schools stating that they must forgo their diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs and activities to continue receiving federal aid. The DOE also launched an “End DEI” portal on its website. The directive has garnered pushback, including in lawsuits brought by multiple civil rights groups, and several attorneys general, led by New York’s Letitia James, issued their own guidance to schools. And James, along with 20 other attorneys general, filed a suit Thursday to stop Trump’s broader efforts to dismantle the department.

In addition to abolishing the department, Trump and other conservative federal lawmakers have called for civil rights enforcement and major grant programs, such as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, to be transferred to other departments within the federal government while other programs might be passed onto states.

Various scenarios could play out: Title 1 funding for high poverty schools and funding for students with disabilities could remain untouched — or they could be swept into broader budget cuts, converted into block grants given as a lump sum to states to spend as they see fit, or reduced by Trump’s push to steer more federal funding to private school vouchers.

While it’s unclear what will actually happen to the federal funding that the Education Department currently allocates, below are some of the highest-funded grant programs that the NYC Department of Education currently receives from the federal government, which could be at risk if the Trump administration restricts certain funds or calls for dramatic cuts:

ESSA, Title I ($679.1 million)

The Every Student Succeeds Act calls for students from low-income families to receive “fair, equitable and high-quality” education, according to the law. Federal dollars to support such students come from the Title I program.

The city’s Education Department has received more than $679 million from Title I so far this fiscal year, accounting for about a third of the department’s federal education revenue. It’s the largest source of federal funding to local districts.

Though federal law says schools must have at least a 40% poverty rate to qualify for the funds, districts have some freedom to set their thresholds, and in New York City, Title 1 schools serve at least 60% of students from low-income families. The money pays for costs including the salaries of paraprofessionals, mental health services, and technology upgrades.

Close to 1,300 of the city’s 1,600 schools qualified for the Title I schoolwide program this year, according to school allocation memorandum reports.

But there are strict requirements for how Title I funds may be used, Pallas said, and districts must provide a fair amount of guidance to school leaders on allowable expenditures. Title I funds, for example, cannot be used to fund the salaries of a gym or art teacher.

“The loss of Title I funding would widen the achievement gap, leaving our most vulnerable students without the resources they need to succeed,” said NeQuan McLean, president of the District 16 Community Education Council in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. “This would undermine years of progress made in District 16 and severely limit opportunities for students who depend on these services to thrive.”

Meal programs ($545.4 million)

New York City participates in several meal programs subsidized by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, including the National School Lunch Program, School Breakfast Program, Summer Food Service Program, and the Child and Adult Care Program.

One in four children in New York City experiences food insecurity, according to a report published by the non-profit food rescue organization City Harvest.

All New York City public schools — as well as hundreds of public charter and private schools that operate outside of the city’s education department — provide free breakfasts and lunches to students through the federal government’s community eligibility provision. The provision allows schools to offer the meals at no charge to students, regardless of their families’ economic backgrounds, with the USDA covering the bulk of the costs.

“This is the most cynical and cruel time to be cutting food programs,” said Liz Accles, executive director of the food access non-profit Community Food Advocates, referring to how an executive order could impact federal food program allocations.

With proposals by House Republicans to reduce access to SNAP benefits and increase the eligibility threshold for meal programs looming, Accles said there could also be a “potential compounding impact of these threats.”

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act ($290.8 million)

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires federal, state, and local education agencies to allocate funds to support students with disabilities.

In order for states and school districts to receive the federal funds, they must agree to use the money to supplement their own spending, rather than replace it. Schools can use the federal dollars on supplies, transportation, salaries, and contracted services for students with disabilities, such as translation and job training services.

At her confirmation hearing, McMahon proposed moving management of IDEA to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Moving the grant to a different department could force states and local education agencies to overcome additional bureaucratic hurdles when attempting to resolve civil rights complaints, said Senior Attorney at the Education Law Center Wendy Lecker.

“Having it all in the education department means that the state and districts only have to go to one place,” she said. “They don’t have to duplicate efforts.”

Additional ESSA funding ($171.5 million)

Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, New York City schools also receive Title II funds, which support “effective” instruction. Title II funds can be used to pay for professional development programs, recruitment efforts, retaining educators in high-need areas, and other costs related to supporting educators.

Title III is a formula-based grant program that supports both English language learners and immigrant students. For English learners, the funds can be used to enhance or develop new programs, provide instruction outside of school hours, or provide translation services to parents. The Education Department also uses the money to provide immigrant students with programs that help them navigate the U.S. education system, as well as services to their family members through community-based organizations.

Title IV covers additional education programs that enhance basic learning at schools. For example, the funds could cover a class on nutrition and the costs of food items to be included in lessons. The funds could also be used to pay for field trips.

Health and medical services ($140.2 million)

Medicaid is a program that provides health care for free or at a low cost to low-income individuals. The reimbursements make up about 4% – or $81 million – of the Education Department’s federal revenue so far this fiscal year.

The department uses the reimbursements to pay for health and medical services for students with disabilities, including physical therapy, transportation, or counseling. The city’s Education Department also expects to receive about $16.7 million for substance use prevention and intervention.

Child Care and Development Block Grant ($125 million)

Through the Child Care and Development Block Grant Act, the federal government sends money to states to subsidize child care costs for low-income families.

The city mostly uses its allocation from the state to provide low-income New Yorkers with child care vouchers. Recipients can then use the vouchers to enroll their children in a formal child care center, a family-based center or an informal setting, like a relative’s home. Nearly 53,000 children used the vouchers to enroll in an early childhood education program as of last December, according to a report by the Administration for Children’s Services, which administers the program.

The city also uses the money for extended day programs beyond school hours and EarlyLearn, an early childhood program for babies and toddlers who are 6 weeks to 3 years old. More than 10,000 children were enrolled in the program last fiscal year.

A potential cut to these funds would be “disastrous to the early childhood education program that New York City has been building to meet the needs and demands of working families across the five boroughs,” said J.T. Falcone, director of communications at United Neighborhood Houses, which supports a network of settlement houses that provide early childhood programming.

Head Start ($70.7 million)

Head Start is a grant-based program run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that provides free early childhood education to low-income families. About 19,000 children rely on the program in the city.

Changing the conversation: Disability pride clubs foster inclusion at Stuyvesant and beyond

2025-02-07T18:31:07+00:00

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In Stuyvesant High School’s sixth-floor library, about a dozen students brainstormed how to raise money to buy equipment or assistive technology for students with disabilities.

They talked about whether artificial intelligence should be used in diagnosing cognitive differences (they decided against that). They discussed their ongoing project to examine language used in special education. They even delved into the debate between nature versus nurture.

In some ways, it was just another Thursday at Stuyvesant High School, where after-school clubs were abuzz with activity before the winter break.

But this was the first club of its kind at Stuy — and the largest such club in city schools focused on fostering an inclusive environment for students of all abilities.

StuySPICE is one of about 90 disability affinity, disability pride, and inclusion clubs in a network formed this school year through the Education Department’s new Division of Inclusive and Accessible Learning in partnership with the Neurodiversity Alliance, a nonprofit founded for and by students with learning differences. Another five are in the pipeline following the Education Department’s “inclusive learning” training sessions, officials said.

Two public school alumni serving on the Special Education Advisory Council, Victor Edwards and Joshua Stern, pushed for the citywide rollout of pride clubs, which are open to all students at a school, as a way to raise more awareness around ableism and exclusion of students with disabilities in school communities. Modeled on gender and sexuality alliances, these new student clubs aim to bolster a sense of belonging and community for students with disabilities, whether or not they have diagnoses or receive special education support through individualized education programs, or IEPs, or have accommodations through 504 plans.

StuySPICE — which stands for students promoting inclusivity and civic engagement — is the largest such club in the network, Education Department officials said. Its meetings average about 30 kids each week, with a high of 96 students coming to its early December gathering, Dheenah Whaqid, the club’s founder and Stuy junior said, emphasizing that all students were welcome.

“We don’t believe that you need to be diagnosed with an IEP or a 504 to believe that you have a cognitive-like difference,” she said.

The club’s seed was planted when Whaqid was in eighth grade, and she participated in the Education Department’s disability pride month art contest. She began learning more about the Americans with Disabilities Act, watching a video about 1990’s “Capitol Crawl” when more than 1,000 people marched to the capitol building, some of them ditching their wheelchairs to crawl up the steps in their push for the ADA.

“I made it a mission that as soon as I went to high school, I was going to start something to help people with disabilities,” Whaqid said.

In her sophomore year, Whaquid emailed Christina Foti, deputy chancellor for the inclusive learning division, about starting a club at Stuy, and got connected to Education Department staffers. They provided support to help get it off the ground last year, making it one of the original “pioneers” in the newly formed inclusive schools clubs network, Whaqid said.

Number of students with disabilities increasing at Stuyvesant

In some ways, the club’s popularity at Stuyvesant might not be surprising. The school is famous for its plethora of clubs and incredibly engaged student body.

But Stuyvesant isn’t a school known for having a robust special education program. In fact, the school, like the seven other specialized high schools that require a test as the sole means of entry, has among the city’s lowest percentage of students classified with disabilities.

Things, however, are beginning to change.

In the 2019-20 school year, just 15 students at the school were classified as having disabilities and receiving special education services, according to public data. This year, there are 61 such students, Education Department officials said. Another 96 students receive accommodations through 504 plans.

Last year, Stuyvesant brought on Gina Paulson as assistant principal overseeing student support services, including those receiving mandated special education services through IEPs or other accommodations through 504 plans.

Paulson, who previously worked as an assistant principal at Brooklyn Tech, has made herself accessible to families and discloses her own background as someone with dyslexia to her students. She is also the faculty advisor for StuySPICE.

Under her guidance, the school has been ramping up services. This year, she brought a speech therapist on staff for the first time. (Previously, Stuy students who needed speech services had to get vouchers from the Education Department and find their own providers outside of school. Students still have to do that for other related services.) The school, which serves nearly 3,300 students, has three special education teachers, according to budget documents. Five years ago, the school had no special education teachers, budget documents show.

Stuyvesant has been identifying more students who did not enter the school with an IEP or 504 and starting the process to identify support they might need, Paulson said.

Students might need support related to executive functioning, attention, or social-emotional skills, for example, that may not have been evident until they arrived at the school, she said. The school might need historical information about a student’s prior performance and might require supplemental diagnostic testing, such as speech or assistive technology evaluations.

“Identifying students’ learning needs in high school can be very difficult and requires a great deal of parent involvement and support,” she said.

Students don’t need to have or disclose disability to be in club

Two students who showed up to the club on Thursday for the first time — one with an IEP and another with a 504 plan — explained why they hadn’t come before: They were often taking tests on which they were allowed extra time.

“I feel like we’re in a very supportive environment where people are very understanding,” said a student who came late to the club because of a test that afternoon. “I’ll tell people like that I have to take tests after school because I have a 504, and they’re like, ‘Oh OK, cool.’ My biggest complaint is the scheduling thing.”

The student with the IEP also felt that the club created an inclusive environment, but he had general concerns that the language the school system uses around special education made it hard to understand by students who don’t receive services — and even those that do.

“It’s the use of very long words or just these acronyms,” he said listing IEPs, 504, and SETSS, for example. “Do you know what SETSS stands for, or how it’s even spelled?” he asked the group. (Special education teacher support services involve targeted support a special education teacher provides in a small group or one-on-one setting either by pushing into a classroom or pulling students out of class.)

When he first said that he had SETSS, Whaqid thought he was doing something related to constructing theater sets, she said.

Though students in StuySPICE are not asked to disclose whether they have a disability they are welcome to share so if they choose.

One student talked about her mother’s experience as a paraprofessional working with students with disabilities. Another talked about her grandfather, who is deaf.

Whaqid discussed how she views neurodiversity as an expansive concept, saying that many people might feel like they’re different but not have a diagnosis, or they might have a diagnosis but not want to share.

“We’re trying to create an inclusive community,” she said, “and help everybody feel included while getting ideas on how to improve the community.”

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

NYC schools to bolster translation services to families with limited English after lawsuit

2025-02-06T22:51:16+00:00

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Under a new court settlement, New York City education officials will soon be required to beef up training and oversight at schools to ensure they are providing translation services for families who don’t primarily speak English.

The agreement stems from a 2019 federal civil rights lawsuit that alleged a “pattern and practice” of failing to provide interpretation services across the nation’s largest school system. Families were unable to access communications about bullying, lead contamination, and even serious medical conditions, the lawsuit claimed. In one instance, a family who requested an interpreter for a meeting was asked by school officials, “Why don’t you learn English?”

About 356,000 of the city’s public school students came from families who primarily speak a language other than English at home last school year, or roughly 44% of students, a population larger than the entire enrollment of Chicago Public Schools. Since the summer of 2022, New York City has seen an influx of about 48,000 newcomer students, many of whom are migrants who do not speak English, underscoring the importance of widespread interpretation services.

Under the terms of the new legal settlement finalized last week, the Education Department will expand “language access training” for a range of staff including principals, parent coordinators, and school nurses. The training will emphasize parents’ rights, best practices for interpretation, and how to make those services available, according to the settlement agreement. Central employees who help support schools, known as “language access coordinators,” will also receive enhanced training.

M’Ral Broodie-Stewart, a senior staff attorney at Legal Services NYC, which brought the lawsuit, is hopeful those efforts will pay off.

Translation for families has “not been happening on the ground in schools based on pure ignorance of the requirement to provide language access and how to actually get documents translated and how to get interpreters on the phone,” Broodie-Stewart said. “That’s been the biggest barrier for language access.”

The settlement requires city officials to collect more data on the number of requests for interpretation of documents and meetings that are fulfilled, though those figures will be reported to the plaintiffs confidentially. (City officials have previously made some of that information public.)

The Education Department agreed to send letters, conduct robocalls, and post on social media to remind families that language services are available, and it will post guidance for interpreting documents and meetings on its website. Officials must also create a new complaint form for families to report issues securing interpretation services.

Interpretation services are especially crucial for caregivers of students with disabilities who may struggle to advocate on their child’s behalf if evaluations, meetings, and special education learning plans aren’t properly translated. About 30% of the New York City students with disabilities have a home language other than English, Education Department officials said. Each of the four families involved in the 2019 lawsuit had children enrolled in public schools geared toward students with complex disabilities.

The responsibility to arrange translations of many special education documents and meetings has long rested primarily with school staff, leading to a patchwork system of finding outside vendors or recruiting staff to interpret even if they had limited language skills or knowledge of technical special education terms.

City officials have taken steps in recent years to centralize the process. In 2021, the Education Department agreed to translate special education learning plans for any student who needed it, instead of relying heavily on school staff. Last school year, the Education Department centrally translated 13,205 special education plans, up from 7,078 in the 2019-20 school year.

Still, even though all parents are eligible for their child’s special education plan to be interpreted, that process is not automatic and requires parents to request such services. Broodie-Stewart said it should be offered when schools meet with parents to craft the learning plan.

Much of the interpretation and translation process for day-to-day communication and meetings will still be handled by individual schools, Broodie-Stewart added, though she said there will be enhanced oversight from the Education Department.

Hui Qin Liu, who speaks Mandarin and has a child with autism, previously told Chalkbeat that she struggled to understand why requests for feeding therapy went unaddressed or why her daughter’s physical therapy services were reduced. She also struggled to communicate with the school about why her child, who was nonverbal, came home with bruises and bite marks. The situation felt “hopeless,” said Liu, one of four families who were part of the lawsuit along with the Alliance for Families with Developmental Needs.

“It was like torture to not be able to get updates on my child, especially during emergency situations,” Liu said in a statement in response to the settlement agreement. “But I am now hopeful that others can get the translation and interpretation services they need to make sure their children are safe and are getting the academic supports they need to learn.”

Liu and the other three families will each receive $11,000 as part of the settlement.

After this story was published, Education Department officials offered a statement and noted that they have increased spending on language access programs from $5.2 million in fiscal year 2019 to $14 million last year.

“Our goal is to ensure that our translation and interpretation services are available to all parents and families in our community,” Education Department spokesperson Onika Richards wrote in a statement. “As we continue to make improvements, we encourage all parents and families to request the services they need directly through schools or at schools.nyc.gov/hello.”

As part of the settlement, the Education Department did not admit to any wrongdoing.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Families left in dark about impact of alternate assessment track on students with disabilities

2025-02-05T20:34:18+00:00

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Before starting at his Harlem high school, Jeurry always assumed he was progressing appropriately in school, despite having significant learning challenges.

However, in his freshman year, he began to notice himself struggling to read longer words and more complex sentences.

As he grew increasingly overwhelmed, it became clear that the small classes exclusively for students with disabilities that he had been in since kindergarten had not adequately prepared him for high school.

Still, Jeurry managed to pass nearly all his classes. His final meeting with his Committee on Special Education — which consisted of Jeurry’s mom and several faculty members — took place in December 2016. By then, the senior had earned 45 credits — 44 were required to graduate — and a C+ average, records show.

But Jeurry was devastated to learn that he would not earn a diploma.

The reason was based on a decision the committee made when Jeurry was in sixth grade and, according to records, never revisited while he was in high school. At that time, the educators concluded that Jeurry could not learn grade-level curriculum. They decided he would be “alternately assessed,” or evaluated based on lower achievement standards. New York State students who take alternate assessments through high school cannot earn a diploma, a prerequisite for military service, many jobs, and most degree- or certificate-granting college and trade school programs.

Heartbroken, he begged the faculty to find a solution during the 2016 meeting. “They didn’t even care,” Jeurry said. “They just wanted me to ‘graduate’ and get out.”

Jeurry, who is now 26 and was diagnosed with a mild intellectual disability after graduating high school, requested that his last name be withheld over concerns about the stigma surrounding intellectual disabilities.

Special education advocates say the systemic failures that led to Jeurry’s situation eight years ago continue to jeopardize the futures of similar students. Last school year, 6,116 New York City students took the New York State Alternate Assessment, according to state data. Federal law requires that states offer such assessments for students with disabilities who are incapable of taking state tests. Importantly, it also states that only “students with the most significant cognitive disabilities” can take the alternate assessment, and that schools must fully inform parents of the potential ramifications. (State education departments are responsible for ensuring compliance with these mandates.)

Too often, however, those standards are neither maintained nor enforced, special education advocates, teachers, and families told Chalkbeat. Instead, factors like under-resourcing, nebulous procedures, and a failure to equip parents to make fully informed decisions have led schools to place some students without significant cognitive disabilities on a non-grade-level, non-diploma track. Students who take alternate assessments are typically placed in non-inclusive, low-rigor settings, which can deprive them of academic and socialization opportunities.

At the December 2016 meeting, the members of Jeurry’s special education committee said their hands were tied. According to documentation from the meeting, Jeurry’s mother said “she was not made aware of the long-term effects of alternate assessment when it was first initiated or during any supplemental [meetings].”

“They would always tell my mom, ‘His diploma is going to be real,’” Jeurry said. “She kept believing them.”

Throughout his time as a K-12 student in Harlem, Jeurry received inadequate academic support and struggled to advance past a first- or second-grade reading level.

In response to requests to interview state special education leadership, a New York State Education Department spokesperson said in an email: “NYSED is committed to working with schools and parents to determine the appropriate participation of students with disabilities in [the alternate assessment] and to fully understand the impact it has on these students.”

Since New York’s alternate assessment is used to meet federal special education law requirements, the spokesperson said, “there are very strict criteria for its development, administration, and applicability to students.”

Christina Foti, the city Education Department’s deputy chancellor for inclusive and accessible learning, acknowledged that there is room for more robust safeguards, and she said the Education Department recently recommended that the state consider several alternate assessment-related policy changes. They include clarifying definitions and participation criteria, requiring the use of a decision-making flowchart and checklist, and mandating that special education committees “conduct a complete and up-to-date battery of psychoeducational assessments” before making assessment decisions.

The Education Department is also pursuing local-level reforms, but officials are still in the early stages of developing a “definitive language and shift in practice [and] policy,” Foti said.

Inequitable outcomes for students on non-diploma track

In New York, special education committees determine annually how students will be assessed, usually starting around third grade. Although the state has established participation criteria for the alternate assessment, deciding whether students meet those criteria can be a relatively subjective process.

Data obtained through a public records request show that students placed on the non-diploma track are disproportionately Black or English language learners. Last school year, 29% of New York City students who took the alternate assessment were Black, while Black children represented only 20% of all students and 26% of those with disabilities. More than 29% of students who were alternatively assessed were English learners, while such students accounted for just 19% of the school system’s overall population and 14% of students with disabilities.

There have been some signs of progress toward ensuring that only students with the most significant cognitive disabilities are placed on the non-diploma track. Participation is declining in New York City and statewide, and racial disproportionalities among alternatively assessed students decreased between the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years, according to the data.

The New York City Education Department has worked to minimize subjectivity in assessment decisions “over the past five or six years,” said Arwina Vallejo, the department’s executive director of school-based evaluations and family engagement.

To more holistically determine students’ aptitude for grade-level learning and test participation, schools now administer “specialized assessments in reading, in writing, in math, in executive functions, in neurological abilities,” Vallejo said.

The Education Department also trains school psychologists in “culturally responsive, non-discriminatory assessment practices” to mitigate the impact of bias, she said.

But special education advocates and families say more must be done. School officials sometimes change the graduation track of children with mild intellectual disabilities or disruptive behaviors when they don’t have the will or means to try other options, said Juliet Eisenstein, a special education attorney and former assistant director of the Postsecondary Readiness Project at Advocates for Children of New York.

“It’s just a box that’s checked and not really talked about, because it’s an easier solution than figuring out a program that fits this more complex student profile,” she said.

Resources that could help such students — like one-on-one tutors or specialized placements — are often limited or nonexistent. This is especially true in New York City, where around 300,000 students qualify for special education services, and government audits have found that the Education Department regularly fails to meet its obligations to them. An estimated 2,300 special-education staff vacancies exist citywide.

Trevlon, 18, has been both alternatively and regularly assessed. He has a history of behavioral problems, an attention deficit hyperactivity disorder diagnosis, and an intellectual disability classification from the Education Department. Trevlon struggled to keep up academically in elementary school and attended a middle school in District 75, a citywide district that caters to students with significant disabilities. There, he received intensive academic and behavioral support and made major strides, but he was not on a diploma track.

Trevlon, who requested that his last name be withheld because a complaint he filed against the Education Department has yet to be resolved, said he was unhappy in the highly restrictive environment. He committed himself to proving that he could be successful at a community high school. By the time Trevlon graduated middle school as valedictorian of his eighth grade class, his special education committee had agreed that he could transition back to the diploma track and into a community school.

However, Trevlon was placed in a school that did not offer the learning environment the Education Department had determined most appropriate for him: a self-contained special education classroom for 15 students. Instead, he attended large classes that integrated students with disabilities and their general education peers. He said he struggled to focus and keep up. As he fell behind academically, he became increasingly frustrated and started acting out.

After his tumultuous freshman year, Trevlon was moved back onto a non-diploma track in a District 75 school, where he felt out of place and insufficiently challenged. He begged for a different placement that might offer a path back to community school — or a diploma, at least — but nothing changed, he said.

Knowing he would never have a “real” high school experience, Trevlon grew disillusioned, started attending school infrequently, and finally dropped out last year.

“It’s not just, ‘Oh, I stopped going to school because I don’t like school,’” Trevlon said. “I feel like the system gave up on me to a certain extent, as a Black male. … All I ever really wanted to do was to work and sit down and be like everybody else.”

Parents often unaware of children’s placement on non-diploma track

Schools are legally mandated to inform a student’s parents about the long-term ramifications of the alternate track. However, special education advocates said they regularly work with parents who had no idea their children were on a non-diploma path — often until it was too late.

“Many parents do not even know to ask questions about alternate assessment, because they’re never informed,” said Young Seh Bae, executive director of the Queens-based Community Inclusion and Development Alliance and a parent of a student with disabilities. It’s only when graduation approaches that many parents say, “‘Oh, I didn’t realize my child wouldn’t receive a high school diploma … The school didn’t explain my child never will be able to go to college or get a license for certain things.’”

In New York, diploma-track students must pass a certain number of Regents exams, making it one of eight states that require high school seniors to pass standardized tests to earn a diploma. (New York State is planning to phase out Regents as a graduation requirement in fall 2027.)

When Jeurry was in middle school, the faculty members of his Committee on Special Education pointed to his lack of academic progress and recommended that he be "alternately assessed." Although his mother agreed to the change, she did not realize that the decision would take away her son's opportunity to earn a high school diploma.

Because Jeurry was on a non-diploma track and never took his Regents, he could only earn a Skills and Achievement Commencement Credential, which cannot be used to apply for college, trade school, the military, or many jobs.

Jeurry was reading and doing math on a first-grade level by the start of middle school and on second- to third-grade levels by the end of high school, records show. Over the years, the Education Department classified him with several different kinds of disabilities, including a learning disability at one point and an intellectual disability at another. While he was a student, he was not evaluated by an outside provider, which some families pay for if they think their children have been improperly classified by district professionals. Faculty members repeatedly told Jeurry’s mother he was incapable of progressing academically, his academic records show, and they eventually used his lack of progress to justify placing him on the non-diploma track.

From kindergarten through eighth grade, he remained in self-contained classes, receiving only speech language therapy as a supplementary service. In high school, Jeurry moved from a self-contained setting into integrated classrooms, which benefited him socially but only further highlighted how far his academics lagged behind his peers.

At no point did Jeurry’s special education committee suggest additional services or more intensive support, records show. Federal law mandates more intensive intervention if a special education student is not making progress toward his goals.

Kim Swanson, the principal of Jeurry’s high school who overlapped with him during his last year there, declined to comment on Jeurry’s situation. She said her school “always follows state guidance.”

The school’s special education committees have always informed parents of the ramifications of alternate assessment, but the school has implemented additional safeguards during Swanson’s 11-year tenure as principal, she said. These include sending home a form letter that was developed by the state with input from the city Education Department (a requirement of all New York schools since 2019), and ensuring that faculty members discuss students’ progress toward their goals before special education committee meetings.

Vallejo, who oversees school-based evaluations, said the Education Department worked with the state to develop the form letter because “there was a point where little information was available to students and families regarding alternate assessment and the impact of that designation.” Education Department faculty are committed to fully involving students’ parents in assessment decisions and revisiting them annually, Vallejo said.

Special education advocates have lobbied the state for specific alternate assessment reforms for years, with little success — including a 2022 push for policy changes that could have helped demystify the assessment decision-making process.

In August 2024, for the first time in at least five years, the state proposed policy tweaks of its own, including seeking feedback from special education advocates and families on how to clarify the existing eligibility criteria for alternate assessment and update existing decision-making tools and training materials.

In the future, Jeurry hopes to earn a four-year degree and go into marketing before someday opening his own restaurant.

After legal battle, NYC pays for more than 1,300 hours of services

Knowing that he wouldn’t receive a diploma, Jeurry skipped his June 2017 graduation.

He then languished in a city-funded GED program for more than a year. In fall 2018, on the recommendation of a teacher, Jeurry contacted Advocates for Children. Within months, a pro-bono legal team arranged by the organization filed an action against the city school system, accusing it of denying Jeurry a free, appropriate public education as required by law.

While the legal process unfolded, Jeurry’s advocates helped him apply for his diploma through a “superintendent determination,” a safety net for students with disabilities who are unable to earn the Regents scores needed for graduation but meet all other requirements. In June 2019, he received his high school diploma.

As part of the 10-month legal process, a neuropsychologist evaluated Jeurry and diagnosed him with a mild intellectual disability, concluding that he could have benefited from more rigorous support, such as one-on-one literacy tutoring.

The city ultimately agreed to compensate Jeurry for what he missed during his 14 years of school by paying for 1,308 hours of academic tutoring, life skills training, and transition services. For more than a year, he attended all-day tutoring sessions that started with phonics and built upward.

“At first, I was like, ‘It’s not helping,’” Jeurry said. But then, little by little, I started noticing my reading level going up … and I was like, ‘Oh, it is working!’”

Although it has required him to work through significant education-related trauma, Jeurry now attends community college online while working full time. He’s considering transferring to a four-year institution after he earns his associate degree in business administration.

“I didn’t want to go back, but I had to do it, you know?” Jeurry said. “I needed to get a better education.”

Sarah Komar is a New York City-based journalist. She reported this story while at the Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

NYC teachers union pushes unusual method to win $10,000 raise for paras: legislation

2025-01-30T23:55:22+00:00

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New York City’s teachers union is pushing for substantial raises for paraprofessionals, an effort to address shortages of the classroom aides who serve students with disabilities.

But in an unusual maneuver, the union wants to secure those pay bumps through legislation rather than in the traditional contract bargaining process — an effort that generated pushback from City Hall and even some paraprofessionals.

A handful of City Council members said Thursday they plan to introduce a bill soon that would mandate annual pay increases of at least $10,000 for paraprofessionals, also known as paras. The starting salary for paras is just shy of $32,000 a year, about half of what regular classroom teachers earn. The raises would cost about $260 million a year, said Rita Joseph, who chairs City Council’s education committee.

“It is becoming more and more difficult for us to recruit and retain what I consider to be the essential piece of special education, which is the paraprofessional,” said Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, which represents city educators.

Advancing legislation to boost para pay represents the latest salvo in the union’s campaign to call attention to special education staffing shortages. There are more than 1,600 unfilled para positions, according to figures the Education Department shared with the City Council. In the fall, there were about 23,564 active paraprofessionals, a nearly 8% decline since June 2020.

The lack of staff can have devastating implications for students with disabilities. In some cases, students are not able to participate in job training programs or attend mainstream classes because there is no staffer to accompany them. In extreme cases, some students have not been able to attend school at all because they are not allowed to ride a yellow bus without a dedicated aide.

The push to increase pay for paraprofessionals comes as Mulgrew is up for re-election this year and some of the educators who hope to unseat him have called attention to the pay disparities.

The union chief said the city has been unwilling to give paras significant raises in contract negotiations without asking other members of the union to accept smaller pay bumps to finance it. The union typically adheres to “pattern bargaining” in which municipal unions agree to similar pay increases, which Mulgrew said limits their ability to secure more significant raises for paras.

Union officials said they were unaware of any previous efforts to secure wage increases for city union workers through legislation.

Some union activists who oppose the union’s leadership said the move may be an effort to help shore up votes, as the union has faced bruising battles over health care and the union leader won his last election with a smaller margin than usual.

“I don’t understand why [Mulgrew is] presenting this in a bill with some council members when he had the opportunity to fight for this in our contract negotiations,” said Marie Wausnock, a union executive board member who co-founded a slate called Fix Para Pay which largely opposes Mulgrew’s Unity caucus. She noted the pay bumps Mulgrew is pushing for would not count toward their pensions.

A spokesperson for Mayor Eric Adams indicated that any pay increases should be bargained in regular contract negotiations and noted paras received raises under a contract deal reached in 2023 and which runs until 2027.

“Paraprofessionals are crucial in the educational experience of our families, and we recognize the importance of ensuring fair compensation for all members of our educational workforce,” City Hall spokesperson Allison Maser wrote in an email. “We look forward to discussing all of the union’s economic demands in the next round of collective bargaining.”

The proposed legislation already has some support. A handful of lawmakers rallied Thursday morning in front of City Hall to press their case for it.

“We can solve this issue with an investment in this workforce that is so needed,” said City Council member Carmen De La Rosa.

Local lawmakers said they intend to push for funding during negotiations for next school year’s budget, which wrap up by the end of June. They did not immediately provide text of the legislation or say when it would be introduced.

Some longtime observers of city education politics said the effort to pass legislation could largely be about generating pressure to ink a better deal for paras in the future, said David Bloomfield, a professor of education, law, and public policy at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

“It seems a distraction from the union’s failure to bargain for this small exception to the city’s preferred pattern of union wages,” he wrote in an email.

Still, Bloomfield acknowledged the union has won some major legislative victories, including a state law that requires significantly smaller class sizes in city schools.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Hundreds of children with disabilities (still) wait for promised preschool seats in NYC

2025-01-29T16:36:05+00:00

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Mirdella arrived in New York City from Peru two years ago, hopeful she’d find a public school that could support her son, who has autism. The Peruvian schools offering the services he needed were private and too expensive.

The mom secured a special education learning plan from the city’s Education Department in September, guaranteeing her 4-year-old son, Matheo, a seat in a small specialized classroom and a range of therapies.

That learning plan, however, has been gathering dust.

Matheo, who is non-verbal, has spent months at the cramped Manhattan shelter where the family lives awaiting a spot in a program. He is among hundreds of children who waited this fall for a preschool seat nearly two years after Mayor Eric Adams promised one for every child with a disability — as required by law. The ongoing lack of seats is likely to raise questions at a Thursday City Council oversight hearing on special education.

“He’s not really doing anything in particular,” Mirdella said in Spanish. She requested her family be identified using their middle names for privacy reasons. “It’s basically February, and he still isn’t in school.”

Adams has taken some action on the issue, setting aside funding for salary bumps to bring special education preschool teachers who work at community organizations to be more in line with starting salaries of their public school counterparts. The city also invested $55 million this school year to open new preschool seats for children with disabilities, opening 456 new slots in September, Education Department officials said, with roughly 280 more in the works.

But 450 children are currently stranded at home without seats, department officials confirmed. Meanwhile, Adams’ preliminary budget for next school year did not renew the $55 million for new classrooms, raising fresh concerns that the number of students sitting at home could creep back up.

“Providing these classes is not optional,” Randi Levine, policy director at Advocates for Children, an organization that helps low-income families navigate the special education system, wrote in an email. “Given the City’s legal obligation, the new preschool special education classes should have been among the first programs to get long-term funding.”

Red tape stymies families — and providers

Mirdella said she has been struggling for months to get answers from the Education Department about when Matheo could begin school.

She said she ran into bureaucratic hurdles, including requests from the city to submit the same paperwork multiple times.

Mirdella enlisted the help of Advocates for Children, which began reaching out to the Education Department in October on behalf of Matheo, said Betty Baez Melo, the organization’s early childhood education project director, who has been working with the family.

Education department officials said they identified a program in December that was ready to enroll Matheo and claimed that delays after that stemmed from the parent’s interest in weighing other programs.

But Mirdella disputes that, saying she was ready to enroll Matheo and didn’t receive a clear indication from the city that she could send him. Around that time, Baez Melo inquired with the Education Department about why the city appeared to not have a placement ready.

“The DOE hasn’t specifically said what the challenge has been,” said Baez Melo, referring to the delay in placing Matheo in a program.

In the meantime, Mirdella is doing her best to keep Matheo engaged, coaxing him to mimic words like papá and devising painting activities. It’s a struggle to keep him focused at home all day, especially as she cares for her other 11-month-old child, and Matheo sometimes has outbursts.

“He doesn’t know how to make circles or say ‘water,’” Mirdella said. “I know he can do it if he has therapies.” His learning plan calls for regular sessions with speech, occupational, and physical therapists, which he isn’t yet receiving.

As many families are still going without the programs they’re entitled to, some nonprofit organizations that form the backbone of the city’s preschool special education system say they often struggle to bring new classrooms online.

Jeanne Alter, the chief executive officer at Kennedy Children’s Center, which operates preschool special education programs for about 350 children in Manhattan and the Bronx, said she’s been waiting months to open more seats.

Students at the Kennedy Children's Center, which offers preschool programs for students with disabilities, participate in a classroom activity at the organization's Bronx site.

The organization won the green-light from the state to open three new classrooms back in September, but has been mired in red tape getting approvals from multiple city agencies, including the Fire Department and Department of Buildings. She doesn’t anticipate being able to open the classrooms until March.

“Here we are: ready, willing, and able since August, and nobody cares,” Alter said. At the Thursday City Council hearing, she plans to call on the city to create a task force to address bureaucratic hurdles providers are facing. “I have 20 kids who I know are just sitting at home waiting for these classrooms to open.”

Transportation problems create another setback

Mirdella felt a sense of renewed hope in recent weeks after receiving word from the Education Department that they were setting up transportation for her son to get to school.

But the family soon hit another snag. Mirdella is depending on a yellow bus to take Matheo to school, and city officials did not immediately assign him to a route.

In the meantime, the Education Department offered to pay for a rideshare. When Mirdella tried registering for the rideshare account this week, the code she got from the city appeared to be invalid, though an official later told her it would take 24 hours to begin working.

Rideshare, however, isn’t a sustainable solution. Matheo has mobility challenges, requiring his mom to hoist him into the car and accompany him to school with her 11-month-old in tow while her husband works, Mirdella said.

The process of getting Matheo a seat, along with transportation, has left Mirdella feeling discouraged.

“We thought this country was really inclusive — that if a child has needs or a condition or has medical needs that they would get attention,” she said. “It’s been really disheartening.”

After Chalkbeat asked the Education Department about Matheo’s case, an official reached out to Baez Melo, as Mirdella’s advocate, informing her Matheo would be eligible for yellow bus service starting Thursday.

Still, Mirdella indicated that she had not heard from the Education Department about transportation arrangements, including what time the bus would arrive.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

As congestion pricing begins, some Manhattan school communities worry over long-term impact

2025-01-06T23:34:32+00:00

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For the first time on Monday, some New York City families and educators commuting to school by car faced a $9 toll upon entering a swath of Manhattan.

The toll — a result of the congestion pricing program — charges drivers who enter Manhattan at or below 60th Street in order to help finance public transit improvements. (Most drivers must pay the $9 toll during “peak” hours — between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m. on weekdays, as well as between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. on weekends — and a reduced $2.25 during all other hours).

That program, which has been in the works for years, went into effect on Sunday.

For decades, environmental and transit advocates have sought to enact a congestion pricing program, looking to it as a means of reducing gridlock and pollution while raising revenue for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

But the program has also sparked concerns from some, including the city’s teachers union.

Last year, the union filed a lawsuit against the plan in partnership with the Staten Island borough president, seeking to halt its implementation. Some pro-congestion pricing teachers bristled at the legal action, but on Monday, union officials noted the lawsuit remained ongoing.

“Our lawsuit continues because the congestion pricing plan that is now in effect puts the financial and environmental burden on communities least able to pay, and the last to see improved air quality or less congestion,” said Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, in a statement.

Josh Millis, a parent at The Neighborhood School in Manhattan, said he supports public transportation and the broader aims of the congestion pricing plan, but takes issue with the lack of exemption for public school parents. Millis, who lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, about a mile from the nearest subway station, said it’s not always feasible to take his three kids to school on public transit.

“I don’t mind walking a mile,” he said. “But my kindergartner is not going to do that in December, at 6:30 in the morning, when it’s 13 degrees out. That’s just an impossibility.”

Some school districts fear long-term effects of congestion pricing

Robert Murtfeld, a member of the Community Education Council for District 1 in Manhattan, said about 25% of families in his district commute from upper Manhattan or another borough. He worries that congestion pricing could threaten the district’s ability to retain teachers, with educators who currently drive to school potentially looking to transfer. Meanwhile, families who live in public transportation “deserts” outside of the district could be burdened by the high cost of the tolls, he said.

Families and educators who choose to drive into Manhattan would pay more than $1,600 in tolls across the 180 school days in each academic year, Murtfeld said.

The District 1 CEC has called on state officials to carve out exemptions or reduced tolls for students traveling to and from schools within the congestion pricing zone, as well as teachers and other school staff commuting into the district.

“We don’t make a commentary on whether congestion pricing is good or bad,” Murtfeld said. “We’re just saying, if this thing gets implemented — which is a fact, as of midnight [on Sunday] — we will be affected.”

Millis, the parent at The Neighborhood School, said his family has been looking into other options to cut down on costs, like carpooling with others at the school, as well as reconsidering at what age his children can start taking public transit on their own. But in the meantime, he’ll keep driving them to school, he said.

“That $9 a day is a big hit,” Millis said. “To make an exemption for our families for the purpose of public school education is not even pennies in the couch of the MTA. It would not even be missed. But it makes all the difference to us. All the difference.”

Toll’s impact on Manhattan school commutes remains unclear

MTA officials estimate the toll will result in at least 80,000 fewer vehicles entering the zone every day. And though fewer drivers on the road could in theory help some school buses — which are exempt from the toll — arrive earlier, the broader effects of congestion pricing on school commutes for now remain unclear.

Sara Catalinotto, founder of Parents to Improve School Transportation, said the possibility of shorter bus routes “would be a welcome positive side effect,” but added that the Monday snowfall made it difficult to gauge the immediate impact of congestion pricing on school commutes.

To Catalinotto, the longer-term impacts on students with disabilities could be complicated. Though many students with disabilities rely on school bus services, parents and advocates have for years issued complaints about delayed, overcrowded, or missing buses.

Individuals with disabilities can qualify for an exemption from the congestion pricing toll, but Catalinotto worries families could still face financial hardships.

“When the school bus or paraprofessional is out for the day or longer, and families of students with specialized busing have to use the so-called ‘rideshare alternative’ to get the student to school in a car which is not exempt, tolls will be charged,” she said.

In some cases, the city offers families prepaid rideshare vouchers when school buses aren’t available — including when specialized staff aren’t available to accompany a student with a disability who requires them. But Catalinotto noted not all families are registered for such services, and others will be “compelled to pay for a cab out of pocket or use their own vehicle, at higher cost if in the congestion relief zone.”

And though parents can seek reimbursement for transportation costs when school buses fail to arrive, those payments can sometimes take years, leaving families shouldering the cost in the meantime.

“There are varying views in the disability community on the Congestion Relief issue but I think everyone agrees that the MTA has to become fully accessible by some means,” Catalinotto said. “Perhaps taxing the billionaires or Wall Street transactions to achieve that would have been less stressful than this.”

Julian Shen-Berro is a reporter covering New York City. Contact him at jshen-berro@chalkbeat.org.

How to get ‘school avoidant’ students with disabilities back to class? Lawsuit pushes for solutions.

2024-10-08T22:24:10+00:00

New York City’s Education Department is systematically failing to provide equal access to education for students with disabilities who are chronically absent due to “school avoidance,” according to a class action lawsuit filed Tuesday by the Legal Aid Society.

Four students involved in the lawsuit stopped regularly attending school because of their social or emotional disabilities, such as severe anxiety or depression, and the lawsuit alleges that the nation’s largest school system has no policy or procedures in place to ensure that these students are receiving the “free appropriate public education” they are entitled to under the law.

New York City schools do not have a systemwide policy to evaluate students who are experiencing school avoidance and get them back in school, according to the suit. The system also lacks a process to track and identify chronically absent students who are struggling with school avoidance, according to the complaint. (Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman joined Legal Aid on the case.)

Instead, schools often either ignore the situation, convince parents to home-school their child, or suggest parents apply for home instruction, which provides a limited number of weekly instructional hours for children who can’t attend school due to physical or psychiatric disorders, the lawsuit states. Schools also often involve child protective services, the lawsuit notes.

The suit demands the Education Department immediately develop a comprehensive plan and implement a process to identify, evaluate, and establish programming to help students suffering from school avoidance, as required by federal and state law.

“We need some consistency around what schools are supposed to do,” said Susan Horwitz, supervising attorney of the Legal Aid Society’s Education Law Project, emphasizing that schools should not wait until a student is absent for more than 10 consecutive days, as chancellor’s regulations require, to investigate what’s happening.

“Every school knows who’s not coming,” and they know which of their students have accommodations for disabilities, Horwitz said. “There’s got to be some prevention … before it’s really kind of too late to come up with an effective, fast solution.”

Education Department officials said that school-based mental health teams look at behaviors and whether mental health issues are contributing to absences. Additionally, teams crafting individualized education programs, or IEPs, or 504 plans outlining mandated accommodations for students with disabilities can include services to address why students are refusing to attend school.

“We know that this is an issue among our most vulnerable students, including students with IEPs, and as such, we provide instructional supports, paraprofessional services, and mental health services based on students’ individual needs,” said Education Department spokesperson Chyann Tul in a statement.

Data gaps makes it difficult to address school avoidance

The lack of official city guidance, as Chalkbeat previously reported, leads to an uneven response across the city’s 1,600 schools, ranging from little to no involvement from school administrators to deeper partnerships with families. And it has often fallen to families to navigate an inadequate mental health system instead of getting school-based support they’re entitled to.

Ultimately, it means that many students with disabilities are missing critical instructional time as well as services and accommodations they would be receiving in school, such as counseling or occupational therapy, the lawsuit said.

Students with disabilities struggle disproportionately with chronic absenteeism, which is defined as missing 10% of the school year, or roughly 18 days per year. About 46% of the city’s 200,000 students with disabilities were chronically absent in the 2022-23 school year. In District 75, which serves students with significant disabilities who cannot be accommodated in neighborhood schools, nearly 60% were chronically absent. That compared to a citywide average of 36%.

The Education Department, however, does not have granular data on how many of these students are chronically absent because of school avoidance. (Busing-related issues are also a driver of chronic absenteeism for students with disabilities.) When a student is absent from school for 10 consecutive days, the school is supposed to ascertain the reasons through parent outreach, and if they can’t obtain the reason, they are supposed to conduct what’s called a “407 investigation.” These investigations, however, do not even include a process to identify students specifically struggling with school avoidance, the lawsuit states.

“If one thing that comes out of this is that we finally know how many kids it’s affecting, that will be 10 steps ahead of where we are now,” Horwitz said. “Because then we can be more specific about how to address it.”

The Education Department instructs schools to consider conducting a “functional behavior assessment” to assess “any behavior with an impact on learning, including but not limited to: elopement [leaving class or school] . . . and school avoidance,” the lawsuit stated, but said that schools rarely conduct such evaluations for students experiencing school avoidance.

Education Department officials said additional evaluation might be warranted for students who are school avoidant to determine whether new supports might help get a student to return to school.

But no one conducted any functional behavior assessments or provided effective strategies for M.T., a 15-year-old ninth grader on the autism spectrum, who is part of the lawsuit.

M.T., who has a tendency to elope, struggled with attendance at her Queens middle school. (All of the plaintiffs used initials to protect privacy.) Though New York City schools have recommended a residential special education school paid for by the state, in two years, they have not been able to secure her a spot. Now at the Queens Transition Center, a District 75 school, M.T. began avoiding taking the bus to school in October 2023, so her parents began driving her, sometimes waiting with her for two hours trying unsuccessfully to coax her to go into the building.

Schools should be coming to student’s homes to conduct functional behavior assessments, Horwitz said.

“It’s getting at why this is happening and how do we fix it,” she said. “It’s not that complicated. What is complicated is what happens to kids and families when kids aren’t going to school, whether it’s ACS involvement or parents having to quit their jobs and then the cascade of horrible things that happen when people can’t afford to pay their rent in this city.”

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

He dreamed of attending Stuyvesant. But getting accommodations for his disability proved too much.

2024-07-19T17:20:09+00:00

In the summer after middle school, George begged his mom to drive him to Lower Manhattan from their home in Brooklyn, so that he could walk around Stuyvesant High School, a massive 10-story building along the Hudson River.

He gazed up at it, trying to imagine what it would be like to go to one of New York City’s most prestigious institutions.

“I had this idea in my head of what Stuyvesant would be like,” he said, recalling that summer three years ago. “I’ve always been kind of a sucker for those big things.” (George and his mother requested pseudonyms for privacy reasons.)

George had attended gifted and talented programs, excelling in those environments, and seemingly was the type of student that Stuyvesent is built for. Yet students like him rarely attended.

George has a learning disability, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. In middle school his individualized education program, or IEP, called for him to be in a classroom integrating students with and without disabilities co-taught by two teachers: one general education or subject specialist, and one special education teacher. He also received additional support, like guided notes and specialized counseling to help him stay organized and work on strategies to stay on task.

The accommodations he needed would greatly complicate his Stuyvesant dream.

At the city’s eight specialized high schools requiring an exam as the sole basis of admission, students classified with disabilities represent a staggeringly small share of the population, much lower than the average at high schools citywide. In fact, the specialized high schools rank close to the bottom or last, according to the Education Department data from the 2022-23 school year.

In some ways, this is by design: The specialized schools are the only high schools in the system not required to set seats aside for students with disabilities. Moreover, specialized high schools, directly and indirectly, have for decades discouraged students with learning disabilities from coming to their schools, according to advocates and parents as well as legal complaints filed on behalf of students. At some specialized high schools, students with disabilities barely eclipse 1% of the total population, Education Department data showed.

Across all high schools in the city, 1 of every 5 students are mandated to receive special education support under an IEP. At specialized high schools, that number is only 1 of 50.

For the few who do make it, some families say they are forced to battle with school officials to receive their legally mandated accommodations, struggling to stay afloat in an environment of intense workloads and high expectations.

Teachers and administrators at specialized high schools declined to comment after repeated requests.

“Entrance requirements to these schools are set by state law,” said Education Department spokesperson Nathaniel Styer, declining to address specific allegations. “If a student has services on their IEP, then they get those services. If they do not have services on their IEP or an IEP, they don’t get services.”

While the specialized high school admissions test, or SHSAT, has long been blamed for the lack of racial diversity at these schools, it also has locked out students with disabilities. Students with IEPs were three times less likely to sit for the SHSAT than their peers without disabilities, according to an Independent Budget Office analysis of 2021 data done at the request of Chalkbeat. And when it came to getting an offer, that disparity only grew. Test takers with disabilities were 11 times less likely to get an offer than their peers, an acceptance rate of 0.6%.

Of the more than 3,600 students admitted to the eight specialized high schools, only 80 eighth graders with disabilities got in. Last year, outcomes for students with disabilities were slightly worse: just 76 students received an offer to a specialized high school, according to data obtained through a public records request.

Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan on July 9, 2024.

Before the high school decision deadline, in a meeting with Stuyvesant’s assistant principal for special education and a social worker, George’s parents were pushed to drop co-teaching from his IEP, they said. The administrators told the family that many students at Stuyvesant often “graduate” out of those accommodations, and when told that George had also been admitted to another school, they suggested that George would be better off going there.

“We could already tell that there would be trouble,” said Elizabeth. “It’s just kind of like this culture of denial: If you’re at Stuyvesant, and you’ve made it this far, that means that you don’t need the support.”

His mother, however, did not give up. She said George was the first student at Stuy to receive classes co-taught with a special education teacher. The two special education teachers on staff had to bounce from class to class and teach multiple subjects throughout the school day.

Despite their reservations, as he entered the doors of Stuyvesent at the start of his freshman year, George remained optimistic about his future there.

Lack of services, lack of students with disabilities at specialized high schools

In 2012 the city established a policy to set aside seats for students with disabilities at selective high schools that use GPAs and other measures to screen students. Within a few years, not only did the number of students with disabilities increase, but access to co-teaching classes and special education support classes became far more common at these top schools.

Specialized high schools were exempted from this policy.

The small number of students with disabilities is also reflected in the specialized high schools’ budgets. According to school budget documents obtained from the Education Department, specialized high schools spend far less on special education than other schools. Because funds from the city for special education are need-based, fewer students with disabilities means less money to hire teachers and provide services.

Bronx Science only has one dedicated special education teacher, and at Stuyvesant, there are only four, budget figures show. Both schools serve about 3,000 students. Schools with comparable numbers of students, such as Bayside High School or Susan E. Wagner High School, each have 30 or more special education teachers. At smaller selective schools like Beacon (roughly 1,500 students) and Townsend Harris (about 1,300 students), there are 14 and 20 special education specialists, respectively.

In the last school year, out of the more than 18,000 students at specialized high schools, only 76 students had co-teaching on their IEP, and 108 had special education support classes, according to DOE data obtained through a freedom of information request.

Families and advocates say some school officials have said co-teaching classes can’t be provided. Some schools also try to persuade parents to drop parts of their child’s IEP, or drag out discussions in the hopes that parents either capitulate or choose a different school, they said.

Jenn Choi, an advocate who has represented parents in IEP meetings at multiple specialized high schools, said it is easier for administrators to encourage students to remove the more expensive accommodations from IEPs, or convince students not to attend the school at all.

“What we have to remember is that the students are not asking for lower standards. They’re only asking for access,” said Choi. “They’re just not understanding that they have to learn how to teach differently.”

With limited funding for special education, specialized high schools would potentially need to divert money from other programs to hire enough staff to support special education services adequately. Choi said that with that funding model, the problem will continue.

“It was like a piece of reality that kind of like, fell on top of him at that moment,” said Maria Torres Quiles, whose son was told by Brooklyn Tech special education teachers that they would not provide co-teaching services in 2019. “He was so crushed.”

She decided not to fight Brooklyn Tech for the services, choosing to send him to Manhattan’s NEST+m High School, another selective school, instead.

Parents feel pressured to downgrade support for students with disabilities

Sandra Cheng’s daughter, a recent Stuyvesant graduate with an IEP, had a stroke in 2019 during her last year of middle school, causing her to lose the ability to read and speak, and resulting in paralysis in one half of her body. It was after she had been offered a spot at Stuyvesant, which she accepted.

During lockdown in the first year of the COVID pandemic, Cheng was able to support her daughter by reading texts and writing for her at home.

Once her daughter returned to in-person school, however, teachers began questioning or ignoring accommodations in her IEP. Some officials at Stuyvesant suggested that her daughter drop out and have the DOE pay for private special schooling, Cheng said. Others suggested that asking for accommodations was a way to cheat the system or gain an advantage.

Stuyvesant is one of eight specialized high schools in New York City that require a single test for admissions.

Cheng, an alumna of Stuyvesant herself, attributed some pushback from teachers to a larger cultural problem at the school. She thought that in an effort to uphold high standards, teachers were often inflexible and expected students to keep up with the strenuous pace.

But things are slowly starting to change at Stuyvesant, Cheng believes. Parents of students with disabilities have formed a sub-group within the larger structure of the parents’ association, advocating for changes collectively. The school recently hired a new assistant principal of special education.

As Cheng’s daughter grappled with school and recovering from her stroke, George began his freshman year. From the start adherence to his IEP was uneven, with some teachers being better than others, Elizabeth said.

Elizabeth described her son’s freshman year as a cycle of burnout and then a crazy push to catch up as George labored to hang on to a grade point average good enough for a top college. At the beginning of the year, George joined several clubs. But he soon stopped having time for anything other than school work, with about four hours of nightly homework — and he was still falling behind.

Meanwhile, in IEP meetings, Stuyvesant officials pressured Elizabeth to scale down George’s support, she said.

By the end of his freshman year, George dreaded going to school each morning. His optimism was gone.

When George returned sophomore year, he continued to struggle. He and his mother were exhausted, and the prospect of three more years of constantly battling with administrators and teachers — “trench warfare,” as George put it — did not seem worth the ongoing emotional anguish.

In the fall of 2022, he said goodbye to his teachers and friends, and dropped out in the middle of the semester.

George’s family had the financial means for an alternative to the public school system, which is a luxury few have. (For privacy reasons, the family didn’t want to share George’s current school.)

After George left Stuyvesant, Elizabeth filed a civil rights complaint against the school with the U.S. Department of Education, which Chalkbeat reviewed.

Yet she may have a long wait. Another Office of Civil Rights complaint against Brooklyn Tech brought in 2021 is still awaiting adjudication. The suit alleges that officials illegally delayed or denied students’ evaluation for IEPs, said Miriam Nunberg, an attorney who filed a joint suit on behalf of five families.

George said he was proud of going to Stuyvesant.

But, “I never really felt like I was wanted there.”

Brendan Rose is a New York City-based journalist. He attended the Bronx High School of Science, and he reported this story while at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

NYC schools restructuring: A new deputy chancellor for students with disabilities, English learners

2024-06-24T19:50:18+00:00

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New York City’s Education Department is creating a new division to support students with disabilities and children learning English as a second language, officials announced Monday.

The Division of Inclusive and Accessible Learning, or DIAL, will be led by Christina Foti, who is being promoted from her role as chief of Special Education — where she has earned accolades from advocates and families — to Deputy Chancellor for Inclusive and Accessible Learning.

Mayor Eric Adams first announced the move Monday in a Daily News op-ed.

The new division will have a $750 million budget and 1,300 staffers, pulling staff and funding that were already directed toward students with disabilities and English learners but were housed in a different part of the Education Department bureaucracy. The city’s special education advisory council, composed of parents, students, educators, and advocates, will help support the new division.

“We’re going to give it our all,” Adams said Monday at Samara Community School in the Bronx. “We’ve heard it over and over and over again about this population of achievers who are not given the opportunity that they deserve.”

The move represents the latest reshuffling for administrative staff who oversee special education and multilingual learners. The Education Department previously had a deputy chancellor position responsible for special education and multilingual learners, though that role was eliminated in 2018.

More recently, special education and multilingual learners fell under the division of teaching and learning overseen by Deputy Chancellor Carolyne Quintana. In March, schools Chancellor David Banks disbanded that unit, and Quintana left the department. The staff then reported to Danika Rux, the deputy chancellor of school leadership.

Advocates largely praised the move to give students with disabilities and multilingual learners their own division and deputy chancellor, as city officials have historically struggled to serve those students, who represent a significant chunk of the school system.

Roughly 21% of students in New York City are classified as having disabilities and requiring special education services through Individualized Education Programs, or IEPs, according to data from the 2022-23 school year. About 14% of students across the five boroughs are learning English as a new language.

Both groups have seen major challenges in recent years.

City officials have long failed to provide all students with disabilities with the therapies and instruction they’re entitled to, driving thousands of families to seek out private schools or services that now cost the city more than $1 billion each year.

Under Adams, the Education Department has made some reforms to the special education system, including modestly expanding programs that serve students with autism.

But some of Adams’ highest-profile efforts have fallen short. A major promise to provide every student with a disability access to a preschool seat has gone unfulfilled. Hundreds of children are still languishing without one, despite a legal requirement to offer them seats.

And even after his schools chief promised to comply with a federal court order to address lengthy delays in providing services to families, the city has not fully implemented most of the order’s requirements.

And with about 38,000 migrant students entering the city’s public schools over the past two years, many schools have struggled to keep up with the demand in language services, mental health support, and helping them with basic needs such as food and clothing. Many of their families are living in shelters they are only able to stay in for 60 days, which adds a layer of stress as parents navigate long commutes for their children when they move or try to figure out the notoriously difficult yellow school bus system.

On Monday, special education advocates praised Foti’s promotion and the establishment of the new division, though they remained wary over the city’s track record on supporting students with disabilities. Foti received multiple standing ovations during Monday’s press conference from Education Department staff and advocates.

Paullette Healy, an advocate and parent of a child in District 75, which exclusively serves students with disabilities, said Foti’s promotion was “a long time coming.”

“Having a thoughtful and effective leader helming this historic division is a major win for struggling families raising children with learning differences in NYC,” she said.

Maggie Moroff, a special education policy expert at Advocates for Children, noted Foti’s new position “makes a lot of sense.”

“This feels like a smart move and a statement of commitment to the students her division will be supporting,” she said. “We will, of course, be watching closely and hoping it ensures all students with IEPs and learning differences can be successful in the NYC schools.”

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Julian Shen-Berro is a reporter covering New York City. Contact him at jshen-berro@chalkbeat.org.

LISTEN: Students speak out about special education

2024-04-10T09:00:00+00:00

This episode of P.S. Weekly dives into New York City’s notoriously complex special education system, which serves 1 in 5 students — or more than 200,000 children.

Students with disabilities have the right to customized support — listed on individualized education programs, or IEPs, or 504 plans — that spell out what accommodations they need, from smaller classes to frequent breaks. But securing a learning plan, and getting the services listed on it, can be an uphill battle.

Our first segment focuses on those challenges through the eyes of two Beacon High School students who have a common accommodation: extra time on tests. Beacon senior Zoe Lazaros tells student producer Ava Stryker-Robbins that they faced a monthslong process to get that accommodation.

“I would not have gotten through my junior year without it,” Zoe says. “But I’m now realizing, like, so many people don’t have access to therapy or a psychiatrist or a parent that will stand up for them. And even with that, it was almost impossible for me to get [a 504 plan].”

Stryker-Robbins also digs into the stigma and trade-offs students can face when they try to use extra time, including missing out on classroom instruction.

EVENT: Register for our virtual event to meet the students behind the new podcast

Next, student producers Santana Roach and Dorothy Ha explore the broader experiences of students with disabilities through short-form interviews at Frederick Douglass Academy II Secondary School and Stuyvesant High School.

“Not everyone wants to be treated, like, differently,” one student says. “No matter of your race, or gender, or even if you have autism.”

P.S. Weekly is available on major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Be sure to drop a review in your app or shoot an email to PSWeekly@chalkbeat.org. Tell us what you learned in this episode or what you’re still wondering. We just might read your comment on a future episode.

P.S. Weekly is a collaboration between Chalkbeat and The Bell. Listen for new episodes Wednesdays this spring.

Read the full episode transcript below

Sabrina: Hey listeners, save the date! We’ll be having a virtual Zoom event on April 17 from 5-6 p.m.

It’s called Inside P.S Weekly: Meet the students and the adults behind the new podcast.

Join us on Zoom and learn how the podcast is made, how it can be used as a teaching tool, and how you could potentially have your voice heard on the show.

Check out the link in our show notes!

Bernie: Welcome to PS Weekly… the sound of the New York City School System. I’m your host this week, Bernie Carmona. I’m an 11th Grader at The Beacon School in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan. I’m very excited to be hostingBernieing the third episode of P.S. Weekly! P.S. Weekly is a collaboration between Chalkbeat New York and The Bell.

Today we’re diving into an important issue… the struggle students with disabilities face in getting accommodations from their schools.

Bernie: But first the Chalkbeat Bulletin….

Mike: I’m Mike Elsen-Rooney, a reporter with Chalkbeat. Here’s a quick recap of the week’s biggest education stories.

A 4.8-magnitude earthquake shook New York City last Friday. Most schools were unscathed, but the gym at J.H.S. 218 in East New York, Brooklyn, was damaged and is temporarily closed. Officials said the rest of the building is safe.

Mike: Looming budget cuts this summer could jeopardize the jobs of 100 Education Department coordinators working in family homeless shelters. Advocates and families say that would be devastating when there’s a record number of homeless families and high rates of chronic absenteeism.

And there are 9 new public schools set to open in New York City this year. They include a new Bard Early College High school in Brooklyn and a high school in Queens focused on the motion picture industry.

Mike: To stay up to date on education news throughout the week, head to Chalkbeat.org/newsletters and sign up for the New York daily roundup.

Bernie: More than 200,000 students in New York City’s public schools have a disability classification–that’s larger than the ENTIRE city of Syracuse. These students are guaranteed a plan that lays out exactly what accommodations they need to learn; from a smaller class size to physical therapy. They’re called Individualized Education Programs–or IEPs. Others might have what’s known as a Section 504 plan.

504 plans are for students with disabilities who don’t need specialized instruction, but STILL need accommodations to learn. These accommodations can include sitting near the teacher, or having classroom breaks.

Bernie: Getting an IEP or 504 isn’t always easy. We drilled down into one common type of accommodation: extra time on tests. Our reporter Ava Stryker-Robbins found that students often face roadblocks and even unexpected consequences when trying to use their accommodations. She has the story…

Ava: Imagine you’re getting ready to take a test. You grasp your pencil and feel your heart beating as the teacher sets a timer.

Voice: Class, you may begin.

Ava: You hear the bustling movements of your class fade to silence. Everyone around you starts to scribble at a fast pace. And though you studied all night and knew the material through and through, you just can’t keep up. You try to stay focused. You try to go faster. But before you know it…

Voice: Time is up. Everyone put your pencils down.

Ava: You couldn’t finish as fast as everyone else; no matter how hard you tried. Zoe Lazaros, a 17 year old senior at the Beacon School, has had many similar experiences. Although they have ADHD, they went through school without any accommodations — like extra time — for many years.

Zoe: I think, at first, I had this kind of reassurance that, you know, I always kind of pulled through as a student, regardless if I was struggling in a class. And when that started kind of not working anymore, it felt very stressful. And also just generally helpless.

Ava: After years of constantly working long hours outside of school to stay on track, Zoe finally got their 504 two years ago during their sophomore year of high school. Getting it was not an easy process...

Zoe: It took probably around four months from the beginning of the process. Like, it wasn’t as long as I know some other people were, but it was definitely a draining process.

Ava: One of the first things Zoe had to do for their 504 application during the 2022-2023 school year was get on a Zoom meeting with their mom, their therapist, and a 504 coordinator at Beacon.

Zoe: There was a bunch of people kind of vouching for me and being like, you know, Zoe needs this. A lot of people don’t have that. So the fact that I had that and still it was difficult for me to get a 504 is really telling. So yeah, what ended up happening was we were on, like, this group Zoom call, and they said that they would not be able to give me a 504 cause my grades were too good. I felt very discouraged after that.

Ava: But a few months later, Zoe had to try again.

Zoe: I was failing three of my classes, and I wrote this very angry email to my 504 coordinator, and I was like, “Do you see my grades? I’m failing 3 classes. Will you help me now?” And she responded back to me and she’s like, “Yes, let’s have a meeting.” And I was like, “Girl…” It took me failing 3 of my classes, and my therapist, and my psychiatrist, and my mom, and like four months for them to approve the 504.

NARR: And it changed their life for the better.

Zoe: I’m so grateful because I would not have gotten through my junior year without it. But I’m now realizing, like, so many people don’t have access to therapy or a psychiatrist or a parent that will stand up for them. And even with that, it was almost impossible for me to get one. I feel very lucky.

Ava: Zoe is just one of many students who have had to endure a long process to get the accommodations they deserve. Every year, thousands of families face delays, according to city statistics. Families might feel like they’re fighting an uphill battle when navigating the notoriously complex special education system. And students often don’t get all the services they’re entitled to. Nearly a third of students who were referred and qualified for special education for the first time last year waited more than 2 months for an IEP meeting to be held.

Ava: And, even when students get IEPs or 504s, and are granted accomodations–they’re not always enforced. For example, when it comes to testing, students I spoke to said teachers sometimes forget, or resist giving students the extra time they need. The teacher also may not have received a student’s IEP or 504 documents outlining the accommodations a student is entitled to. Zoe explains…

Zoe: I had an experience in my forensics class last year where my teacher was basically like, “Oh, I don’t know where the school sent your 504 stuff. I haven’t gotten it, so you can’t use your extra time.” What? Like I have extra time. And so I have had experiences where, like, teachers discount extra time or like, are ignorant to it in some way. They’re like, “Well, I didn’t know that.”

Ava: Zoe isn’t the only one struggling from not being able to use their accommodations. Becca Sidi has experienced similar setbacks. She’s a senior at Beacon who’s had an IEP for ADHD since she was in elementary school. Her IEP entitles her to double time on exams, the ability to take tests in a separate room, tutoring, extensions on assignments, and more. One time, Becca said a teacher accused her and other students of cheating because of their extra time.

Becca: After a midterm, my teacher had gathered everyone who– who was an IEP student, and then he goes on to say something about how we got suspiciously higher test scores. I didn’t cheat, but in that moment, I just felt, like, scared.

Ava: Another one of Becca’s teachers told students that they would need to use all of their extra time in one sitting, meaning they would have to miss part of their next class.

Becca: I was missing other instruction. But at the same time, my teacher was also blaming me for missing other instruction. She told us, “Don’t you guys have class? Like, this is ridiculous.” And what everyone wanted to say to her in that moment was, “Well, I mean, this is your policy, and we’re not necessarily happy that we’re missing instruction either.”

Ava: For Becca, It’s not just teachers who don’t always understand the necessity of accommodations. Some students don’t either.

BECCA: I finished taking a calculus test once, and I think I overheard some people in the hallway talking about how someone who with an IEP, who was still taking the test. And then they were saying something like, “Oh, wow. Why does this person get extra time, this isn’t fair, like.” I feel like there are just some things that some people don’t understand or refuse to understand. I cannot stress this enough, like people have IEPs, not to have a leg up on everyone else, but to stay at the same level as everyone else.

Ava: While this may sound shocking to you listeners, this is daily life for me and so many of us among the nearly 20% of students who have IEPs across the city.

I reached out to the city’s Department of Education, as well as Beacon’s principal, for comment on the incidents students shared with me. Department officials emphasized that they regularly train staff to make sure students get the support they’re entitled to — including extra time. And 504 coordinators are required to complete training every year. Education Department spokesperson Nicole Brownstein wrote the following in a statement: “We are steadfast in our commitment to ensuring all students receive their entitled accommodations in accordance with their IEPs and 504 plans.”

Ava: She added, “When a concern is raised, we work closely with the school support team until the family is satisfied with the resolution.” Johnny Ventura, Beacon’s interim principal, wrote in an email that “students who believe they’re not getting the right accommodations should report it to him so the school can investigate.” So why is this happening? Why might it take so long for students to get IEPs and 504s? And why are they sometimes not being enforced? To answer this I spoke to Dr. Ben Lovett, an associate professor of psychology and education at the Teachers College of Columbia University. We first discussed the benefits of extra time.

Ben: The primary reason that we give extra time or other accommodations is so that the student can get a fair score on the test. So if someone is not able to read quickly enough, then they wouldn’t be able to read the items on the test in time, and they wouldn’t be able to show the knowledge that they have.

Ava: So if there are benefits, why would some people be opposed to granting students extra time?

Ben: I’m not sure there are many people who are opposed entirely. I think there are some folks who think we need to be more careful about granting extra time. So we know that on standardized tests, having extra time can inflate scores artificially. And by that I mean they can actually suggest that someone has higher skills than they do. And that’s part of the reason that we want to make sure that we’re using decisions very carefully about who gets extra time, that it be done equitably, and that it be based on someone’s actual needs.

Ava: I ask Dr. Lovett about the process of granting students accommodations. He says there’s typically a school team that reviews a student’s diagnostic assessments. This can include 504 and IEP plans or evaluations done by psychologists and special educators. They also review other relevant student data, like their academic performance.

Ben: Things like the student’s current performance without accommodations to see whether or not the student is able to perform at a certain level without having extra time. Another piece of relevant data would be information from diagnostic tests where we look, for instance, at how fast someone is when they’re reading or writing, and we’re able to compare them to other kids of the same age.

Ava: What would you say the shortcomings of this process are?

Ben: I think the process, in general, is a good one. I think some school districts need more resources to follow the process, so there may not be a sufficient number of school psychologists or special education administrators to make sure that there’s not a long wait before things happen. So, for instance, the federal law requires that generally, within 60 days of a formal request for an evaluation, that the evaluation be done or contested. And so some districts aren’t able to meet those goals if they have insufficient resources in terms of staffing and things like that.

Ava: Because of the lack of resources, families who pay for private evaluations have a big advantage. These evaluations — which typically cost more than $6,000 — can lead to a two-tiered system. Those who can afford outside evaluations and understand how to navigate the system are more likely to get their children’s needs met, while the needs of many other students go unaddressed.

Ava: So, what’s the best way to ensure that extra time can be equitably enforced throughout New York City?

Ben: I would say having official criteria, having a decision tree or a flowchart of data where you ensure that folks who are getting extended time meet certain criteria and that you’re not just in, for instance, letting someone’s social advantage allow for accommodations would be important. Also, having that sort of database process protects students who may lack certain types of access and resources to be able to persuade or pressure a school for extra time to make sure that they can point to that process and say, I do have the data, I do have the evidence that I need this.

Ava: So Dr. Lovett believes we have a good system in place. But the most effective way to ensure students with disabilities get the accommodations they need, is to make sure schools have the resources necessary to accommodate them. It’s time to reallocate more resources into special education across New York City schools. Everyone deserves a quality education. No one’s disability should hold them back.

Bernie: Once again, that was our P.S. Weekly Reporter, Ava Striker-Robbins. We’ll be back, after a short break.

AD: Hey listeners! We hope you’re enjoying this episode of PS Weekly. We’ve got an assignment for you-- follow us on Instagram @bell.voices. And, we want to hear from you! Reach out to P.S. Weekly at the email address: psweekly@chalkbeat.org with comments, questions, and suggestions.

Bernie: Welcome back to P.S. Weekly. We’ve been hearing about how difficult it is to get specialized learning accommodations. Our producer Santana Roach roamed the school halls to chat with a few more students with IEPs and 504s.

Santana: I had the privilege of speaking with several students and a teacher from Frederick Douglass Academy 2 and Stuyvesant High School.

Santana: What do people often misunderstand about students with IEPs?

Jack: They assume that we’re all what’s the word “special.”

Kaiya: They think that we’re like different. They look down on us as if there’s, like, something wrong with us or, like, we’re disgusting. Not everyone wants to be treated like differently, no matter of your race or gender or even if you have autism.

Mr. Wheeler: To be brutally honest, I very much felt that the fact that I had an IEP meant that there was something wrong with me.

Santana: Who are some people advocating for students with IEPs?

Hana: There are lots of counselors who advocate for me and for other things that I might need.

Kaiya: Oh, the psychologist.

Jack: My guidance counselor.

Keimar: My mom and myself.

Santana: How has your IEP helped you?

Jack: I’ve been able to pass my classes because I have an IEP.

Giandre: I get extra time on the tests. It’s a great experience cause I don’t gotta rush. I can just take my time on test.

Jack: When I have an IEP, I can prove that I’m smart.

Santana: What would you like to share with our listeners?

Kaiya: Don’t judge a book by its cover because you never know what you might see inside the book.

Mr. Wheeler: The way to make sure that students with IEPs are treated the way they deserve is to make sure that the paperwork never takes precedence over the person.

Santana: Thank you to Jack Blake, Kaiya Baker, Hana Debrah, Giandre Sorey, Keimar Miller, and Mr. Isaac Wheeler for speaking with PS Weekly.

Bernie: Thank you Santana. Well, there you are, guys…that’s it for our third episode! Don’t forget to go to chalkbeat.org/newsletters– or click the link in our show notes –to sign up for the Chalkbeat New York morning newsletter. It’s the best way to stay informed on local schools coverage Monday through Friday. And drop us a review! Or shoot an email to PSWeekly@chalkbeat.org. Tell us what you learned today or what you’re still wondering. We just might read your comment on a future episode.

Bernie: And P.S., we’re back next week with an episode about high school seniors making decisions about the future.

Alex: Someway halfway through, you kinda have this realization that “what if this is all for nothing? Like, what if I’m here writing these essays, and nothing comes out of it?”

Bernie: Until then… class dismissed!

CREDITS:

Bernie: PS Weekly is a collaboration between The Bell and Chalkbeat, made possible by generous support from The Pinkerton Foundation, The Summerfield Foundation, FJC, and Hindenburg Systems.

This episode was hosted by me, Bernie Carmona.

Producers for this episode were: Ava Striker Robbins, Santana Roach, and Dorothy Ha, with reporting help from Chalkbeat reporters Alex Zimmerman and Mike Elsen-Rooney.

Our marketing lead this week was Jose Santana. Our executive producer for the show is JoAnn DeLuna. Executive editors are Amy Zimmer and Taylor McGraw.

Additional production and reporting support was provided by Sabrina DuQuesnay, Mira Gordon, and our friends at Chalkbeat. Special thanks to our interns Miriam Galicia and Makenna Turner. And thanks, as well, to our amazing team of volunteer mentors.

Music from Blue Dot Sessions.

And the jingle you heard at the beginning of this episode was created by the one and only: Erica Huang.

Thanks for tuning in! See you next time!

10,000 NYC students are shut out of programs for children with autism. Adding 160 seats is a start.

2024-01-31T23:30:01+00:00

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New York City is expanding programs for students with autism, part of a broader pledge top Education Department officials announced Wednesday to create special education programming closer to where students live.

Beginning next school year, the city will guarantee that rising kindergartners in three local districts won’t have to leave their neighborhoods to access some of the city’s most popular programs for kids with autism.

Children with disabilities often must travel outside their neighborhoods to attend schools with smaller class sizes staffed by teachers with specialized training. Those trips can stretch over an hour each way, thanks in part to the city’s notoriously unreliable yellow bus system. Lengthy commutes can make it difficult to attend after-school programs or build friendships with children in their neighborhood who attend local schools.

“Many of our kids, we’ve got to send them way out of the neighborhood at great expense to the system and at great inconvenience to the families and to the kids themselves,” schools Chancellor David Banks said during a press conference at Brooklyn’s P.S. 958, which opened last school year as a model for serving local students with a broad range of abilities.

“We’ve got to fix this,” Banks said. “Today really is the beginning of that work.”

Children with autism who are entering kindergarten in Districts 5, 12, and 14 will be guaranteed a spot in a specialized program in their home district. (Those districts cover Harlem, Crotona Park in the Bronx, and Brooklyn’s Williamsburg and Greenpoint neighborhoods, respectively.) To accomplish that, the city is adding 160 total seats in those neighborhoods across three existing programs: ASD Nest, Horizon, and AIMS, which is short for Acquisition, Integrated Services, Meaningful Communication, and Social Skills.

Although Banks previously expanded Nest and Horizon programs, the addition of 160 new slots represents a drop in the bucket given the growing number of children who are classified with autism and who qualify for them. More than 10,000 children with autism could benefit from a seat in a Nest or Horizon program but are placed elsewhere, according to Education Department figures.

City officials acknowledged that they’re starting small and characterized the effort as a pilot program. Christina Foti, the department’s special education chief, said Wednesday’s announcement is “a ripple that will eventually turn into a tidal wave.”

Special education advocates largely cheered the expansion of Nest, Horizon, and AIMS programs, which are in high demand. City officials said 95% of children who attend Nest and Horizon programs graduate from high school, more than 30 percentage points higher than students with disabilities overall.

The city also released a report with a series of recommendations for improving the special education system, after collecting input from parent leaders, policy experts, and educators.

“I think it is a really important first step,” said Maggie Moroff, a member of the advisory group that produced recommendations and a policy coordinator at Advocates for Children, a group that helps families navigate the special education system.

Moroff was glad to hear city officials reiterate their commitment to including students with disabilities alongside general education students when possible and creating more programs in their home neighborhoods. And she also appreciated a new glossary released by the Education Department that aims to help schools use more inclusive language when referring to children with disabilities and the programs that serve them.

But questions remained about the city’s plans, including whether it will scale up special education programming beyond the autism-focused initiative reaching just three of 32 local districts. Multiple advocates also noted there was little mention of the city’s vision for District 75, a network of schools that educate more than 26,000 students with more significant disabilities. Those children are largely separated from students without disabilities.

“Like so many things, the devil is going to be in the details about how it plays out,” Moroff said.

Peer support for parents trying to get special education services

City officials also pledged to beef up recruitment of caregivers trained to help others navigate the meetings where families and schools create individualized education programs, or IEPs. These legal documents spell out what services each child should receive.

Advocates say caregivers often don’t know the ins and outs of the IEP process, what their rights are, or even what services their children may need.

“It’s scary – and that’s universal,” said Lori Podvesker, a parent and director of disability and education policy at INCLUDEnyc, an organization that trains parent advocates and supports families who have children with disabilities.

The parent advocates, who also have children with disabilities, are trained to help other families understand the process. They attend IEP meetings alongside their peers — earning as much as $50 per meeting.

Special education advocate and parent Paullette Healy said she signed up to be a parent member years ago and completed the training, but the city never responded to her request to complete a fingerprinting requirement. She has still shown up to hundreds of IEP meetings to advocate on behalf of families, though not in an official paid role.

“It’s always existed, but wasn’t really utilized,” Healy said.

City officials said they’re working with INCLUDEnyc to bolster recruitment and spread awareness that families can request a parent advocate to attend their IEP meetings. Education Department officials declined to provide any tangible goals for the new effort, including how many parent advocates they hope to train.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

NYC needs fully accessible schools. Families like mine depend on it.

2024-01-26T13:00:00+00:00

Josh and I were excited, planning for a child. I was not a happy pregnant person, but at each appointment, I was assured that the baby was growing well. Each sonogram declared he was “perfect.” After an uneventful full-term birth, our son Abey was born 8 pounds, 8 ounces. Within four months we knew he had challenges. At a year old, Abey did not sit, eat, grab a toy, or look at my face.

We had not planned for Abey’s disabilities, but in the months and years that followed, we became well-versed in therapies, doctor’s appointments, feeding tubes, seizure medications, and wheelchairs. By the time Abey was ready for kindergarten, we realized that our school system had not planned for his disabilities either.

Michelle Noris

Abey was born 13 years to the day after the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, was signed into law. When we started looking at kindergartens, we found that the school across the street was not accessible. Neither were any of the schools within walking distance from our Queens home. He would need to be bused to another neighborhood.

When we looked at schools in other neighborhoods, school staff said things like “You won’t be happy here” and “We can’t handle his needs.” Finally, after the city’s Committee on Special Education agreed that its schools could not provide him an appropriate education, Abey, my 5-year-old who could not speak, ended up on a bus, hours each day, to Nassau County. Between kindergarten and eighth grade, he spent some 3,500 hours commuting.

What did that mean for Abey, other than thousands of hours lost to busing? It meant no after-school activities, since the school bus would not bring him home. It meant very few playdates, since I would need to drive to and from Nassau anytime he was invited anywhere. It meant he didn’t have friends in the community where he lived, since he had no exposure to them in school.

What did that mean for our family? It meant that every parent-teacher conference or school event required that one of his parents miss half a day of work. It meant that a bus strike required us to drive him back and forth to Long Island, which could take hours and meant more time off work. It meant not having my sons, born two years apart, in the same school like all the other moms on my block. We were socially isolated and economically penalized by our school system because Abey was disabled.

Fast forward 15 years, and Abey is a junior at Columbia University, where he enrolled after graduating from Bard High School Early College Queens, a fully accessible high school just 20 minutes from home.

The school across the street where we initially hoped to send Abey to kindergarten still is not accessible, and neither are any of those in walking distance from our home. Another generation of students with physical disabilities is being denied access to their community schools.

When I realized that New York City’s public schools were woefully behind in ADA compliance, I set about understanding why. As with many problems, the root was money. The first time I looked at the accessibility of our schools, back in 2018, only about 18% of city public schools were fully accessible, according to the group Advocates for Children.

The author with her son Abey at a Mets game.

The education department’s 2015-2019 capital budget allocated $100 million to improve accessibility in schools, with an additional $50 million earmarked in 2019. That sounds like a lot of money, but only 14 inaccessible or partially accessible school buildings became fully accessible with those dollars, according to a city report. At another 13 school buildings, building accessibility was improved though not enough to make them fully accessible, the report shows.

At the rate they were going, it would have taken many generations for the education department’s 1,300 school buildings to reach full accessibility.

The solution was, and is, funding. Based on what the education department was able to accomplish with the 2015-2019 capital plan, I projected that the city needed to invest about $1 billion every five years for all schools to become fully accessible within 26 years. During the 2020-24 budget cycle, the city allocated $750 million, and by 2023, 31% of city schools were fully accessible, up 13 percentage points from five years earlier.

To continue toward a school system that is inclusive and compliant with federal law, Advocates for Children asked the city to allocate $1.25 billion for accessibility in the next budget cycle, which runs 2025-29. But this time around, the city has plans to spend only about two-thirds of that, $800 million, for accessibility. It may be tempting to point to New York City’s current financial strains and say, “We cannot afford that now; we will do it later.” I say that it has been more than 33 years since the ADA was passed, and we are catching up on work that should have been completed years ago.

I did not plan in advance for my disabled son. When he arrived, my husband and I put our emotional, mental, and financial resources into making sure he got what he needed. New York City did not know that my son would be disabled, but we all knew, and still know, that disabled children will continue to join our community and need to go to school. They need friends in the neighborhood, rather than being bused to other counties. Families like mine should not shoulder greater logistical and financial burdens than our neighbors with non-disabled children. Our city must plan, budget for, and fast-track accessible schools. Students and families demand it, depend on it, and deserve it.

Michelle Noris is a mom to three children educated through the New York City Public Schools and owner of Norfast Engineering PLLC.

NYC says it won’t move forward with tens of millions in cuts to District 75 schools

2024-01-11T22:27:06+00:00

New York City’s Education Department is pledging not to move forward with tens of millions of dollars in budget cuts to District 75 programs for students with significant disabilities – but school staffers say they’re still getting mixed messages about the cuts.

Staffers at multiple District 75 schools said last month that their principals were instructed to cut $1 million or more from their budgets as part of citywide budget cuts ordered by Mayor Eric Adams. The planned cuts totaled roughly $97 million across the district and would have forced schools to slash spending on extracurriculars, supplies, and paraprofessionals, people familiar with the discussions said.

Following an outcry from school staffers, parents, and advocates over the planned cuts, Education Department spokesperson Nathaniel Styer said earlier this week “we can confirm that there are no school-based cuts happening to D75.”

Another Education Department spokesperson denied that there was a “change in course” and insisted that District 75 schools were simply asked to review their budgets to ensure they aligned with enrollment, a “recurring practice for all schools.”

“We are working with district leadership to ensure this understanding is clear for all principals,” the spokesperson added.

But school staffers said they are still getting conflicting messages, and news of the reversal hasn’t yet trickled down to some schools.

Jo Macellaro, a teacher and union chapter leader at P.S. 186X in the Bronx, the city’s largest District 75 program, said the school’s principal is “under the impression that they are still happening.” The principal didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Another District 75 administrator, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the reversal of the cuts has not been communicated to their school either.

Tameka Solomon, the chapter leader at P.S. 352X, another Bronx District 75 program, meanwhile, heard from her principal that the cuts are “on hold.”

The vague communication and confusion surrounding the cuts has left some worried that District 75 school budgets could still be vulnerable.

“In this top-down approach to school governance, there is very little that trickles down to actual schools,” said Paullette Healy, a parent of a District 75 student and long-time advocate. “Until I see it in writing, I still believe our students with disabilities are in jeopardy of losing their services because of these cuts.”

From the start, the specifics of the cuts have been mired in confusion.

In budget documents released in November, only $3 million a year in cuts was listed for District 75.

But staffers at four schools subsequently told Chalkbeat that their administrators were instructed by the district leaders to make far steeper cuts, effective immediately. The staffers added that their schools are not normally subject to big mid-year cuts, and pointed out that enrollment is up across the district.

The $97 million figure was communicated by District 75 Superintendent Ketler Louissaint in a meeting with principals, according to people familiar with the discussions.

News of the cuts drew outrage from staffers, parents and advocates.

One administrator warned that cuts to the school’s paraprofessional budget could pose safety risks for students with autism who are prone to run out of classrooms and buildings with no notice and need full-time monitoring by dedicated aides. That risk was underscored last week when an 11-year-old boy with autism ran out of his District 75 school in downtown Brooklyn and managed to board a train to Long Island. He was found four hours later unharmed.

Some advocates said the Education Department’s commitment not to enact District 75 school cuts was a positive step.

“We are relieved that what was rumored around cuts to the district serving those students isn’t currently in the cards and that, for now, the expertise the district offers should remain intact,” said Maggie Moroff, the senior special education policy coordinator for Advocates for Children. “Hard times can’t be an excuse for cutting services to those students who need support the most.”

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

NYC’s District 75 schools for students with disabilities brace for tens of millions in cuts

2023-12-20T15:25:29+00:00

New York City’s Education Department has quietly been asking leaders of District 75 schools serving students with complex disabilities to slash tens of millions of dollars from their budgets, according to staffers at multiple schools.

The cuts, relayed to principals by schools Chancellor David Banks and District 75 superintendent Ketler Louissant, amount in many cases to more than $1 million per school, and are supposed to take effect immediately, according to staff from multiple affected schools. Across the district, they total about $97 million, and are supposed to help the Education Department achieve savings ordered by Mayor Eric Adams, people familiar with the discussions said.

The cuts would gut extracurricular programming, thin out supply budgets, and exacerbate an already severe paraprofessional shortage, potentially pushing schools even further out of compliance with students’ legally binding special education plans, staffers from four District 75 schools told Chalkbeat.

The roughly 26,000 students in District 75 often have complex disabilities that their local public schools are unable to accommodate, ranging from cerebral palsy to acute emotional challenges.

“They’re asking every principal in District 75 to cut close to $1 million from their budgets,” said a District 75 administrator, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “There will be no paper or ink for the printers … children that are emotionally disturbed, autistic, will not be able to get a paraprofessional.”

Education Department officials didn’t confirm the amount of the cuts. But department spokesperson Nathaniel Styer said, “We are in a fiscal crisis, and we are taking every action necessary to limit impact on schools.”

District 75 schools are undergoing a normal process of “reconcil[ing] enrollment with the number of classes needed to serve students,” he said. “Additionally, we are identifying vacancies, efficiencies, and underspending that can be used to meet the mayor’s savings target.”

But staff at District 75 schools said the steep midyear cuts are not typical. District 75 schools don’t get money through the Fair Student Funding formula used for other public schools and aren’t normally subject to “midyear adjustments” that require schools to give back money part way through the year if their enrollments are lower than projected, staffers said.

Moreover, the district’s enrollment has actually gone up in recent years, even as student numbers have cratered in much of the rest of the city. Enrollment in District 75 rose 3% between 2018-2019 and last school year, while K-12 schools lost 13% of their students citywide during the same period.

“We have so many students with referrals waiting for a new seat,” said Tameka Solomon, a teacher and union chapter leader at P352X in the Bronx.

District 75 cuts are larger than anticipated

The cuts far exceed what was outlined in the city’s November budget plan, which listed “savings” of $3 million a year in District 75 because of “lower than expected spending.” When City Councilmember Alexa Avilés, of Brooklyn, asked about a $97 million cut to District 75 during an oversight hearing last week, Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget Director Jacques Jiha pointed only to the $3 million cut outlined in budget documents.

But behind the scenes, the message from Education Department officials has been much different, educators said.

Solomon’s principal was asked to cut $1.3 million from the school’s budget, though subsequently the principal said the cut was on hold, she said.

The Bronx’s P186X, which is the city’s largest District 75 program with nearly 700 students, is also facing a $1.3 million midyear cut, according to teacher and chapter leader Jo Macellaro.

Many District 75 schools have already begun trimming overtime budgets that pay teachers to staff extracurricular programs and budgets for supplies, multiple staffers said. Those cuts are less painful than eliminating staff positions, but they still affect kids, staffers said.

“Even during COVID we always had an afterschool program, and now it’s like, ‘Don’t even think about it,’”said Allister Johnson, an adaptive physical education teacher and union chapter leader at a District 75 school.

“A lot of learning took place,” in the extracurricular programs, he added. “It’s sad for the kids and for the parents.”

Concerns grow over paraprofessional shortage

Reducing overtime and supplies budgets won’t be enough to achieve the required savings, however. Schools will likely have to slash the budgets for paraprofessionals, teaching assistants who provide extra support for students with the greatest needs, staffers said.

District 75 schools have already been experiencing a severe paraprofessional shortage.

The number of paraprofessionals working in city schools fell from roughly 25,700 in June 2020 to about 21,800 in November 2021, according to the state comptroller, a drop of roughly 15%.

As a result, many students with significant disabilities whose special education plans require a dedicated, one-to-one paraprofessional go without one, staffers said.

P186X is already short at least 30 paraprofessionals, according to Macellaro. On some days, one paraprofessional has to change the diapers of a dozen middle school students alone.

“People are getting injured. It’s already really not a good situation. And honestly we’re already rationing things like wipes,” Macellaro added.

Solomon’s school has largely been relying on substitute paraprofessionals. It’s better than nothing, but it often means investing extra time training people who may have never worked with kids, and less continuity for students who have to work with a rotating array of paraprofessionals, she said.

Further cutting the already diminished paraprofessional pool could have disastrous consequences, staffers said.

The District 75 administrator said their school has a number of students with autism who will attempt to run out of their classrooms and the school building with no warning. “Think about what’s going to happen” when those students don’t have a dedicated paraprofessional to follow them throughout the day, the administrator said.

An Education Department spokesperson acknowledged there is a paraprofessional shortage, but attributed it to “lack of talent,” not “lack of funds.”

The budget cuts laid out in November, which amount to 5% from each agency, include roughly $550 million from the Education Department. Additional 5% cuts are expected in January and again in the spring.

Among the Education Department cuts are $10 million from the community schools program, which pairs schools with community organizations to provide additional services to families, and $20 million from the city’s free summer school program.

But the cuts to District 75 appear to be the deepest so far to individual school budgets — a fact that’s baffled the District 75 administrator: “How do you justify asking the most vulnerable children in the city to go without?”

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

Eric Adams’ budget cuts hamper NYC’s compliance with special education court order

2023-12-13T18:23:59+00:00

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Facing budget cuts and a hiring freeze, New York City’s Education Department has failed to fully comply with a federal court order meant to address longstanding delays in providing services to children with disabilities, according to court documents released this month.

And a court-appointed monitor is urging City Council, Mayor Eric Adams, and other education officials to find “near-term/interim emergency funding” to meet the order’s requirements.

At a hearing in July, a federal judge ordered the Education Department to begin implementing 40 different reforms to more quickly provide special education services — such as speech therapy or payments to families for private school — to families who won them through an administrative legal process.

In an unusual show of support for a court order targeting his own agency, schools Chancellor David Banks personally attended the summer hearing, shaking U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska’s hand and posing for photographs. He issued a statement declaring that “change is long overdue,” earning praise from advocates who note the Education Department has not complied with orders for services on time in more than 90% of cases.

But out of 16 reforms the Education Department was required to make by mid-November to speed up that process, only nine were fully implemented, according to the first progress report from David Irwin of Thru Consulting LLC, the court-appointed monitor overseeing the city’s compliance with the order, known in legal jargon as a “special master.” (The 40 reforms mandated by the court order have deadlines that range from three months to over a year. The special master is expected to file a progress report every four months.)

The Education Department has “shown a significant commitment and effort” to implement the requirements, Irwin wrote, noting that “most” of the outstanding items due in November should be completed by the end of 2023.

Compliance with the order’s upcoming requirements in doubt

But a hiring freeze and budget reductions ordered by City Hall are impeding progress on key elements of the court order, specifically hiring staff and overhauling severely outdated technology systems, Irwin’s report notes. At least five of the 10 changes due in January are not likely to be completed on time, he wrote.

“Each day that passes, thousands of our most vulnerable children are not getting services they need when more steps could be taken,” Irwin wrote.

The office responsible for implementing special education orders relies on handwritten forms, paper-based invoices, and other laborious data-entry practices, a previous report found. Its staff are also overwhelmed, as the number of cases moving through the special education complaint process has exploded in recent years.

The court order was meant to give the Education Department a roadmap for improving its systems, hiring staff, and even launching a helpline for families to get status updates on their cases — goals that may be thrown off course if the department is unable to bring in new employees or win approval for budget requests.

Rebecca Shore, the litigation director of Advocates for Children, which brought a class action lawsuit that led to the court order this summer, said the Education Department has been making efforts to comply. But failing to implement elements of the order is unacceptable, she said.

“The budget constraints the city is announcing should not impact their compliance,” Shore said. Asked if her organization is planning to go back to court to enforce the order, Shore said her team is “discussing our options.”

Spokespeople for Adams and Banks did not answer questions about whether they will allocate needed funding or staff to comply with the court order.

“We continue to work collaboratively and intensively with the Special Master as we move forward,” City Hall spokesperson Amaris Cockfield wrote in an email. Preska, the federal judge presiding over the case, declined to comment.

Order stems from lawsuit filed in 2003

The federal court order stems from two decades of litigation over the Education Department’s failure to swiftly provide special education services or reimbursements. When a family believes their child is not getting the right special education services, they have a right to file a complaint that is heard by an administrative judge known as an impartial hearing officer.

That officer can order a range of solutions, from additional speech or occupational therapy to private school tuition payments if a family can show their child cannot be adequately served in a public school.

Under a 2007 legal settlement, the city is supposed to implement hearing officers’ orders by providing the required payments or special education services within 35 days, unless the officer lays out a different timeline. But the Education Department blows the deadline in the vast majority of cases, often taking months longer.

For orders with due dates between August and November 2022, the Education Department implemented 8.6% of orders for special education services on time and 3% of orders for payments, according to a recent audit released as a result of the 2007 settlement. (Those figures cover a period before the federal court order this summer; more recent figures were not yet publicly available.) The city has paid more than $25 million for the audits and another $912,000 for Irwin’s services as special master as of June.

John Farago, an impartial hearing officer since 1980 and an emeritus professor at CUNY Law School, said he has seen little difference in the speed with which the Education Department implements his orders since the summer.

Irwin’s report “just documents that not only is the district not implementing my cases on time, it’s not implementing the federal court’s order either” he wrote in an email. “It’s a deeply disheartening spiral.”

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Advocates demanded $1.25 billion to make NYC schools more accessible. They got $800 million.

2023-11-01T22:14:41+00:00

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New York City plans to spend $800 million over the next five years to boost school building accessibility for people with physical disabilities, officials revealed Wednesday. That figure is far short of what advocates had demanded.

Fewer than 1 in 3 of the city’s public schools are fully accessible to students and staff with mobility impairments, according to a recent report from the group Advocates for Children. The organization previously called on the city to dramatically ramp up spending to $1.25 billion to ensure that at least half of buildings would become fully accessible over the term of the new capital plan, which runs from 2025 through 2029.

With many budget concerns on the horizon — including the expiration of billions of dollars in federal relief money and additional cuts to city agencies ordered by Mayor Eric Adams — accessibility funding hewed closely to current levels.

The capital plan will increase funding for accessibility from $750 million under the current five-year plan, which runs from 2020 through 2024, to $800 million in the new one, according to documents released Wednesday. Advocates contend that is not enough to keep the current pace because of inflation and rising construction costs.

“Given the decades of inadequate attention that preceded this investment, nearly two-thirds of City schools will still not be fully accessible by the time the construction funded by the current Capital Plan is complete,” Kim Sweet, executive director of Advocates for Children, said in a statement. “It is not acceptable to postpone compliance with [the federal Americans with Disabilities Act] for yet another generation.”

Lack of access to school buildings has long been a barrier for students with physical disabilities and has even drawn the attention of federal prosecutors. In past years, some children had few — or even zero — nearby school options. It can also limit students’ ability to take advantage of New York City’s extensive choice system, which allows children to apply for schools outside their neighborhood boundaries.

Queens mom Michelle Noris said she was disappointed when her son, who uses a wheelchair, could not attend the public elementary school across the street from their home. Instead, he wound up at a private school, with tuition covered by the city, about an hour away.

“I really wish he had friends down the block like all the other kids,” said Noris, who works as an engineer. Though her son is now in college — and has written about his experience navigating the city’s high school admissions process in a wheelchair — she remains an advocate for more accessible schools.

Although “there is an improvement” in terms of building upgrades, she said the school across the street from their home is still not fully accessible. At the current pace, it would take decades to make every school accessible. “They need to allocate more money to do more good work,” Noris said.

Officials have made some progress in recent years in part due to pressure from advocacy groups who have pushed for more funding — and attention — to the issue. By the end of the current capital plan, 1 in 3 schools are expected to be fully accessible, up from 1 in 5 five years ago. (The figures do not include certain alternative schools, prekindergarten programs, or charter schools. Nor do they include satellite campuses, as schools may have more than one location.)

The city has also boosted the number of schools that are considered “partially accessible” and worked to provide more granular information about which facilities on those campuses are accessible to students with mobility impairments.

Representatives of the city’s Education Department and School Construction Authority did not say what percentage of schools they plan to make fully accessible under the new capital plan.

“Building on prior plans, we will continue to enhance accessibility in our school buildings through a variety of measures, such as bathroom renovations, lifts, and ramps,” Kevin Ortiz, a spokesperson for the School Construction Authority, wrote in a statement. “We remain committed to improving access throughout the system.”

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

NYC families push for special education open houses as high school admissions season heats up

2023-10-31T19:24:47+00:00

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Manhattan dad Tom Fiorella wanted a public high school that could challenge his child and accommodate learning disabilities. He spent countless hours scouring websites, attending open houses, and emailing parent coordinators in search of answers.

Does the school integrate students with disabilities alongside typically developing children in classes at all grade levels? Is support available for students who could handle advanced coursework but, like his child, also have a language-based learning disability? Would the environment feel welcoming?

“It’s complex – it’s a lot of work,” said Fiorella, whose child began ninth grade this year. “It was hard to get solid information.”

Now, a group of parent advocates is pushing for more high schools to offer open houses specifically geared toward students with disabilities. They’ve sent a flurry of messages to school leaders to persuade them to roll out the information sessions more widely.

That advocacy effort, which began last year, is already starting to bear fruit, said Jenn Choi, a special education advocate who created an email template and encouraged parents to send it to school leaders and superintendents.

The Brooklyn North high school superintendent has required all of the 47 campuses under her supervision to offer special education information sessions. And two other district leaders have been receptive or encouraged principals to offer them, including those who represent Queens North as well as the superintendent responsible for schools that use alternate graduation assessments, international schools serving recently arrived immigrants, and Outward Bound schools, messages sent to parents show.

Open houses are an important way for families to narrow down which 12 high schools to list on their application out of more than 400 options. All families, including those with disabilities, are welcome to attend those sessions. But parents and advocates say the traditional open houses may fill up quickly, gloss over special education, or wind up with little time for families to ask questions about whether the school is prepared to offer the services their child needs.

The city’s online high school directory makes it simple to filter schools by a wide range of categories — from sports teams to uniform requirements. Still, clear information about what types of special education classes are typically offered, what types of therapists are on staff, and even information about school building accessibility for those with mobility issues can be difficult to come by. Officials have improved access to information about physical building accessibility in recent years.

Using the city’s directory, “a parent can find the 30 high schools with girls’ golf teams in NYC in under 8 seconds,” Choi wrote in a guide for school leaders who want to offer special education open houses. If a parent wants to find schools that regularly provide a certain type of special education class, “they will have to pick up the phone and start calling over 500 schools, one school at a time.”

Although some schools have offered special education open houses for years, it’s unclear how common they are. An Education Department spokesperson could not say how many schools offer them now or in recent years.

Choi, who runs a special education consulting business and also navigated the admissions process as a parent of two children with disabilities, said they are relatively rare. Requiring all schools to offer them would help make the high school process friendlier to students with disabilities, she argues. Plus, they can serve an important accountability purpose, as school officials may commit to providing a range of services during the sessions.

“Parents are going to expect that promises are going to be kept,” Choi said. “And that’s how change happens.”

Even as some schools are embracing special education open houses, it can still be tricky to find basic information about them. For some schools, the city’s centralized directory lists whether a school offers such a session. In other cases, that information appears to be missing and individual school websites don’t always list them.

Education Department spokesperson Nicole Brownstein emphasized that “open houses are organized at the school level” and did not indicate whether the city would consider requiring all high schools to offer them. She also did not respond to a question about how families can find out about them given some of the inconsistencies in where they’re posted.

Maggie Moroff, a special education policy expert at Advocates for Children, said she felt torn about special education open houses. In an ideal world, information about specialized services should be woven into traditional sessions, she said, though that can be a challenge.

“You don’t want it to be siloed, but you want to make sure the right attention gets paid” to students with disabilities, Moroff said, adding that in practice she supports more special education open houses.

Specialized open houses can also make it more difficult for schools to hide that they’re not actually set up to support students with a variety of news, advocates said.

“You can have a school that can check off all the right boxes on paper,” Moroff said, “but when a family gets there, the way they are welcomed is quite different. You can glean a lot from that.”

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Meet Harry and Lucy, NYC’s tween wheelchair racers

2023-10-27T20:26:12+00:00

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Harry Houng-Lee has his eye on 2030. That’s when the 11-year-old will be old enough to race in the New York City marathon.

Harry’s family would often wake up early and watch the professional wheelchair racers in the marathon so he could see his own possibilities as an athlete.

Just before the pandemic, the Upper East Sider joined the Rising New York Road Runners Wheelchair Training Program, a free year-round program for New York City kids with disabilities ages 6 to 21. In less than four years, Harry has become a decorated racer, winning four gold medals at the 2023 Move United USA Junior Nationals. He set personal records in all five events.

He practices frequently in Central Park, and loves the feeling of the wind in his hair as he whooshes around, clocking in at about 20 mph when going downhill, he estimated.

“I get to go fast,” Harry said. “Wheelchair racing is a cool sport.”

In a city where accessibility is a constant challenge, the Road Runners’ wheelchair training program focuses on removing barriers. Working with the JDJ Foundation, the program provides custom-fitted racing chairs for the children — which cost upwards of $5,000 — and it also covers transportation costs to the weekly practices as well as the races.

For Harry, being part of the group has opened new doors as his confidence in the sport has grown. Besides traveling the country to national competitions, the sixth grader recently joined the track team at East Side Middle School. He is the only wheelchair racer at his school.

Harry felt fortunate that East Side, his local middle school, was fully accessible — and that it had a track team. He wasn’t able to attend his zoned elementary school, P.S. 198, because the multi-story building had no elevator. Instead, he had to travel to the Upper West Side to P.S. 333, The Manhattan School for Children.

Fewer than 1 in 3 New York City public schools are fully accessible to students with physical disabilities, according to a recent report from Advocates for Children, an organization dedicated to helping the city’s most vulnerable students. The group has been pushing for $1.25 billion to address major gaps in building accessibility in the city’s five-year capital plan, which is expected to be released on Nov. 1. (That funding would allow about half of the city’s schools to be fully accessible, according to the report.)

When Harry started at East Side Middle School, he never doubted that he’d join the track team. He’s well aware of “Tatyana’s law,” federal legislation passed a decade ago ensuring equal access to school sports for students with disabilities.

His mom, Jasmine Tay, reached out to the school about Harry joining the team, and said they were very “encouraging.” Still, she told them not to worry about the cross country season in the fall, since the team trains and competes off-road. She suggested that Harry could wait until track season.

But the school’s gym teacher insisted they could make accommodations, taking the more advanced runners on the road in Central Park so Harry could join, Tay said. They also changed the training routes so the team no longer used stairs.

“Harry was so thrilled, and I was so happy with the effort made for inclusion and just the attitude of the coach to make it work — not only changing the route, but also recognizing where Harry would be faster versus slower than the runners and building that into team drills,” Tay said.

“It was proper inclusion,” she said, “and I was surprised it was that easy — sad, I know.”

The joys of being part of a team

In practices, Harry enjoys zipping by his new school teammates on downhills and straightaways, though he’s not as fast uphill.

But he still enjoys spending time with his teammates he’s known for years from the Rising Road Runners wheelchair program, like Lucy Shannon, 12, from Hamilton Heights.

Lucy also learned about the sport when watching the professional wheelchair racers in the New York City marathon. And on Nov. 2, she’ll get a taste of crossing the marathon’s famed finish line in Central Park along with about 1,000 other kids in a 400-meter dash TCS Run with Champions, earning a medal at the end.

Lucy, too, had five first place finishes in Nationals in the summer.

While she enjoys the competition, that’s not the main draw of the program for her.

“It feels inspiring when I’m racing,” said Lucy, who is home-schooled. “I’m meeting so many new friends on my team.”

That team camaraderie is a big part of the program, said Marissa Muñoz, senior vice president of community impact at Rising at New York Road Runners. There are three coaches for the program, which had about 20 kids participating last year.

“I think it’s a pretty rare thing to have this extracurricular for these young athletes,” Muñoz said.

It’s among three programs run by Rising New York Road Runners where their coaches directly work with kids. The organization mainly works with schools where its free curriculum and professional development is used by school coaches who work with about 60,000 kids across the five boroughs.

Many of the kids in the wheelchair racing program, like Harry, stay with the program for years. Muñoz hopes more children will join the program and continue to build bonds.

“We’re just looking forward to continuing to work with them and grow over the years,” she said. “We want to see them reach their goals.”

For Harry, being around his cheering teammates gives him a boost.

“It makes me feel encouraged and happy,” he said.

And after Harry’s first marathon in 2030, he’s angling to go to the Paralympics in 2032, in Brisbane, Australia, where the Aussie-born tween hopes to represent Team Australia.

Correction: The national competition is called Move United Nationals, not Adaptive Sports USA Nationals, as an earlier version of this story stated.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

A widespread school bus worker strike has been averted. Here’s what it means for NYC families.

2023-09-21T21:08:46+00:00

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New York City’s school bus workers have reached a tentative contract agreement with bus companies servicing thousands of routes — meaning a majority of families who could have been impacted by a strike will see uninterrupted bus services.

News of the agreement, which union officials and City Hall confirmed on Thursday, follows months of negotiation between the Amalgamated Transit Union and bus companies that contract with the city. New York City schools contract bus services with dozens of companies, and the union’s collective bargaining agreement with many bus companies expired at the end of June.

The tentative contract agreement, which secures services for thousands of bus routes that transport students to and from school each day, was first reported Wednesday night by the New York Daily News.

The terms of the contract must still be ratified by union members, according to union officials.

“We fought for the contract our members need and deserve to support themselves and their families, and so that there are enough skilled school bus workers to provide safe and reliable service to New York City families,” said Carolyn Rinaldi, chief of staff at ATU, in an emailed statement. “Our members are trained professionals. They are passionate and dedicated. Above all, they safely transport and attend to the most precious cargo in New York City — the children.”

The contract includes some guarantees on weeks of employment and medical coverage, as well as shorter progression to higher pay, among other things, according to the union.

Rima Izquierdo, an advocate and Bronx parent whose children take the bus to school, said she was grateful that a widespread strike appeared to have been avoided.

“That would have shut our city down,” she said. “And that would not have been good for anybody.”

What the contract agreement means for families

This year, some families returned to school as the potential strike fueled uncertainty over how their children would get to school. Though service continued as usual through the first few weeks of the school year, fear of future disruptions loomed.

Disruptions to school bus services disproportionately impact younger students, as well as students with disabilities and those who live in temporary housing.

The city’s Education Department previously estimated a strike would impact roughly 80,000 students across roughly 4,400 routes in the five boroughs, or more than half of the roughly 150,000 students who ride yellow buses during the school year.

About 25,000 of those affected would have been students with disabilities, officials said.

Now, a majority of those families should continue to receive services, though ongoing negotiations with the nonprofit school bus provider NYCSBUS and two other companies mean some families could still face strike-related disruptions, according to union officials.

“We are grateful that ATU Local 1181 and DOE-contracted school bus companies were able to come to a voluntary agreement,” a City Hall spokesperson said, adding it “will ensure continuity of service and peace of mind for the more than 80,000 students and their families who rely on these services, including thousands of students with disabilities.”

Why some families could still be affected by a strike

Negotiations with the remaining three bus companies could impact about 1,600 of the city’s more than 9,000 bus routes.

“That’s still a lot of kids,” said Lori Podvesker, director of disability and education policy at the non-profit INCLUDEnyc.

If each bus route carries even just 10 students, a strike would impact thousands of kids, Podvesker added.

“It’s really important if there is a strike, and in general, that there’s some kind of accountability system set up by the city that is school-based and keeps track of whether students miss services as a result of busing,” she said. “They need their services in order to access curriculum, and cumulatively, it builds up.”

Why families might see services disrupted without a strike

Even without a strike, some families may still experience issues with busing. The city’s vast school bus system often gets off to a rocky start, with families experiencing no-shows and long delays.

In a statement, Sara Catalinotto, the head of Parents to Improve School Transportation and a longtime transportation advocate, said her organization was “cautiously optimistic” that the settlement would include a wage structure that would help address staff shortages that lead to doubled-up bus routes that lengthen children’s commutes.

“A fair labor contract would be a step forward,” she said. “Much more is needed to repair the damage done by misplaced priorities and disconnected governance within NYC school busing.”

Izquierdo, the Bronx parent, remained concerned over the bus routes that could still be impacted as well as by the delays in bus service this year many have faced this year, including her own children.

“I feel like the least you can do for us is make sure our kids get to the building,” she said.

Julian Shen-Berro is a reporter covering New York City. Contact him at jshen-berro@chalkbeat.org.

NYC school bus strike looms ahead of new year. What families should know.

2023-08-28T20:45:29+00:00

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With a new academic year about to start, New York City schools are bracing for a potential bus worker strike that could affect tens of thousands of students who rely on yellow buses to get to and from school.

The possible strike comes amid continued negotiations between the Amalgamated Transit Union — which represents about half of New York City’s public school bus drivers and attendants — and bus companies that contract with the city. A strike could impact roughly 80,000 students across 4,400 routes in the five boroughs, according to the city’s education department.

That’s more than half of the roughly 150,000 students who ride yellow buses across approximately 9,000 routes during the school year.

About 25,000 of the potentially affected riders are students with disabilities, officials said.

Concerns over the potential strike have been brewing for weeks, after the union’s collective bargaining agreement with many bus companies expired at the end of June. But Monday, just days ahead of the Sept. 7 start of school, the city’s education department released a more detailed set of guidelines about how families could navigate a possible strike.

Here’s what we know:

Which students could be affected?

A school bus worker strike would disproportionately affect students who tend to rely on yellow bus services — including the city’s youngest students and those with disabilities.

It’s not clear yet which routes would be impacted. The city’s education department initially said it would release a map of potentially affected routes sometime this week, but Friday, officials said no map would be posted.

Families who are affected will receive an automated call, email, and text message from the city once a strike is confirmed, as well as on the first day of interrupted service, according to officials.

Even under normal circumstances, the city’s vast school bus system often gets off to a rocky start, with scores of families experiencing long delays or no-show buses.

And even if a strike is averted, it’s possible that the effects of the last-minute negotiations could ripple into the start of the school year. One source close to the negotiations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said school bus companies usually pick routes this week, but that isn’t happening because of ongoing negotiations.

How long could a strike last?

In a press release Monday, schools Chancellor David Banks said the city is “pushing for a resolution before the start of the school year,” but it remains unclear whether the strike will occur and how long it could last.

In 2013, a prolonged school bus worker strike saw services disrupted for more than a month, impacting more than 100,000 students and significantly driving down attendance rates in programs for students with disabilities.

What services will the city offer if a strike occurs?

Families impacted by the strike will be eligible for prepaid MetroCards through their school, allowing parents and students to travel to and from school on public transportation, according to the city’s education department. Families will receive four trips per MetroCard on MTA buses and subways each day during the school week.

Some affected students — like those with disabilities who are entitled to transportation services, or who live in temporary housing — will also receive access to a free rideshare service, which will provide a car to take them and a caregiver to and from school each day.

Ride-share services have typically been difficult for parents to take advantage of since they require parents to accompany their children to and from school. The car service would also provide a ride for the caregiver to any location in the five boroughs after drop-off, and pick them up there in the afternoon before returning to the school — an option which could make it more feasible for some parents.

One public school teacher in Fort Greene, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said they worried about whether their two kids would be able to use the service, even though both would be eligible. They attend school about an hour away in Bensonhurst, where they receive specialized programming for students with autism.

“The earliest they’re allowed to be in the building is 7:30 a.m.,” the teacher said. “There’s no way I’m going to get them dropped off at 7:30 a.m., and take the hour ride, and still be there in time for my 8:10 classes.”

Some eligible families can also be reimbursed for transportation costs to get to and from schools in taxis or personal vehicles.

The city’s education department has not provided detailed information on how parents can access these alternative transportation services, but vowed to share further details before the school year begins.

Impacted families cannot opt for virtual learning if a strike occurs, but students will be excused for up to two hours of lateness caused by it.

Why are school bus workers considering a strike?

Union officials have been tight-lipped about the key sticking points in negotiations, though they have generally pointed to bread-and-butter economic issues.

“There has been a school bus workers shortage for several years,” Tomas Fret, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1181, said in a statement earlier this month. “Drivers, attendants and shop employees simply cannot make ends meet.”

School building shutdowns in the wake of the pandemic prompted the city to furlough thousands of bus workers, and officials have since warned of driver shortages and challenges with recruitment.

A union spokesperson declined to comment on the status of negotiations or detail their demands.

How did the most recent school bus strike end?

The 2013 strike largely centered on job protections. Then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg was seeking new bus contracts to save money, and union officials wanted a guarantee that current workers could keep their jobs even if the companies they worked for did not win a new contract. (Bloomberg argued that the city was legally prohibited from making that promise.)

After a month, union officials called off the strike without winning job protections. The action was costly to bus workers, some of whom expressed frustration about the episode.

It remains to be seen how a strike this school year might play out in the court of public opinion. But some parent leaders who advocate on transportation issues have circulated a petition supporting the union’s demands for higher wages and detailing concerns about the city’s contingency plans.

Sara Catalinotto, the head of Parents to Improve School Transportation and a veteran transportation advocate, recalled that during the 2013 strike, “parent after parent testified their students had regressed and that they couldn’t get their kids to school under” similar transportation alternatives to what city officials are offering now: MetroCards and city-funded taxis.

“Those who remember it, the moment they heard the word strike, it’s a chilling feeling in your stomach,” she said.

Julian Shen-Berro is a reporter covering New York City. Contact him at jshen-berro@chalkbeat.org.

Only 1 in 3 NYC schools are fully accessible to students with physical disabilities, report says

2023-08-23T10:00:00+00:00

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Fewer than one in three New York City public schools are fully accessible to students with physical disabilities, according to a report released Wednesday by Advocates for Children that calls on the city to ramp up funding for building upgrades.

With the city expected to release its initial five-year capital plan for schools in November, the group is pushing for $1.25 billion to more quickly address major gaps in building accessibility.

That funding, which would run from 2025 through 2029, would allow roughly half of the city’s schools to be fully accessible according to the report, addressing a longstanding problem that has drawn criticism from parents and federal prosecutors alike. The City Council is slated to approve the capital plan in June, though it is typically amended twice a year thereafter.

Officials have made some strides in recent years, in part due to pressure from advocates who successfully lobbied the city to devote $750 million to the effort in the current capital plan, which runs from 2020 through 2024.

The city is on track to boost the share of fully accessible programs from about one in five schools to one in three under the current capital program, according to the Advocates for Children analysis. (The figures do not include certain alternative schools, prekindergarten programs, or charter schools. Nor do they include satellite campuses, as schools may have more than one location.)

“That represents a huge amount of progress, which really shows that when you commit to making schools accessible, you can make a huge difference,” said Sarah Part, a policy analyst at Advocates for Children. “The current lack of accessibility isn’t inevitable.”

Inaccessible school buildings have long represented a barrier for students with physical disabilities, leaving children with few — or even zero — nearby school options. They can also limit students’ ability to take advantage of New York City’s extensive choice system, which allows children to apply for schools outside their home neighborhoods. Nearly 39% of schools have no accessible classrooms for students with mobility needs, according to the Advocates for Children report.

Abraham Weitzman, a rising junior at Columbia University who has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair, took the bus more than an hour each way to private school through eighth grade.

“This was while I lived across the street from an inaccessible elementary school,” Weitzman wrote in an email. “I didn’t get the chance to find community in my neighborhood.”

Weitzman eventually attended Bard High School Early College Queens, a fully accessible public school, though the process of navigating the high school admissions process was a challenge. The staff and students on many campuses were welcoming, but he quickly found the buildings weren’t as accommodating.

In one case, he visited a school he liked, only to find his wheelchair didn’t fit in the bathroom, leaving his mother to carry him into a stall.

Although he had a positive experience at Bard, access for students with physical disabilities across the public school system “is disgraceful,” Weitzman wrote. “We must put our efforts into making it better for future students.”

Obstacles for students remain despite building accessibility gains

Federal officials have also spotlighted dire accessibility problems.

In 2015, then-U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara released findings from an investigation that found elementary school accessibility problems in New York City were so severe they amounted to a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Even though many of the city’s school buildings are more than 100 years old, Bharara found city officials failed to improve accessibility even when renovating older buildings.

Part said the city has taken accessibility improvements more seriously in recent years. But the scale of the problem — and the massive amount of funding required to fully address it — means even if the city heeds Advocates for Children’s call for more funding, about half of schools will still not be fully accessible by 2029, nearly four decades after the Americans with Disabilities Act passed.

Asked about their accessibility goals, city officials declined to say whether they hope to make all schools fully accessible, though they pointed to improvements over the past five years.

“This report acknowledges how far we have come, and the ongoing $750 million commitment in our current capital plan towards our shared goal of making school buildings more accessible,” Kevin Ortiz, a spokesperson for the School Construction Authority, said in a statement, referring to Advocates Children’s analysis.

City officials have made incremental gains, including improvements that render some buildings “partially accessible.” About 20% of the city’s school buildings meet that definition, which means some — but not all — classrooms and facilities can accommodate students with physical disabilities.

In recent years, the city began releasing more granular school-level reports that outline which areas students with physical disabilities can access. Advocates for Children also created a map alongside their report with school-level accessibility information.

Partially accessible buildings can still present significant obstacles. Manhattan mom Yuvania Espino sent her daughter Mia Simpson, who has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair, to a partially accessible elementary school in East Harlem that specializes in serving students with disabilities.

But the front entrance was above a small set of stairs, which forced the family to stand by a separate accessible entrance, sometimes in the rain, as they waited for a staff member to unlock the door each day.

Mia took classes on the school’s first floor, but didn’t have access to certain classrooms or support on other levels, including a second-floor gym that helped students with sensory difficulties. Over time, many of her friends moved to classrooms on other floors, which distressed Mia and made her act out, Espino said.

Mia Simpson, left, poses for a photo with her little sister, Kira. Mia lacked access to certain classrooms during her time at a New York City public school, and wasn’t able to use the school’s front entrance.

“We don’t know to this day what an elevator would have done for Mia’s academic performance at that school,” Espinso said. The family ultimately decided to send Mia to an accessible private school, where her tuition is covered by the city.

Mia, now 14, is still affected by accessibility problems. She often has to miss performances and other events at her younger sister’s public school because the auditorium is on the second floor and there is no elevator.

“When enrolling your kids in school, no parents should have to think about accessing the building,” Espino said. “I’m thrilled that we’ve taken some baby steps, but we need to buckle up and take some giant leaps.”

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Federal judge orders NYC to fix special education service and payment delays

2023-07-19T21:56:41+00:00

This is part of an ongoing collaborative series between Chalkbeat and THE CITY investigating learning differences, special education, and other education challenges in city schools.

A Manhattan federal judge on Wednesday ordered the Department of Education to take 40 specific steps to address decades-old delays in providing special education services to families who have won legal battles to secure them.

This includes a mandate that the department assign additional staffers within six months to address the thousands of cases that are currently overdue.

When parents of students with disabilities believe their child is not getting the supportive services they’re entitled to, they can file a complaint that leads to a hearing in front of an administrative judge, known as an impartial hearing officer.

Advocates and eight parents of kids with disabilities sued the department in federal court two decades ago because families were often forced to wait months to obtain services or payments for special education services even after they were awarded them in administrative hearings.

Those services can include transportation to and from school, physical therapy, and tuition payments to private schools when families can demonstrate the district can’t properly serve their children in a public school.

Over the years those delays have stretched for months or even years, forcing parents to forgo crucial services or pay for them out of their own pocket — which can be untenable for some families. Those with means sometimes take extreme measures, such as taking out second mortgages on their homes.

While the original lawsuit was settled in 2007, the case has continued for more than a decade longer because of the education department’s inability to meet the settlement terms, which require that it speed up services and payments considerably.

Wednesday’s order is the latest move, with the most detailed remedy to date, for fixing the issue. Many of the steps delineated by U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska require the education department to act within three to six months, while a number extend beyond a year.

“We are here today to take a massive step toward getting families reimbursed for the costs of services,” Preska said during a court hearing on Wednesday. She referred to the changes required by her order as a “wholesale streamlining of the payment system.”

The ruling also requires the Education Department to set up a hotline from which parents can get updates on the status of their complaints seeking special education services for their children, and to set up a mobile app that allows providers of services to enter their hours worked by phone — rather than through a paper invoice that’s required currently.

“It’s huge and very impactful for students — especially the families that don’t have the resources to put money out and essentially give the DOE a loan until the DOE pays them back,” said Rebecca Shore, the litigation director at the group Advocates for Children, which filed the federal lawsuit in 2003. “Parents, families and students have been harmed because of the DOE’s failure for decades to timely implement [hearing officers’] orders.”

City officials said on Wednesday that they support the changes mandated by the court order. In an unusual move, schools Chancellor David Banks attended Wednesday’s court hearing, shaking Preska’s hand and posing for photographs. Though he did not take questions from reporters, he released a written statement after the order was issued.

“The new requirements are stringent because we, too, believe that change is long overdue,” Banks said. “While case volume and challenges increased over the past decade, we are moving aggressively to set a new course.”

Banks’ statement is notable because he previously cast doubt about the legitimacy of the complaint process, arguing that families have tried to “game this system,” referring to reimbursements for private special education that have ballooned to nearly $1 billion. Education officials later walked those comments back.

Delays are commonplace

Unless hearing officers set different timelines, the education department has 35 days to implement orders for services or payments, under a prior settlement in the federal lawsuit reached in 2007.

That agreement sought to push the education department to comply with the required timelines in more than 90% of the cases, and required the department to pay for an independent auditor to monitor its performance.

The education department utterly failed to meet that standard. The latest numbers supplied by that auditor, covering January to April 2022, show that the department met the deadlines for enacting orders for special education services in just 5.8% of cases, and met payment deadlines in just 2.3% of orders.

There were about 2,800 orders for services and nearly 4,000 orders for payment issued by hearing officers during that three-month quarter. It was the auditor’s 51st report since the settlement, which has come with a price tag for the Department of Education of over $25 million.

Wednesday’s ruling followed the installation of a special master in 2021 to analyze the Department of Education’s challenges in complying with hearing officer decisions in a timely manner, and it mandates most of his recommendations for addressing them.

Earlier this year, special master David Irwin, of Thru Consulting LLC, found that the education department office responsible for ensuring services are provided or payments made is operating with severely outdated methods and technology.

This includes using handwritten forms, paper-based invoices, and relying on “heavy” levels of data entry that involve “simply copying text from one place to another.”

“These outdated processes require more human staff time as the volume of cases increases,” Irwin wrote in a summary of his findings in March. “This is essentially the root cause of backlogs and delays.”

David Irwin worked as a federally appointed special master who recommended the changes ordered on Wednesday.

Irwin also pointed to staffing shortages that are exacerbated by the laborious need for manual data entry and by the administration’s unwillingness to make the positions more desirable by allowing staffers the flexibility to work from home.

“Simply put, kids are not getting services because there are not enough qualified staff to support this work, and the regular means of attracting and retaining staff has not worked,” he wrote.

John Farago, a hearing officer who adjudicates special education cases, said he’s skeptical the court order will transform the process. The problem, he argues, is more systemic and can’t be fixed with a series of technological and workflow changes.

“The culture of the district is to resist its obligation to pay providers,” he said, noting that culture extends to the department responsible for issuing payments to providers and private schools that receive tuition reimbursements from the city.

One solution, he said, could be to take the responsibility for breaking down hearing officers’ orders into specific payments and services out of the education department’s hands and giving it to an independent entity.

“What’s wrong with the order in my view is that it treats a large deep systemic problem as though it’s a series of small technical problems,” Farago added. “When you’re being eaten alive by piranhas it’s a mistake to focus on them individually.”

Irwin, the court appointed special master who came up with the recommendations adopted in the court order, said the education department “hardly pushed back” on any of his recommendations.

It will take time to see results, Irwin said, adding that he hopes that within a year a much larger share of services and payments are delivered within the required timeframe. He suggested that the main reason the education department has struggled to meet the legal timelines is that they have not understood what reforms are needed to fix the process.

“I’m an optimist,” he said. “This order tells them exactly what they need to do.”

Long-running ‘crisis’

But the court order does not address a much larger issue: The entire process disproportionately benefits families with time, resources, and access to legal help. Some families may simply go without services rather than facing a daunting bureaucratic system.

And the order focuses on the final phase of the complaint process, even as many other elements of it have been in crisis for years because of an explosion in cases. The number of complaints filed grew by the thousands between 2014 and 2018, according to a report commissioned by the New York State Education Department in 2019 — which found there were also too few hearing officers and too little space to handle the flood of cases.

At one point in 2019 there were just nine hearing officers on rotation to hear nearly 10,000 cases, and a single hearing officer had more than 1,700 cases on his plate.

The COVID-19 pandemic’s interruption to instruction made things even worse for many special education students, particularly those who relied on in-person services or whose disabilities made remote learning all but impossible.

In early 2021, the special master was appointed to get to the bottom of the education department’s difficulties in implementing the orders of hearing officers.

By the end of 2021, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio put the hearing process under the umbrella of the city’s Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings — a shift away from a contracted system that struggled for years to identify enough willing and knowledgeable hearing officers.

In the last school year under de Blasio, parents and attorneys filed nearly 18,000 requests for impartial hearings, according to The New York Times — almost double the number from 2018.

Shore, the attorney at Advocates for Children, said what’s significant about Wednesday’s order is the level of detail in the mandated action steps and the requirement that the Department of Education provide regular updates to the court about its progress.

“Those steps must be taken,” she said. “This is an actual order with teeth.”

Still, any fixes will be too late for many families, including the students involved in the original lawsuit who have since aged out of the public school system.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Yoav Gonen is a reporter for THE CITY. Contact Yoav at ygonen@thecity.nyc.

New York wants to revamp how schools are evaluated. Here’s what could change for now.

2023-06-22T16:45:25+00:00

How does the state determine whether schools are doing well or if they are struggling and need extra support?

Before the pandemic, state officials relied on standardized tests and high school Regents exams to figure out how well students were doing, along with other factors, such as graduation rates. But the public health crisis paused state testing and affected school performance metrics in other ways.

Now, education department officials are seeking a new, temporary evaluation system for the next two school years, with the hopes of creating something more permanent for the 2025-26 school year.

If a school is found to be struggling, it is required to develop an improvement plan that must be approved by local and state officials. Schools that don’t make progress for five years could face state takeover or closure — but it’s a route that state officials rarely took even before developing the current accountability system, which is meant to be less punitive for schools.

In the short term, over the next two years, state officials want to exclude certain science and social studies exams, as well as measures for student growth and college and career readiness, when deciding which schools need improvement. These changes are necessary, officials say, because schools are still missing a trove of data, such as enough student participation in state tests, because of the pandemic.

Already, the conversation is sparking some controversy. Some groups focused on education reform believe the move represents a step backward just as schools need more help as they recover from the pandemic. Other observers believe the state’s proposed plan is reasonable.

Ultimately, the federal government must sign off on these proposed changes, since the state’s accountability system is required by federal law and is written into New York’s federally required Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA, plan.

“They’re doing a decent job of balancing what’s of interest in the state and the federal ESSA requirements, and incorporating all the instability and uncertainty that came with the slowdown of testing during the pandemic,” said Aaron Pallas, a professor at Teachers College and an expert in testing.

But Education-Trust New York, an advocacy organization focused on equity issues, worried that several of the proposed changes could mean masking “bright spots and disparities,” according to their written public feedback to the state.

“I think these next two school years are incredibly important for kids coming out of the pandemic,” said Jeff Smink, the group’s deputy director, in an interview with Chalkbeat. “We have to both give them all the support they need but also hold them to high standards, and I just don’t feel like we’re doing that right now.”

What metrics would still be used?

Under the state’s proposal, schools will still be measured on English language proficiency (based on a state language exam for English learners), graduation rates, how well students are doing in core subjects based on Regents and state test scores, and chronic absenteeism. In New York City, chronic absenteeism has been a pressing issue, with 41% of students last school year absent for at least 10 school days.

What do state officials want to ditch (for now)?

The state wants to put a pause on measuring academic progress based on certain goals for student scores on state English and math tests.

State officials say they want to update these goals — first set in the 2017-18 school year — before they use them to determine whether schools are struggling.

The state’s proposed plan would also pause the use of “Measures of Interim Progress,” which more broadly measures whether schools are meeting goals for academics and other things, like their graduation rates.

For elementary and middle schools, officials want to pause how they’ve been measuring student growth, largely because of the lack of testing data. Typically, they calculated student growth using three years of testing data, but the pandemic caused big disruptions: For example, just one in five New York City children took state exams in the 2020-21 school year, when most children chose to learn from home.

For high schools, officials won’t consider college, career, and civic readiness metrics, which include advanced coursework or extra credentials in specialized jobs-based courses. That’s because the pandemic may have hampered students’ access to some of these programs or courses, officials said. They also worried that the pandemic’s impact on learning may have caused students to perform worse academically than they otherwise would have, such as on AP exams.

What will the state do with data, even if it’s not being used to evaluate schools?

State officials still plan to provide all of this data to schools for “informational purposes only” for the next two school years, they said.

Why do state officials want to exclude elementary school science exams and high school social studies assessments?

Science tests would be excluded because the state has changed who must take those exams. Traditionally, students in fourth and eighth grades take the state science test. However, only eighth graders took the test this school year, as the state prepares to offer the exam next year to fifth graders instead of fourth graders. That means they won’t be able to compare results equitably across elementary and middle schools that have different grade configurations.

Fifth graders will take the exam next spring. Asked why those scores won’t be taken into account for the 2024-25 school year, a spokesperson said that it allows districts to have “consistency and predictability” for now, as they attempt to rebuild the accountability system.

While calling it a “logical” move, Ed-Trust argued that excluding science tests “undermines the importance of science education” and worried schools will have less reason to focus on it. The organization suggested that the state should instead work with local districts to “ensure a smooth transition” to the new science assessments without entirely removing it as one way to measure student performance.

On the high school level, officials want to pause using social studies tests because of multiple exam cancellations in recent years. The state looks at cohorts of students, such as the graduating class of 2023, when considering how they performed on these tests, namely the Regents exams for Global History and Geography and U.S. History and Government.

But students who will graduate this year couldn’t take Regents exams in 2021, when they were in 10th grade, because of the pandemic. U.S. History and Government exams were also canceled last year, when these students were juniors, in the wake of a mass shooting in Buffalo, with the state education department claiming there was material on the exam that could “compound student trauma.”

State officials have emphasized that this plan “in no way diminishes” the importance of science or social studies instruction.

How will schools be labeled if they need support?

The lowest performing schools are known as schools in need of Comprehensive Support and Improvement, or CSI. But the state won’t list new CSI schools until the 2025-26 school year because they identified a group of such schools this year under a tweaked system, and that process only happens every three years, officials said.

A total of 139 New York City schools were identified this year as in need of some level of improvement, with 83% of them listed as CSI schools, according to state data.

However, New York will identify schools for Targeted Support and Intervention, or TSI, next year, which must happen annually per federal law. Those are schools that aren’t meeting goals set for specific student groups, such as by race, economic status, and those with disabilities.

In one recent — and perhaps confusing — change, schools that are meeting or exceeding their goals are no longer called “Schools in Good Standing” and instead are now labeled by the state as schools identified for Local Support and Improvement, or LSI.

What will happen for the 2025-26 school year?

State officials plan to revamp the accountability system for the 2025-26 school year after collecting feedback from the public. The new plan will also incorporate any changes to the state’s graduation requirements, which could come as soon as the end of this year. The education department is rethinking the role of Regents exams in graduation, among other considerations.

Pallas said that the plan for the 2025-26 school year and beyond would still have to meet federal ESSA requirements and earn the buy-in of school district leaders — meaning that it likely won’t be “a dramatic break from the past.”

“It’s gotta be something that feels progressive but also comfortable,” Pallas said.

Thomas Wilburn contributed.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City public schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

NYC often segregates students with significant disabilities. This new school aims to change that.

2023-06-20T16:41:26+00:00

Outfitted with paper chef hats, a group of students at Brooklyn’s P.S. 958 were getting ready on a recent afternoon to launch a mock restaurant, wiggling on the classroom carpet in anticipation of their first wave of customers.

The students had been preparing since February, touring their surrounding Sunset Park neighborhood to learn what types of food were most prevalent before settling on a Mexican theme. The 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds also studied different roles within a restaurant — including chef, host, server, and manager — before assuming one of those positions themselves.

It was no traditional end-of-year project for the school, which is wrapping up its inaugural year. As the students scampered to their stations and loaded up plastic trays of popcorn and water, the moment represented a test of the new school’s unusual mission: to serve any student in the surrounding neighborhood — ranging from typically developing children to those with more significant disabilities — and meaningfully integrate them in classrooms and other activities whenever possible.

All of the mock restaurant’s customers, who soon began trickling in, were students with autism from a neighboring classroom whose needs would have otherwise landed them in a separate school for students with more complex disabilities.

All city elementary schools are required to accommodate students with disabilities, but some 26,000 children attend District 75 programs, a citywide network of schools that exclusively serve students with more serious needs. Inconsistent or inadequate special education services have also helped drive thousands of additional families to private schools with tuition financed by the city, which involves a complex legal process that favors those with time and resources.

P.S. 958, however, is trying to keep children who may have higher needs closer to home, something a group of caregivers in Sunset Park have long pushed for. The school’s mission is in line with an effort by schools Chancellor David Banks to expand programs designed to include students with disabilities alongside their typically developing peers, part of a push to keep families from exploring private options.

P.S. 958 is wrapping up its first school year — serving 3- and 4-year-olds in prekindergarten, as well as kindergarten, in its own gleaming new building on Brooklyn’s Fifth Avenue. It will gradually expand to fifth grade in the coming years.

About half the school’s students have disabilities, more than double the citywide rate. A majority of the school’s students come from the surrounding neighborhood, and the school prioritizes local applicants in its admissions process, officials said, though some local parents said they hope the city does more to get the word out.

Emily Shapiro, the principal of P.S. 958, spent 20 years working in District 75, starting as a paraprofessional right out of high school. Those schools often provide crucial support that traditional elementary schools don’t offer, she said. But the students who attend often have to travel far outside their neighborhoods, which can make it difficult to forge bonds with other children in the neighborhood and attend after-school programs, and it can lead to lost instructional time thanks to the city’s notoriously unreliable yellow bus system.

“Once the kids leave the school building, they don’t see each other at the playground, or at the grocery store. Parents aren’t building relationships,” Shapiro said, adding that siblings typically can’t attend school together if one of them is placed in District 75. “The idea of being able to go to school in your neighborhood, that’s the number one most important piece of all of this.”

A new model for integrating students of all abilities

One way the school is working to include a more diverse group of students is by hosting programs that are more typically found in schools that only cater to students with disabilities. P.S. 958, for instance, is the first elementary school outside District 75 to host an AIMS program, short for Acquisition, Integrated Services, Meaningful Communication, and Social Skills.

The AIMS program is designed for students with autism who have significant behavioral, communication, or social delays. It involves small group instruction and a bevy of dedicated staff, including a certified behavior specialist, special education teacher, speech teacher, and paraprofessional.

In a traditional District 75 program, those students might have more limited contact with their typically developing peers. At P.S. 958, they were the first set of customers to test out the mock restaurant their classmates next door were setting up.

As they filtered into the classroom, the AIMS students largely needed assistance from classroom aides and iPads with picture-to-speech software to communicate snack orders. But the interactions let them practice conveying their needs, and the students running the restaurant were also learning how to work with peers who may not pick up on typical social cues, such as making eye contact.

P.S. 958 is starting small, enrolling 59 students in its first year — including six in the AIMS classroom. As the school grows to serve students from 3-K through fifth grade in the coming years, the school plans to grow the AIMS program, too.

To be sure, some District 75 schools, which often share buildings with other schools, also give students opportunities to interact with their typically developing peers, such as shared physical education classes or sports teams.

But frequent opportunities for meaningful inclusion are rare, especially when it comes to academics, according to educators and advocates. There are often signals that inclusion isn’t a priority: District 75 students can be forced to use separate entrances to school buildings or may struggle with equal access to school facilities.

There can also be downsides to segregating children with more intensive needs. Some families and educators say those programs can be chaotic or may represent little more than holding grounds, especially for children with more intense emotional or behavioral issues. Still, it can be difficult to tease out the impact of inclusive classrooms and it may not always be effective for students with disabilities to learn in general education classrooms.

Some observers said the P.S. 958 model is promising and stressed that the city should do more to get the word out about schools that have inclusion programs.

“What you really want is [P.S.] 958’s everywhere,” said Jenn Choi, an advocate who helps families navigate the city’s special education system, noting that meaningful inclusion is rare.

“Inclusive doesn’t mean ‘I let you in here.’ Inclusive means ‘I’m going to help you when you’re here,’” she said. “I don’t hear that message very often.”

P.S. 958 Principal Emily Shapiro.

So far, about 15% of students enrolled at P.S. 958 likely were initially recommended for more restrictive settings than what the school offered — such as those with very small class sizes and intensive support that can be offered through District 75. And while Shapiro said the school is not yet equipped to handle any student who might want to enroll, they’ve had success working with families who were initially slated for more specialized programs but wanted to give P.S. 958 a shot.

Commitment to inclusion runs throughout the school

Fahyolah Antoine, a special education teacher who helped plan the mock restaurant project, said she’s been impressed with the school’s commitment to inclusion. “What I really appreciate is how special education is put on the forefront, rather than the backburner,” she said. “Sometimes it can just feel like it doesn’t get the attention it needs and deserves.”

For example, students from the AIMS program may participate in academic programs with their peers in other classrooms. In one instance, the school placed a less verbal student in a classroom with more verbal students for phonics — lessons that teach children the relationships between sounds and letters.

“Because the other students are saying, ‘A-Apple-Ah,’ and using their voice, he’s starting to do it,” Shapiro said. “Putting him in a classroom with other peer models, who are using those skills is more motivating, I think, than having a speech therapist sitting next to you” practicing the same lesson.

Staff are also intentional about grouping students of different ability levels for other activities, like recess and music. Students also do not sit with their regular classes during lunch, giving students of a wider range of ability levels the chance to interact with each other.

Parent Ivelisse Castro said those types of interactions have been a big help for her daughter, Chloe. The 3-year-old, who has a learning disability, struggled to coordinate her movements without falling down, and she often screamed or whined rather than using words to articulate her feelings.

P.S. 958 parent Ivelisse Castro and her daughter, Chloe.

In Chloe’s pre-K classroom, which includes children with and without disabilities, “she’s picking up habits from them, how to express herself better, how to speak better,” Castro said. “She can have a conversation with you now — it’s an amazing feeling.” She was relieved to find a school that could meet Chloe’s needs just down the block from her home.

The school also makes time for service providers such as speech and occupational therapists to regularly consult with teachers. Through a creative scheduling arrangement, therapists conference with educators multiple times a week, eventually discussing each of the school’s students — including those without disabilities.

They’ve collaborated on issues such as deploying adaptive seating for students who struggle to focus in traditional classroom chairs. (The school also has a dedicated space where students with sensory issues can receive extra help.)

“In other schools, there isn’t structured time for this,” said Cara Kantrowitz, an occupational therapist. “Here, it’s built into everyone’s schedule.”

A P.S. 958 student played the role of “manager” in their mock restaurant.

Back at the mock restaurant, the mood at times resembled the frenetic energy of a professional kitchen, as one child was momentarily overwhelmed with orders.

“I need servers! I need servers!” he shouted. “I need their popcorn!” With plenty of adults on hand to keep students on track, the popcorn orders made their way back to the tables on small paper plates.

Antoine, the special education teacher, noted that the students running the mock restaurant also include a mix of students with and without disabilities. The teachers worked to let students tap into their strengths and interests in deciding what roles to take on.

After students had a chance for seconds, it was time for the next class period. As a handful students from the AIMS classroom filed out, the children running the mock restaurant offered a sendoff.

“Thank you — come again!”

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

NYC failed to provide full services to 9,800 preschool children with disabilities last year: report

2023-06-06T09:30:00+00:00

More than one-third of New York City’s preschool children with disabilities did not receive all of the extra support they’re entitled to in the last school year, according to a report released Tuesday morning.

The report, by advocacy organization Advocates for Children New York, analyzes the most recently available city data for the 2021-22 school year. The figure represents an increase from the 2020-21 school year, when 30% of children, or about 7,800, didn’t receive all of their required services.

The data means that a child may have received some of their required speech therapy, for example, but no required physical therapy — services that are spelled out in an individualized education program, or IEP.

Among the 9,800 children — or close to 37% — who didn’t receive all of their required services:

About 6,500 children who required speech therapy — or about a quarter of children who needed monolingual speech therapy and a third of children who required bilingual services.
Nearly 28%, or 5,300 children, who required occupational therapy.
About 2,000 children, or nearly 26%, who needed physical therapy.

The report showcases a yearslong problem with the city’s public preschool system, which serves 3- and 4-year-olds: Programs struggle to provide all children with the services they need, as they are legally required to do. Young children’s access to these services might be more crucial now, since some of these students may have missed out on necessary services as infants and toddlers early in the pandemic, like tens of thousands of kids nationally.

The greatest disparity in who received services was based on language: Sixty-nine percent of children who required only English instruction received their services, versus 53.5% of those who needed to be taught in another language.

The racial and socioeconomic disparities were smaller. While 69% of white students fully received services, the same was true for 67% of Hispanic children, 65.5% of Black children, and 62% of Asian children. Sixty-seven percent of permanently housed students received services, versus 61% of homeless children.

The city’s data might actually “significantly” underreport the problem, the report said. The education department considers a child “fully served” if they received at least one session of all of their required services, the report said.

“A child whose occupational therapist quits in November and is never replaced, or a preschooler who waits six months for mandated speech therapy to begin because the DOE is unable to find a provider, is not fully served from the perspective of their parents and teachers, but they are left out of the counts above,” the report said.

In December, Mayor Eric Adams vowed to open hundreds of additional seats for preschool children with disabilities to ensure that all children get the seats that they’re entitled to. Advocates have praised that commitment, but it already is being tested. While the city has opened 700 new seats this school year for students with more challenging disabilities, about 300 preschoolers are still waiting for a spot, the report noted.

Having access to seats is a perennial issue. Last year, just over 1,000 preschool children who required a small special education class did not have access to those seats by the end of last school year, according to the report.

“We agree with the concerns of our parents and advocates that for far too long students with disabilities were excluded from programming and services,” Nicole Brownstein, a spokesperson for the city’s education department, said in a statement. “This administration is committed to righting this wrong.”

But the city’s commitment to open more seats doesn’t address the ongoing shortage of staff who can provide extra required services for these children, one significant reason why children are missing out on services, said Betty Baez Melo, director of the Early Childhood Education Project at Advocates For Children. The city contracts with outside organizations to provide many of these services, so Advocates For Children is calling on Adams to spend another $50 million to increase pay for those service providers and hire their own staffers.

Brownstein noted that the education department has expanded its own teams who provide services to preschool children, including hiring an additional 24 speech therapists, 23 occupational itinerant therapists, and 12 physical therapists.

The $50 million request from Advocates For Children would also go toward speeding up evaluations for children, another weak area the report cited. Nearly 16% of children, or 1,974, who were eligible for preschool special education services waited more than 60 days — the legal deadline — for a meeting to determine what extra services they should receive, according to the organization. That’s a similar rate to last school year.

Over the last three years, the education department has opened 21 Preschool Regional Assessment (PRAC) teams, which provide evaluations in addition to state-approved agencies that the city contracts with. This school year, staffers on PRAC teams had the option of working overtime, allowing more students to get evaluated — something they plan to do again next school year, officials said.

Still, education department officials said there are not enough agencies to meet the evaluation needs of preschool students, as more children have been referred for services since the pandemic. They plan to work with city, state, and federal government officials to ensure there’s enough funding to link students with necessary services.

While data for this school year is not yet available, the organization reported that it’s received many calls from families who have struggled to access services for their young children. One of those calls was from Terese, a mother in the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn who asked to use her first name only for privacy reasons.

Her 4-year-old son required the help of a special education itinerant teacher, or an SEIT, who helps children like hers with disabilities inside of a general education preschool class. But in February, that teacher left her son’s preschool with no replacement.

Terese spent a month emailing the main special education contact in her district about a replacement teacher with no response, even taking days off work to deal with the issue, she said. Meanwhile, her son was talking less at home.

“The teacher started reporting to me that he was not communicating in the classroom,” Terese said.

Terese’s problem was not unique. According to the report, roughly 1,300 preschoolers, or nearly one in five children did not have an SEIT all last school year, even though their IEP required one.

Eventually Terese contacted Advocates For Children, which advised her to lodge a complaint through 311. After that, a special education official with her district responded, blaming the lack of a teacher on a staffing shortage. By mid-May, her son once again had an SEIT, she said.

“I felt all alone,” Terese said. “The DOE just left me to fend for myself with my child with special needs.”

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City public schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

NYC’s Summer Rising program rejected 45,000 applicants, launching scramble for child care

2023-05-24T21:50:38+00:00

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Roughly 45,000 children have been shut out of New York City’s free, popular summer program, education department officials said this week.

The program, which runs between six to seven weeks for most students, provides academics during the morning and enrichment activities in the afternoon for children in grades K-8 across the five boroughs from July to August.

Like last year, a total of 110,000 seats were available this year, with a portion held open for students mandated to attend summer school. During a City Council hearing this week, the education department’s Chief Operating Officer Emma Vadehra said there are 94,000 seats available for 139,000 applicants. Officials initially reported that 30,000 families did not receive spots.

It’s possible that some of the rejected applicants will have to attend the program anyway for academic reasons and will get a seat that has been set aside. Still, many of those families, who were notified earlier this month that they didn’t get seats, are likely scrambling to find summer programs for their children before the school year ends on June 27.

“The basic challenge is that demand outstripped supply pretty dramatically,” Vadehra told City Council members. “And so there’s different ways that could have looked, but we just didn’t have enough seats in the program for the number of kids and families that really wanted this program despite the fact that it is the largest summer program we’ve had – and the largest in the country.”

Two of those unsuccessful applicants were Alejandra Perez’s 5- and 10-year-old sons, who should have been prioritized for seats because they attend an after-school program run by the city’s Department of Youth and Community Development, through a community-based organization that helps oversee Summer Rising.

Perez, a lifelong East Harlemite, paid $2,250 last summer for six weeks of child care, which she can barely afford again this year.

But in mid-May, about three weeks after applying, she was informed via email that her sons, who attend a charter school in East Harlem, didn’t get in. While she can probably rely on a relative to care for her older son, she is scrambling to find free or affordable care for her 5-year-old.

“I am still trying to find a program,” she said. “By the act of God, maybe I’ll get an email like, ‘Hey, we found you a spot!’”

Some children with priority did not get spots

Former Mayor Bill de Blasio established the program two years ago with federal relief dollars as the city clawed its way out of the pandemic, attempting to provide children with a bridge back to school after remote learning. It differs from summer programs in the past: It’s open to any child, including those in charters and private school, not just those who are mandated to attend summer school.

The program, though bumpy with its initial roll out, has grown in popularity. This year, city officials made a couple of key changes to the application process. While still open to the same number of children, applicants were allowed to rank choices for Summer Rising sites instead of the first come, first served process last year. Additionally, students who attend after-school programs subsidized through the city’s Department of Youth and Community Development, or DYCD, were supposed to be prioritized for seats, like Perez’s children. That’s in addition to students living in temporary housing, children in foster care, and children with disabilities who must have services year round.

Perez had ranked three Summer Rising sites close to her home. Perez said the application did not ask if her kids were in an after-school program. According to an education department spokesperson, Perez’s children didn’t receive a spot because there was likely a lot of demand at the sites she chose.

When she asked someone from the after-school program why her sons didn’t get into Summer Rising, they didn’t have an answer — except that none of the kids in the program who applied got in, Perez said. (A representative for their SCAN-Harbor Beacon after-school program did not return a request for comment.)

During the City Council hearing this week, officials said that just over half of the seats that have been filled went to students in the priority groups. Of those, 29,000 spots went to students who were in DYCD-run after-school programs, 16,000 went to students in temporary housing, 3,000 seats to children with 12-month individualized education programs, or IEPs, and another 1,000 to students in foster care. (Last year, Summer Rising had 12,000 students in temporary housing, 2,700 students with 12-month IEPs and 1,000 students in foster care.)

New seats won’t be added, but filled seats might open up

Vadehra said they’re not planning to add seats — emphasizing that this program is being supported by federal dollars that are set to run out next year — and there is no wait list for seats. But they are expecting an unspecified number of spots to open up, either because fewer students will be mandated to attend summer school or because families may decline a seat they’ve been offered. The education department is working with DYCD to figure out how to make families aware of empty seats in June and how they can apply for those, she said.

In the meantime, parents are scrambling to find options that seem few and far between — and too pricey.

Perez’s rejection email from the education department included a link to other DYCD programs that might be available. She said she has called every local community-based organization near her home for some type of programming with no luck.

“At this point I am just emailing everyone,” she said.

Tia Jackson, who lives in Central Harlem, knew she would potentially need to scramble for summer options if her son didn’t get into Summer Rising, so she signed him up for a YMCA program near her home. Her planning came in handy: Her son did not get a Summer Rising seat.

While he doesn’t fall into any of the priority groups, her son, who is autistic, also has an individualized education program. The YMCA program has staff who can assist him if he needs extra support, Jackson said. She will be reimbursed up to $2,250 for summer care expenses through the state’s Office of People With Developmental Disabilities, but that only ensures four weeks of summer programming for her son. He’s planning to visit his aunt in Florida for one week, and she will pay out of pocket for child care for an additional week.

She feels thankful for having a “Plan A and Plan B.”

“I feel like the way they rolled out the program to start was very late, and it wasn’t the best for working parents, typically because when you think about summer camps most applications for summer camp start in February and March,” she said. “We didn’t get the Summer Rising notification until April.”

The department spokesperson did not explain the timing of the Summer Rising application, except to say there are several factors that impact the timeline.

Both of Loretta Bencivengo’s children got into Summer Rising last year, likely because she submitted her application as soon as it opened during the previous first come, first served model. This year they didn’t get spots, said Bencivengo, who lives in Windsor Terrace.

The most affordable alternate option she’s found so far is with the local YMCA for a $5,000, eight-week program for both of her children, which she equated to two months of rent. Many places don’t have space this late in the spring, she said.

“All those slots are filled up in January and February,” she said of private programs. “If that’s the case, why not put this application out in November and December so that you can open an appropriate amount of slots?”

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City public schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Better pay and more hours: NYC Council leaders push for changes to 3-K, pre-K programs

2023-05-10T00:30:12+00:00

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization covering public education in communities across America. Sign up for Chalkbeat New York’s free daily newsletter to keep up with NYC’s public schools.

Leaders of New York City Council charged Mayor Eric Adams with failing to address problems that have plagued the city’s public preschool programs, and they made several demands to improve the system.

Speaking in the playground of a Lower East Side 3-K and prekindergarten center Tuesday, Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, several of her colleagues, and advocates listed several items they want. That includes higher pay for workers in programs run by community-based organizations, paying preschool providers on time, improving outreach to encourage more families to enroll, and allowing community organizations to directly enroll families.

The push comes as budget negotiations are underway between the council and the mayor, whose $106.7 billion proposed budget would cut funding for the education department by 3%, or $960 million. That slashes a plan under former Mayor Bill de Blasio to further expand preschool for 3-year-old children, with the Adams administration pointing to at least 16,000 unfilled seats.

Speaker Adams blasted the mayor’s approach, describing the city’s early childhood education system as “broken” and “in full crisis mode.”

“As my colleagues in the council and the advocates here today have pointed out repeatedly, the city needs to correct its course to address the gaps in our system so we provide stability for this very critical sector,” she told reporters outside the program run by Grand Street Settlement.

New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, flanked by council members and advocates, discusses changes they’ll demand of Mayor Eric Adams in order to improve the city’s public preschool system.

Mayor Adams’ first year in office has been marked by changes and sometimes chaos in the city’s early childhood education system. In addition to the cancellation of plans to expand 3-K, many providers have reported that the city has not paid them on time, which has left some programs in financial crisis and caused others to close. Despite the city’s promise to fix the problem, multiple council members said Tuesday that they’re still hearing of issues at centers across the city.

When the education department announced a bureaucratic overhaul, including moving hundreds of early childhood workers to other offices, those workers were left in limbo without clarity about what their new jobs would entail; the department later pulled back on that plan.

At the same time, the mayor has vowed to ensure the city offers enough seats to preschool students with disabilities, an issue that his predecessor failed to solve.

In a statement, education department spokesperson Nathaniel Styer credited the city’s outreach efforts, noting that applications for 3-K have increased by more than 20% compared to last year. The city, he said, has shifted 3,500 3-K and pre-K seats from “unfilled areas to areas of demand, which also includes shifting the types of seats offered to meet actual need.”

Styer added, “there is a misalignment of seats that we are tackling head on.”

Boosting worker pay at community-based organizations

For several advocacy organizations, boosting pay for teachers and other support staff is the most important issue to tackle. Better pay would mean retaining quality staff instead of losing them to programs or jobs that pay better, they argue.

Pay disparities are in part the result of the patchwork of programs that make up the city’s preschool system. Some programs are run by the education department, such as inside schools, while community-based organizations run others. Department staffers are unionized and are generally paid more than their counterparts working in community-based organizations, who tend to be women of color.

Four years ago, the city agreed to boost salaries for teachers at community organizations with a certified masters degree, to $69,000 a year by October 2021, matching the salary of a first-year teacher at the education department. The agreement didn’t include raises after that date, and it also meant a veteran teacher at a community-based organization made the same as a new education department teacher, said Gregory Brender, chief policy and innovation officer with Day Care Council.

Tara Gardner, executive director of the Day Care Council, shared an example of one disparity that still exists: An assistant teacher at a community-based organization earns 53% of their counterpart in public schools. Advocates like Gardner want pay for teachers at community-based organizations to match their years of service, as well as comparable pay for other support staff, such as paraprofessionals and custodians.

“They do the same work as staff at the DOE; the only difference is the building,” said Ayana Reefe, Head Start director for Grand Street Settlement, the community organization where Speaker Adams visited on Tuesday.

Council members will also push for $15 million to provide a longer school day and year for 1,000 3-year-olds. That funding — which would convert existing seats instead of adding more — would also include signing bonuses “to help attract and retain the necessary staff,” officials said.

Currently, many 3-K seats are only available between 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., which advocates argue don’t work for parents who work outside of those hours. In a recent survey conducted by the Citizens’ Committee for Children, one-third of more than 1,000 respondents said they were looking for child care from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Styer noted that there are 11,000 unfilled seats with longer hours that go beyond the school year.

Correction: An earlier version of this story said a survey from the Citizens Committee for Children included 160 respondents due to incorrect information. In fact, there were more than 1,000 respondents.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City public schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

NYC schools handcuff and haul away kids in emotional crisis

2023-05-04T09:00:00+00:00

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with THE CITY. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

It was almost time for school pickup when Paul’s mom saw the text on the classroom messaging app: Paul — her 7-year-old — “ended up running out of class today and it escalated rather quickly.” Someone at the school had called 911. Paul’s parents could contact the main office for more information, the message read.

Paul’s mom remembers the physical feeling of dread, like ice under her skin. Paul — that’s his middle name — has a neurological disorder. He loves to cuddle with his mom and help take care of his baby sister, and he’s wild about Greek mythology. Like a lot of kids with developmental disabilities, he also has very big tantrums, hitting, spitting and throwing things when he gets upset. Since the end of first grade, he’s been in a special public school classroom in Brooklyn that integrates disabled and nondisabled kids.

The day of the message, in early December, Paul’s mom was so panicked that she couldn’t fully make sense of what it said. Why had the school called 911 instead of calling her? Was her child hurt? Had something gone terribly wrong? She wanted to run the last few blocks to the school, but her legs felt frozen. It was hard just to walk.

When she made it into the school building, she found Paul lying facedown on the floor of a computer room, his whole body heaving with sobs. She touched his back, and he screamed and tried to scramble away. Then he recognized his mother’s voice and jumped into her arms. “Mommy, don’t let them handcuff me,” he begged.

“I said, ‘What are you talking about? No one is going to handcuff you.’”

But that’s when she found out: Someone already had.

That afternoon, Paul had had a meltdown that started in his classroom and spilled into a hallway. When he didn’t calm down, someone called a school safety agent — an officer of the New York Police Department who is stationed full-time in the building. Paul knocked off the agent’s face mask and glasses, and that’s when it happened. The agent pulled out a pair of Velcro restraints and forced them over Paul’s hands.

Looking now, Paul’s mom could see red marks where the handcuffs had rubbed Paul’s wrists raw. But she felt more bewildered than ever. She must be misunderstanding, she thought. Who would handcuff a 7-year-old?

New York City officials have promised for years to stop relying on police to respond to students in emotional crisis. Under the terms of a 2014 legal settlement, schools are only supposed to call 911 in the most extreme situations, when kids pose an “imminent and substantial risk of serious injury” to themselves or others.

And yet an investigation by THE CITY and ProPublica found that city schools continue to call on safety agents and other police officers to manage students in distress thousands of times each year — incidents the NYPD calls “child in crisis” interventions. Unless a parent arrives in time to intercede, cops hand kids off to EMTs, who take students to hospital emergency rooms for psychiatric evaluations. In close to 1,370 incidents since 2017, students ended up in handcuffs while they waited for an ambulance to arrive, according to NYPD data. In several incidents, those kids were 5 or 6 years old.

Note: 2017 is the first year that the New York Police Department released data on all incidents where a school employee called 911 over a student in emotional distress, known as child-in-crisis incidents. Data Source: NYPD quarterly School Safety Act report. Credit: Lucas Waldron, ProPublica

Ten years ago, in the runup to the 2014 settlement, a group of parents sued the city’s Department of Education, claiming that schools violated their children’s constitutional rights and broke federal law by sending them to hospitals when they weren’t experiencing medical emergencies — in many cases in response to behavior that resulted directly from a student’s disability.

The experience was traumatic and humiliating for the kids, the plaintiffs claimed. Students were terrified to return to school; 6- and 7-year-olds thought they were being arrested. Two schools filed child welfare reports on parents who didn’t allow EMTs to put their children in ambulances.

Meanwhile, the hospital visits served no useful purpose, plaintiffs claimed. Students missed crucial class time only to wait for hours in emergency rooms — sometimes with seriously mentally ill adults — and then be sent home. At least one parent lost her job because she was repeatedly forced to leave work to rush to the hospital, and then she was stuck with bills for ambulance trips and ER services her child didn’t need.

As part of the 2014 settlement, the department issued a regulation that requires schools to make every effort to safely manage students in distress without involving police — including by deploying trained crisis response teams and allowing parents to speak to their children by phone if possible. Schools are never allowed to use 911 calls as a punishment for misbehavior. When cops do get involved, they must use the “minimum level of restraint necessary.”

Despite the promises and regulations, New York City public schools call 911 on students in emotional distress as often as ever, an analysis by THE CITY and ProPublica of NYPD data shows. Prior to the lawsuit, city-run and charter schools saw an average of 3,000 child-in-crisis incidents per year from 2005 to 2010 and an average of 3,300 incidents in the 2010-11 and 2011-12 school years, according to court documents. Since 2017 — the first post-lawsuit year for which the NYPD reported complete data — schools have seen an average of 3,200 incidents per year. (The analysis excludes 911 calls made in 2020 and 2021, when schools operated on a remote or hybrid schedule due to the COVID-19 pandemic.)

Schools are far more likely to call 911 on Black students, who make up less than a quarter of the student body but account for nearly half of child-in-crisis incidents and 59% of instances in which students were handcuffed since 2017, the analysis shows. And schools continue to call police to respond to young children: Last year, more than 560 child-in-crisis incidents involved students aged 10 or younger. In five cases, the kids were 4 years old.

Note: Data for all New York City child-in-crisis and handcuffing incidents covers 2017 to 2022. Data for student population demographics includes school years 2017-18 to 2021-22. Data Sources: New York City annual student enrollment snapshot and New York Police Department quarterly School Safety Act report.

“The things that needed to change did not change,” said Nelson Mar, an education attorney at Legal Services NYC who represented the plaintiffs in the 2013 lawsuit.

That’s partly because the Department of Education fails to hold schools accountable for not following its own regulations, Mar and other advocates said. Schools are required to file occurrence reports after calling 911 on students, but they don’t have to show that they took the mandatory steps to manage a crisis first. Unless parents have a lawyer or a paid advocate, they rarely know the reports exist, much less get the opportunity to contest a school’s account of an incident or to object if they believe school staff called 911 to punish a student they were fed up with.

In an emailed statement, Department of Education spokesperson Nathaniel Styer wrote that, if parents believe a school called 911 in violation of city rules, they should contact their school district’s superintendent, who oversees school leaders and can provide additional training. “Situations where young children are in crisis and/or are at risk of harming themselves or others are among the most difficult for our educators and school staff,” Styer wrote.

“Nevertheless,” Styer continued, “whenever there is evidence the policy hasn’t been followed, it will be reported and investigated, and we review every case where 911 is called to ensure that it was necessary and complied with our policy.”

But thousands of children are still being forcibly removed from schools each year, which means the oversight clearly isn’t working, said Amber Decker, a public school parent who was a plaintiff in the 2013 lawsuit and now works as an advocate for parents of kids with disabilities.

If schools were being held accountable for unnecessary 911 calls, “the numbers would have gone down,” Decker said. As it is, “there’s no consequences other than the ones you push for until you’re blue in the face or banging your head against the wall.”

To understand why police are so involved in New York City schools, you have to look back to the late 1990s. Rudy Giuliani was mayor, and schools were at the junction of two of his biggest campaign promises: to slash crime and to fix the education system. For students, that meant a “zero tolerance” approach to school misconduct.

In 1998, the city created a new division of the NYPD, transferring school safety operations — which had previously been managed by the Board of Education — to the police department. Agents were allowed to arrest students for all kinds of misbehavior, including spitting, talking back to teachers and cutting class.

Eighteen years and two administrations later, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio presided over a city that approached young people and police very differently. According to a 2016 mayoral task force that included the commanding officer of the NYPD’s School Safety Division, overly punitive practices weren’t making students safer; they were pushing vulnerable kids out of schools and into the juvenile justice system.

The task force pointed to child-in-crisis incidents as part of the problem. “With little mental health experience or training, and scant access to mental health professionals, ER overuse is the norm,” the task force wrote.

De Blasio promised to transform the city’s approach to school discipline by reducing the role of police and dramatically increasing the mental health resources available to students and teachers. “We’re revolutionizing our school system,” he said in 2019.

The revolution never materialized. In 2021, after New York City students experienced some of the longest school shutdowns in the country, the city hired 500 new school-based social workers to help respond to trauma connected to the COVID-19 pandemic. De Blasio’s was “one of the first administrations to recognize that schools are where kids with mental health problems land,” said Peter Ragone, a longtime de Blasio adviser.

But while the hiring push put the city ahead of many other jurisdictions, New York City schools still have just one social worker for every 475 students — close to double the National Association of Social Workers’ recommended ratio of 250 students per social worker.

The city’s current mayor, Eric Adams, announced a sweeping mental health plan in March that includes a “Mental Health Continuum,” a project that was conceived under de Blasio and rolled out last year to connect schools directly to mental health clinics and mobile crisis teams. But Adams’s proposed city budget, released a month later, included no funding for the project.

“It’s mind-boggling,” said Dawn Yuster, who directs the School Justice Project at the group Advocates for Children. “This would expedite care for young people with the most significant needs. If you’re going to say it, fund it.”

The mayor’s office did not respond to questions about the Mental Health Continuum, but Patrick Gallahue, press secretary for the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, wrote in an emailed statement that a new teletherapy program for high schoolers will “connect even more young people with services by reaching them where they are.”

Meanwhile, in 2022, City Council members acknowledged the need for more oversight of child-in-crisis incidents, introducing a bill that would have required school safety agents to document that school staff tried to de-escalate a crisis before involving police. But the bill never made it out of committee. (Neither Councilmember Diana Ayala nor Councilmember Rita Joseph, both of whom sponsored the bill, responded to requests for comment.)

When school staff don’t get the support they need from mental health experts, they often resort to punishing kids for behaviors they can’t control, Yuster said. It might start with “calling parents every day about a student’s behavior. Then they up the ante, calling to say, ‘We’re suspending for five days, and next time we’re going to call EMS if this behavior continues.’”

Not only do the escalating punishments violate city rules but they also destroy trust between students and schools, said Crystal Baker-Burr, an attorney who directs the Education Project at The Bronx Defenders, a nonprofit public defense agency.

“Even if a school is at their wit’s end,” Baker-Burr said, “sending a student to the ER is not going to help the situation. Getting police involved, handcuffing them, it doesn’t make anything better at school the next day.”

Three years ago, Baker-Burr saw the impact of 911 calls up close — on her 7-year-old nephew, Ethan. (Ethan’s family asked us to identify him by just his first name.)

In 2019, Ethan was a second grader at P.S. 157 in the Bronx. He was a gentle and sweet kid at home, but he got overwhelmed and acted out at school, said his mom, Jacqueline De Jesus. He’d hit other kids or run out of the classroom. Sometimes he’d bite himself. This was before he was diagnosed with autism, and his parents were still trying to figure out what to do. De Jesus asked the school for help, she said, but teachers told her that Ethan didn’t need to be evaluated for educational services because his schoolwork was at grade level.

Instead, De Jesus said, Ethan, who’s Black and Latino, got punished. Teachers yelled at him and sent him out of the classroom. He wasn’t allowed to join music or sports clubs or sign up for the after-school program. The school constantly called his parents to pick him up early.

De Jesus felt like the message was clear. “They didn’t want to deal with him,” she said. It seemed like the school was making it as difficult as possible for Ethan to stay.

When Jacqueline De Jesus’ second grader, Ethan, threw tantrums at school, staffers repeatedly called 911.

P.S. 157’s principal did not respond to a request for comment. The Department of Education declined to comment on Ethan’s experience, even though De Jesus signed a release allowing it to share information with THE CITY and ProPublica.

In April 2019, De Jesus got a phone call that shocked her. It was the school secretary, saying that an ambulance was on its way to take Ethan to the hospital. De Jesus was at work in Manhattan — a 40-minute cab ride away — so she called Baker-Burr, who went straight to the school. When she got there, Ethan was curled up in a ball underneath a desk, rocking back and forth and sobbing. His face was swollen and red from crying for so long.

Two uniformed police officers were “standing over my very small nephew,” Baker-Burr said. “They were saying things like, ‘Don’t lie to us, Ethan. When you’re older, we could arrest you for things like this.’”

Baker-Burr asked the officers to leave the room, then got down on the floor and convinced Ethan to come out from under the desk, promising that she wouldn’t let anyone hurt him. By the time the ambulance arrived, he was calm, talking to Baker-Burr about his new Five Nights at Freddy’s backpack. Baker-Burr rode with him to Lincoln Medical Center, a public hospital in the South Bronx, where a doctor interviewed him and sent him home with a note saying he was fine to return to school.

Lincoln Medical Center in the Bronx

“They were like, ‘Why is this child even here?’ It was a colossal waste of time,” Baker-Burr said.

That didn’t stop the school from calling 911 on Ethan two more times in the next month, De Jesus and Baker-Burr said. Nor did it prevent De Jesus from being billed hundreds of dollars for ambulance rides and ER visits.

Eventually, De Jesus gave up and petitioned the city to move Ethan to a different school. “I didn’t want to send him somewhere he wasn’t wanted,” she said.

Calling 911 on kids “is the last thing any teacher wants to do,” said Kristen GoldMansour, a former teacher and coach who works with dozens of New York City schools to support inclusive programming for students with disabilities.

“The question is, how did we get there?” GoldMansour said. “There’s probably a thousand million things we could have done to avoid getting to that point.”

In fact, when students’ behavior or mental health needs get in the way of learning, federal law requires schools to intervene, proactively offering them evaluations and services like occupational therapy or a functional behavioral assessment — a detailed analysis of what triggers kids’ behaviors and the best strategies to prevent an emergency.

But getting the right services can be difficult or impossible — especially for parents who can’t pay attorneys to help them navigate the city’s convoluted system for students with disabilities. Instead, as THE CITY and ProPublica reported last year, kids who are disruptive or aggressive often get pushed out of mainstream schools and into failing special education schools that are packed with other students who have behavioral and mental health challenges. Even if they are capable academically, their chances of graduating with a diploma plummet.

Meanwhile, their odds of encountering police go way up: Special education schools, which disproportionately serve low-income and Black students, call 911 on kids in distress at four times the per-student rate of general education schools, according to a data analysis by Advocates for Children.

In Brooklyn, Paul’s parents are doing everything they can to keep him in a school with general education students. This is his chance to be integrated into mainstream life, his mom said.

On the day after Paul’s school called 911, his parents asked for a meeting with school staff and officials from the Department of Education — something they only knew to do because they were working with paid education advocates, they said. Paul’s dad went to the meeting, which was recorded on Zoom, with a list of questions: What kinds of restraints were used on his son? Could he see a picture of them? Would the school share its plan for responding to students in crisis or its policies on handcuffing kids? What if Paul had another incident — would staff call his parents before calling 911?

School staff said that they had tried to calm Paul down, but no one explained why the NYPD safety agent had become involved or why the school hadn’t called Paul’s parents first. The principal would only say that the school had done nothing wrong. “Protocols were followed,” she said. Everything was “by the book.” Meanwhile, she repeated a list of Paul’s transgressions: He had “assaulted” teachers, his behavior was “egregious.” (Paul’s parents asked us not to use their names or identify his school, in part to protect Paul’s privacy but also for fear of alienating education officials who hold power over Paul’s future school placements.)

After an hour, Paul’s dad was reduced to pleading: “Promise me, if this happens again, you have to call us,” he said. “I’m begging you. This is my son.”

Two weeks after the meeting, the Department of Education transferred Paul to a school that has more experience teaching disabled and nondisabled kids together. It’s a better outcome than many families get, Paul’s mom said. “We’re white, and we have a lot of resources to put toward our son. I have no idea how you would manage this situation without the resources to pay for help.”

So far, things at the new school are going well. Paul’s tantrums have not been quite so explosive, and his teachers seem comfortable managing them, his mom said. “They don’t shame him or drag him through the mud.”

Still, it’s impossible for her not to worry. If Paul was handcuffed at 7, what happens as he gets bigger and older?

She finds herself shutting away the memory of what happened in December. “It’s like this other, alternative reality,” she said. “I’m with my joyful, wonderful child, and I’m like, ‘How could this happen?’”

Sophie Chou contributed data analysis.

Summer Rising applications are now open. Here’s everything you need to know.

2023-04-14T20:30:55+00:00

Applications open Monday for New York City’s free, sprawling summer program for children in kindergarten through eighth grade.

The program was first launched in 2021 under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, using federal COVID relief money, as a way to help children ease into school following remote learning. The rollout of the program was bumpy, but for the first time, it provided a mix of academics and enrichment activities to many children beyond those who are mandated to attend summer school.

In its third year, the program will again have 110,000 spots and will be open to any child in New York City, including children who are home-schooled or attend charter or private schools.

But a couple things will be different from last year, including the application process. Spots won’t be assigned on a first come, first served basis this year; instead, parents will rank multiple choices. In another change, students who already attend a school associated with a Summer Rising site will be added to the list of groups receiving priority in selection for that site.

Parents who want to apply should visit this website when the application opens on Monday.

Here’s what you should know about this year’s Summer Rising program:

Where are the programs, and when will Summer Rising start?

Programs won’t be in every school. Rather, each school will be associated with one of 374 sites across the five boroughs.

The program length will depend on a few things. Programs will run from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. from July 5 to Aug. 18 for children in kindergarten through fifth grade and until Aug. 11 for middle schoolers.

Students with disabilities who have yearlong individualized education programs, or IEPs, will attend programs from July 5 to Aug. 14, from 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Students at District 75 schools, which serve children with the most challenging disabilities, will attend programs that run from July 6 to Aug. 15, also from 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.

Students in Nest and Horizon programs, which serve students with autism, who have 12-month IEPs, will attend a monthlong program from July 5 to Aug. 1, from 8 a.m. to noon.

What will my children do?

Generally, students will spend the morning on academics and then in the afternoons participate in enrichment activities, such as sports, arts and crafts or going on field trips. Elementary-age children will spend the last week of their program on enrichment activities and trips, according to the education department website. (Enrichment activities are run by community-based organizations.)

Students with disabilities will receive extra services that are mandated in their IEPs, including services from health and behavioral paraprofessionals, according to the department’s website. For these students, their school will create an accommodation plan for the summer that will be provided to their parents and the Summer Rising site before their program begins.

Students with disabilities are supposed to receive services “as needed” during the enrichment portion of the day, according to the department’s website. If a family doesn’t want the enrichment portion, they should contact their child’s school instead of using the online application. These children can choose on the application to participate in extended-day enrichment programming until 6 p.m.

Last year, several families reported that their children did not have special education support by the start of Summer Rising, said Randi Levine, policy director for Advocates for Children. She said it’s “important that planning begin early” so that students aren’t left without the services they need.

Will my child get transportation to the program?

Generally, students who are already eligible for busing during the school year — typically in grades K-6 — will receive busing to their summer program but not past 3 p.m. This includes students with disabilities whose IEPs recommend busing, as well as students in temporary housing and students in foster care who are more than a half-mile away from their Summer Rising site.

For children who want to participate in programming until 6 p.m. and need transportation, families will have the option of a prepaid rideshare service. However, a caregiver must take the rideshare service to and from the summer site to pick up their child, which some advocates have said is not manageable for working parents.

Eligible students who receive MetroCards during the school year can also get MetroCards from their Summer Rising site, or if their site is more than a half-mile from their home.

Students who are not eligible for busing during the school year could receive transportation if their regular school is not open for Summer Rising and their site is more than a half-mile away.

How will the application work?

Seats rapidly filled up last year, quickly elbowing out many families who wanted to apply, according to some advocacy and community-based organizations.

This year, instead of the first come, first served model, families will be asked to rank up to 12 choices for program sites, “ensuring that more families receive placements that work for them,” according to a news release.

Like last year, priority will be offered to students in temporary housing, in foster care, who are mandated for summer school, and with disabilities who have year-round individualized education programs. But also, students who have a “local connection” to their school will also be prioritized, such as if they attend the school during the year. Last month, city officials said students who attend city subsidized after-school programs will also be prioritized.

Asked how these groups will be ranked, an education department spokesperson said they’re aiming to give every child in a priority group access to their first choice.

The application will close May 1, and families should be notified the following week of where their child will attend the program, according to the department website.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City public schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

As NYC is expected to spend $38K per student, budget watchdog calls for prioritizing ‘critical services’

2023-04-11T04:01:00+00:00

Buoyed in recent years by billions in federal stimulus dollars, New York City is slated to spend about $38,000 per student next school year — the most in recent history — as enrollment is again expected to drop, according to a new report published Tuesday.

The report, from Citizens Budget Commission, or CBC, a budget watchdog group, comes as the education department faces 3% in cuts for next year. Mayor Eric Adams and the City Council are in the middle of budget planning for the next fiscal year, which begins on July 1.

Many of the CBC’s findings focus on the period from fiscal year 2016 through 2022, since the current fiscal year, 2023, isn’t over yet. Some of the report’s highlights include:

In that time period, the education department’s spending per pupil has increased by 47%, in large part due to the $7 billion in federal COVID aid the district received as enrollment has dipped. Three school years from now, in fiscal year 2026, CBC projects the city could be spending as much as $44,000 per student.
Spending grew the most in three areas: early childhood education, at 65%, covering private school tuition, such as for students with disabilities, by 79%, and for charter schools, by 84%. This was fueled by enrollment growth in these specific areas.
Spending related to schools, such as for instruction, grew by about 34%. Spending on school services, such as transportation, food, and safety, grew at a similar rate.
Spending on school support, such as special education instructional costs, grew by about 15%. And spending on central costs, including central administration, fringe benefits, pension contributions, and debt service, saw the slowest growth – by 8%.

CBC called for officials to prioritize programs and services for next year that are most effective and shed others. It also notes that the city faces financial pressures over the next several years, which the Adams administration has also emphasized as they’ve imposed stricter savings targets on city agencies. Those challenges include labor costs that will stem from new union contracts, including with the United Federation of Teachers, and a potential recession.

“We can’t do everything for everyone, so we need to start focusing on the most impactful interventions,” said Ana Champeny, the vice president for research at the Citizens Budget Commission.

New York City spends the most per pupil among the nation’s largest school districts. That cost grew as federal dollars were poured into the school system and enrollment dropped significantly after the onset of the pandemic. Dips in enrollment are likely due to several factors, including demographic changes and the cost of living in New York, which are leading many families to find homes elsewhere.

Roughly one-third of the department’s spending growth between 2016 and 2022 was due to federal pandemic aid, which is set to run out by 2024, CBC’s report found.

Advocates and educators have decried the potential cuts to the education department — amounting up to $421 million — as students continue to struggle with a host of challenges, including mental health, chronic absenteeism, and recovering academically after remote learning. Cuts to school budgets this school year resulted in some schools losing teachers, having larger class sizes, and cutting some programming, such as art and music classes.

Research has found that more money usually leads to better schools. New York, however, is in a puzzling situation: Despite being the leading state in spending per pupil, students score in the middle of the pack on national math and reading tests.

It’s possible to make cuts through central or support costs, such as through transportation contracts, and “avoid cuts to school budgets,” the CBC report notes.

While CBC doesn’t make specific recommendations, Champeny said such cuts could mean negotiating cheaper transportation-related contracts. The department could also look for ways to reduce private school placements for children with disabilities, commonly known as “Carter Cases,” a cost that ballooned under former Mayor Bill de Blasio and continues to grow.

More immediately, however, the group called on the department to be “transparent” about the future of a slate of programs that are currently relying on federal pandemic relief, which other organizations and advocates have also pressed for. These programs include expanded summer school, new prekindergarten seats for students with disabilities, and screening for dyslexia and other literacy programs – an area that Adams is increasingly making one of his signature projects.

Nathaniel Styer, a spokesperson for the Department of Education said, “This Administration has been open and honest about the long-term combined challenges of declining enrollment, programs funded by one-time federal stimulus dollars, and rising costs tied to unfunded mandates from the State.”

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City public schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

NYC’s Summer Rising program gets admissions overhaul

2023-03-22T21:41:27+00:00

As summer approaches, New York City families should expect changes in the sign-up process and who will be given priority for the city’s sprawling public summer enrichment program, which will again be open to 110,000 children.

Summer Rising — launched under former Mayor Bill de Blasio in the summer of 2021 with the help of federal COVID relief dollars — offers academic and enrichment programs to elementary and middle school students, even if they’re not mandated for summer school.

Last year’s program was offered on a first come, first served basis — leading to a mad rush of applications that filled up most school sites within a week of enrollment opening. In response to concerns about enrollment, this year the city will ditch the first come, first served model, said Keith Howard, commissioner of the city’s Department of Youth and Community Development, or DYCD, during a City Council hearing on Wednesday.

Families, who will also be able to rank their preferences for school sites, can sign up during the whole enrollment period, which will open in early April, said Howard, whose agency partners with the education department on running Summer Rising. This suggests that there will be a lottery process though city officials declined to confirm that or share more details with Chalkbeat.

“We’ll have more to share in the coming days, and we are prioritizing getting the needed information to our families and school communities,” said Mark Zustovich, a DYCD spokesperson, in a statement.

In another significant change, students who are already attending one of the city’s hundreds of DYCD-run after-school programs will also receive priority at the schools where their after-school provider runs Summer Rising. This move is meant “to accommodate families who are accustomed to year round programming,” Howard told the City Council.

Like last year, seats will be prioritized for students in temporary housing, students mandated for summer school, and those with disabilities, though officials did not immediately share how many of these seats would be set aside or if the seats for students with disabilities would be separate from those who are mandated to attend school for 12 months on their individualized education programs, or IEPs.

Neither DYCD nor education department officials immediately shared how all of these priorities would be ranked.

Randi Levine, policy director for Advocates for Children, said her group was happy about the end of the first come, first served enrollment process. She said many families who “needed more support to apply” didn’t get spots, including the very people who were supposed to be prioritized, such as children in shelters.

“We heard from families living in shelter and immigrant families that they did not know about Summer Rising in time to get seats for their children and heard from staff at shelters that when they went to help families enroll, the seats were already gone.”

At the same time, under the enrollment system last year, there weren’t many seats left for students who attended the school if they weren’t in one of the priority groups, said Erica N. Oquendo, division director of youth and family services for Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation, which expects to oversee Summer Rising programs in at least eight schools this summer and also runs eight DYCD after-school programs.

Another issue for Oquendo: Sometimes last summer, she saw children sign up for seats but never show up. To her frustration, her organization didn’t have control over unenrolling that child and offering their seat to someone else in need — an issue that must still be addressed, she said.

While the changes announced Wednesday could mean more seats for students already attending a given school, Oquendo craved more details about how the various priorities would be ranked.

“That’s the hard part — I wouldn’t necessarily say I would want to prioritize an after-school student over a child in a homeless shelter,” Oquendo said. “How do we measure the level of care that’s needed?”

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City public schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

64% of NYC’s bilingual special education students didn’t get all of their services last year

2023-03-20T22:12:41+00:00

Nearly two-thirds of New York City students who are entitled to bilingual special education services are not receiving all of their mandated support, according to new figures released by the city’s education department.

At the end of last school year, just 36% of children who were assigned bilingual special education services received the correct amount of instruction from a certified bilingual teacher and in a classroom with the proper ratio of students and staff.

That means about 3,100 students did not receive their correct classroom placements, including those that are co-taught and include a mix of special and general education students, classes with higher staff ratios exclusively for students with disabilities, or situations where students are pulled out of their classrooms for small group instruction. By comparison, 88% of all students with disabilities were placed in the correct environment listed on their individualized education program, or IEP, which officials said is the highest rate on record.

The statistics are part of the city’s annual special education report and refer to services delivered last school year, when students were required to attend school in person for the first time since the pandemic led to shuttered buildings in March 2020. The report now includes more detailed breakdowns for students who are entitled to bilingual special education services, revealing troubling gaps between those students and their English-speaking peers.

For years, state officials have criticized the city for failing to provide bilingual special education services, placing the education department on a corrective action plan in part due to ongoing shortages of certified bilingual educators and service providers. Advocates emphasized that those problems are even more urgent now, as roughly 14,000 students have enrolled in the city’s public schools since July, many of whom are seeking asylum and may not speak fluent English.

“It is unconscionable that the city has yet to fully close the gaps for immigrants with disabilities,” Andrea Ortiz, senior manager of education policy at the New York Immigration Coalition, wrote in an email, noting that lost services and instruction during the pandemic hit English learners particularly hard. She added that caregivers who don’t speak English have also struggled to access translated IEPs and other special education documents.

City statistics also show significant gaps in access to other wraparound support, though there have been significant improvements since the previous school year. About 21% of bilingual students who were entitled to counseling services received none or only part of their required sessions, far higher than the 6% rate for all other students with disabilities. Meanwhile, 13% of students who were entitled to receive bilingual speech therapy received none or only part of their required sessions, about the same as last year. Only 3% of their English-speaking peers fell into that category.

Lori Podvesker, director of disability and education policy at IncludeNYC, also pointed to an increase in the share of English learners who are eligible for special education services but are waiting more than the required 60 days for an IEP meeting. About 32% of English learners fell into that category, up from 23% the year before.

“That’s significant — that shows the need for more bilingual evaluators and providers,” she said.

Education department officials noted in the report that one reason students may not receive all of their bilingual special education services is families may not want to relocate their children to schools that can offer the full range of support.

“Many families do not move their child to a school where a bilingual program is available, and the DOE does not force families to accept placement in a particular school for the reason of special education programming,” the report notes.

The department is working with superintendents across nine of the city’s 32 districts to add bilingual special education classes, according to the report. They are also using federal relief funding to offer small group instruction, often outside of their regular classrooms, for bilingual students who are not receiving all of their classroom services. Officials also wrote that they are trying to speed up special education evaluations, including by adding psychologists to school support teams and expanding after-school evaluation sites.

Still, advocates argue that families aren’t to blame if nearby schools can’t provide bilingual special education support, noting that traveling long distances to secure services may not be tenable for younger children, and the city’s yellow bus system is notoriously unreliable. Plus, some families simply aren’t offered services at all if there are no available seats, according to Janyll Canals-Kernizan, director of the Robin Hood Project at Advocates for Children, who works with families seeking bilingual special education services.

“It’s not just that families are being offered something and they’re rejecting it because it’s far away. It’s also that [they] are mandated to receive these supports on their IEPs,” she said, “and they just never get it.”

Under city law, the annual special education report is due by Nov. 1, though city officials did not release it until this month despite repeated requests. An education department spokesperson did not respond to a question about what caused the delay.

Reema Amin contributed.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

How NYC’s school bus delays help drive chronic absenteeism and missed learning for students with disabilities

2023-03-15T16:15:13+00:00

One morning in late October, 8-year-old Eric Vilchis’s school bus picked him up on Bushwick Avenue at 7:30 a.m. About three and a half hours later, his mother, Araselis Pedrasa, received a phone call from his school: Her son had never arrived.

Panicked, the Brooklyn mom began calling the bus driver and bus attendant. Neither answered their phones.

“We didn’t know where the bus was,” she said in an interview translated from Spanish.

Pedrasa learned later that the bus had never left Brooklyn. A new bus driver had gotten lost and eventually “just shut down and sat there,” said Laura Cruz, the director of pupil personnel services at Eric’s school in Queens, the Lexington School for the Deaf. Cruz reached out to the bus company during the incident.

About 150,000 students in New York City rely on the city’s yellow buses to get to school each day, and 43% of them are students with disabilities. Many of those students are guaranteed bus service in their individualized education programs, or IEPs, legal documents that outline services and accommodations.

Yet parents and caregivers across the city say the long-standing problem of delayed, overcrowded, or missing buses is contributing to chronic absenteeism in schools and causing students to miss out on hours of instruction. They say the problem has only gotten worse amid a major shortage of bus drivers. About 300 yellow school bus driver positions in New York City were unfilled as of December.

Delays were nothing new for Eric. He typically arrives at school around 10:30 a.m., about two and a half hours after the day starts, his school said. But on that October morning, when his bus driver never left Brooklyn, Eric sat on the bus for six hours, arriving at his school at 1:40 p.m., his mother said.

“He had nothing to eat. No water. Nothing,” Pedrasa said.

About 350 school buses in New York City are delayed each day, according to data released by the city in October. In that month, 14,000 school delays were reported, more than any other month since 2017. On average, the buses showed up 41 minutes late.

As of March 1, almost 63,000 school bus delays had been reported for this school year, an average of over 10,000 each month. Of these, the majority were buses for students with special needs, according to public data.

Some parents and advocates believe the bus problems directly contribute to chronic absenteeism in schools — that rate that reached 40% in the 2021-22 school year, according to the department of education. A student is considered chronically absent if they miss 10% or more of school days.

Students with disabilities were significantly more likely to miss school. In Brooklyn, where Eric lives, about half of students with disabilities were chronically absent compared to about a third of their general education peers.

The city says that if a student is absent or late due to a transportation issue, their absence is coded differently in the attendance system to ensure students are not penalized. But absences due to busing issues are still included in citywide chronic absenteeism rates — and the children still miss out on hours worth of instruction.

Janyll Canals, an attorney at Advocates for Children, echoed this point. “Busing does have an impact on chronic absenteeism for students with special needs,” she said.

Josiah, 17, has missed 11 days of school so far this year because of bus-related issues.

April Blakely’s 17-year-old son, Josiah, wakes up at 6 a.m. each morning to catch his 7 a.m. school bus, a service mandated by his IEP.

“There were times I waited downstairs until 8, 8:30, 9,” she said. “One morning he was late because they didn’t have a bus. He got picked up at 10,” two hours after his school day officially began. Most days he arrives at school just before 9 a.m., missing out on a hot breakfast and his first period.

Blakely said her son has missed about 11 school days so far this year due to transportation issues.

She tries to take Josiah to school by public transportation but is not always able to. This journey takes about two hours round trip and involves the Long Island Railroad, a subway, and a bus.

Students with disabilities disproportionately affected

The education department contracts with 52 different bus companies. These buses cover around 9,000 routes and pick up 150,000 students. Routes zigzag through the city, grouping students from different neighborhoods and schools all on the same bus.

Eligibility for yellow buses depends on grade level, walking distance, and special accommodations. Once a student reaches seventh grade, they are only eligible for a yellow bus if they have an IEP or other accommodation. While about 20% of all New York City students have IEPs, 43% of all students who receive busing have disabilities.

The city’s website states that students as young as kindergarten, traveling out of borough for school, can legally spend up to 115 minutes on their buses each way. Some students have IEPs that mandate the maximum amount of time the child is able to spend on a bus for cognitive and medical reasons, and several families say the buses often violate these limits.

At the start of this school year, the Office of Pupil Transportation received 18,000 complaints from families who reported missing or delayed buses and bus routes, according to a report released by the New York City Council.

City officials say they have been working toward a solution, trying to make it easier for people to become bus drivers and creating an app that they say will eventually be able to track all buses and design more efficient routes. In the meantime, they’re paying rideshare apps, like Uber, to take some students to school each morning. Department of education officials were unable to provide data on how many students use the rideshare option or how much money has been spent on these rides so far.

Students with disabilities have been disproportionately affected by issues with school transportation.

“Every student and family deserve the support and resources they need to safely travel to and from school,” said education department spokesperson Jenna Lyle. “We are committed to providing quality transportation and outstanding service to the approximately 150,000 students we transport to and from school each day.”

Some parents aren’t willing or able to wait for the city’s solutions. Sara Catalinotto and her husband began to get involved in school bus transportation advocacy in 2008, frustrated by their then-second-grade son’s “long long long” commute from one end of Manhattan to the other.

Catalinotto said a group of parents, mostly from the same school, were all comparing notes and trying to figure out why their routes were so convoluted. By 2010, fed up with the city’s alleged incompetence and inaction, they founded Parents to Improve School Transportation, or PIST.

Twelve years later, Catalinotto still runs PIST and is in near-constant communication with parents and bus drivers across the city. She said some days she doesn’t want to open her email because reading all of the accounts from families makes her cry.

Catalinotto’s group has begun petitioning for a “School Bus Bill of Rights,” to “empower a panel of parents/caregivers, disability advocates, educators, and bus workers over pupil transportation policy decisions.” They also provide families across the city with resources, such as a pamphlet with tips to navigate the intricate bureaucracies of the Office of Pupil Transportation.

Rideshare apps, an imperfect solution to busing gaps

Even as advocates and city officials say they are working on long-term solutions, many families say the city’s short-term solutions — Ubers, taxis, and other rideshare options — are inaccessible.

Diana Sombrano, another parent at Lexington School for the Deaf, said her daughter’s bus route has no driver. One morning a bus did show up, but it was so overcrowded that her daughter, Brittany, could not fit, she said.

“I was standing at the door looking inside the bus, and I was like, ‘It’s impossible,’” said Sombrano. “I don’t want my daughter on a bus like that.”

Because of bus issues, Brittany now travels to the Lexington School for the Deaf with her mom using a prepaid rideshare provided by the city’s education department.

After contacting the Office of Pupil Transportation, the office offered her daughter prepaid rideshare trips to and from school. But Sombrano would have to accompany Brittany in the car, both ways. The car is supposed to take the parent to their child’s school and then back home or work— but it’s hard for many working parents to make the roundtrip.

According to the education department’s website, this prepaid service is only offered to students who are eligible for curb-to-school transportation if their route is “out of service.”

Cruz, who works at Lexington School for the Deaf, said that in reality, this option is limiting. “The problem is that a family member has to accompany the students, and a lot of families can’t. They gotta go to work,” she said. “We offered the car share to like 30 families.”

Of those families, the Sombranos were the only ones able to utilize it.

While Sombrano ultimately secured prepaid trips to and from school for her daughter, she said it was a frustrating process requiring repeated follow up with the pupil transportation office.

Lori Glick, a social worker at the school, said this experience is common. She said the school sent a list of students eligible for the rideshare option to the office on Nov. 21. By mid-December, she still hadn’t heard back.

In an emailed statement, an official at the department of education said, “NYC Public Schools works to proactively identify and notify any families who may be eligible for rideshare services. If there are any families who were not contacted proactively and they believe they may be eligible for rideshare, we encourage them to reach out to their school to request the service.”

Eventually, the city assigned the Sombranos a taxi service, which now transports them to and from school each day.

Even that solution is imperfect.

“Sometimes the taxi driver is late so I have to call them every morning and remind them,” Sombrano said. “It’s ridiculous.”

Bus delays have been such a common occurrence that the administrators at Lexington have created an after-school schedule to ensure at least one adult is always available to sit with kids until their late buses arrive.

Eric, the student who was stuck on his bus for six hours in October, is still waiting for a permanent bus driver to be assigned to his bus. His parents do their best to get him to school on their own each morning and, in the afternoons, he sits with the administrator on duty, often for hours, waiting for his ride home.

Amanda Geduld is a Columbia University Stabile Investigative Fellow.

Correction: The city’s rideshare program does take parents to or from work after school drop off or pick up.

Lawsuit on behalf of NYC students with disabilities who lost services during the pandemic goes ahead

2023-02-03T22:03:17+00:00

A class action lawsuit seeking to force New York City to expedite makeup services to students with disabilities has been revived by an appeals court, according to a ruling released Friday.

The ruling reverses a lower court’s decision last year to dismiss the case.

The lawsuit, filed in November 2020 by Advocates for Children, claims thousands of city students missed out on crucial services as the city struggled to distribute remote learning devices and provide adequate instruction after officials shut down school buildings during the pandemic. Other services, such as physical therapy, were extremely difficult to deliver remotely.

Students with disabilities are entitled to compensatory services if their school doesn’t provide the therapies or specialized instruction listed on their individualized education program, or IEP. If schools don’t agree to provide extra services, families can file what’s known as a due process complaint and go through an administrative legal process.

But in New York City, that system has experienced an explosion of due process complaints and faces a backlog of thousands of cases. In previous years, cases have dragged on for hundreds of days, beyond the 75-day legal limit. (City and state officials did not offer updated figures on how long cases are taking to resolve, though they recently sought a contract to hire outside lawyers to respond to cases.)

Advocates for Children’s lawsuit argues that the city must create a streamlined process for adjudicating families’ requests for makeup services, as the current process has broken down and would be too burdensome and time consuming for families to navigate.

A federal district judge rejected that argument last March, noting that none of the families who brought the lawsuit had attempted to use the existing process. The judge, Andrew L. Carter Jr., ruled that families needed to exhaust the existing process before bringing a federal lawsuit. But on Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit overturned that decision, sending the case back to the lower court.

“We’re very pleased with the ruling and think it is the right decision,” said Rebecca Shore, the litigation director for Advocates for Children. “We hope that the DOE will create a system without engaging in prolonged litigation because students with disabilities in New York City have been without these compensatory services since 2020.”

The city’s education department has made some significant efforts to provide students with disabilities additional services to make up for pandemic disruptions outside of the impartial hearing process. The department offered after-school and Saturday sessions to any family who wanted them. However, the rollout was bumpy — yellow bus transportation was not provided, and most families did not participate.

This school year, officials scaled back those programs and directed school staff to make individual decisions in consultation with families about whether students need extra services during their annual IEP meetings. City officials have argued that students should be automatically considered for extra services at those meetings, circumventing the need for a separate process for awarding compensatory services.

Shore countered that the process has not worked to effectively deliver services and that schools often don’t raise the possibility of extra support during IEP meetings.

The appeals court did not directly weigh in on whether the city’s current system of discussing compensatory services at IEP meetings was sufficient or implemented as city officials described, noting that both sides of the case could present evidence to the lower court.

Still, despite the immediate victory for families of students with disabilities who want additional services for their children, it’s unclear how quickly the case will be resolved — a point one of the appeals court judges dwelled on during oral argument in November.

“This is one of the most frustrating areas to be a judge in,” he said, “these are services that these kids need now, not two years from now. It would be a pyrrhic victory for the appellants to win five years from now because many of their clients would be 23.”

A spokesperson for the city’s education department said officials are reviewing the decision. The state education department, which is also a defendant in the lawsuit, did not return a request for comment.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

NYC’s education panel grows with new mayoral appointees and elected members

2023-01-20T14:50:39+00:00

Mayor Eric Adams unveiled on Thursday his newly appointed members to New York City’s Panel for Educational Policy, which has grown significantly in response to an updated state law.

Adams appointed six new people to the newly expanded panel that signs off on major education department contracts and school closures or co-locations. State lawmakers last year required the panel’s expansion from 15 to 23 members when they granted Adams another two years of controlling the nation’s largest school system, in hopes of bringing more parent voice to the body.

Those state-level changes called for the panel to grow from nine to 13 mayoral appointees. Four of these members must be public school parents, with at least one parent of a child with a disability, one with a child who is in a bilingual or English as a new language program, and one parent with a child in a District 75 school, which serves students with disabilities that require intensive support.

The new law also required the presidents of the city’s 32 parent councils to elect five members representing each borough — four more than currently serve. The city’s borough presidents continued to have their previously allotted number of five appointees.

One of the mayor’s new picks already raised eyebrows: Khari Edwards was ousted from his role as a governor’s aide in 2009 after the state found him “immature and irresponsible,” and accused him of lying in testimony for an inspector general investigation, according to the Daily News.

A City Hall spokesperson defended Edwards, calling him “not only a dedicated public servant, but, more importantly, a caring parent of three, who has continued to demonstrate his commitment to New Yorkers since these allegations surfaced over a decade ago.”

Edwards, who has since launched One Brooklyn Health and It Starts Here as the vice president of external affairs at Brookdale University Hospital, “has a strong track record of serving his community,” the spokesperson said in a statement after this story initially published.

Adams made a previous misstep with a panel appointment: last year he tapped Staten Island pastor Kathlyn Barrett-Layne but quickly withdrew the choice after the Daily News reported she had a history of anti-gay comments.

Two of Adams’ previous appointees, Kyle Kimball and Karina Taveras, were not reappointed, according to a spokesperson for City Hall, who declined to say why.

Additionally, the council presidents only elected four members instead of the required five. The Staten Island seat “remained vacant” during the election process, according to a City Hall spokesperson. Typically, such vacancies must be filled within 60 days by another vote from parent council presidents in that specific borough, according to the chancellor’s regulations.

In this case, there is only one parent council in Staten Island, so its president will appoint someone to the position. (Parents can nominate themselves by sending their information to the education department’s Office of Family and Community Engagement, which will forward eligible applications to the council president.)

With the expansion, the mayor’s appointees still make up a majority of the panel, which is often seen as a “rubber stamp” of the administration’s policies since mayoral appointees typically vote in favor of the administration’s proposals. Last year, dissenting voices were typically from the borough president appointees, as well as the panel’s elected member, Tom Sheppard, who has been reelected to the panel. One such vote — which was in part the result of the mayor failing to appoint enough of his members in time — was the panel’s rejection of the city’s funding formula.

Under this new configuration, it’s possible the public will see more disagreement among members. For instance, members elected by the parent councils and borough president appointees could potentially band together against certain policy proposals, such as school closures or co-locations. But their votes would still fall short of the mayor’s majority.

Also as part of the state’s changes last year, the panel must consider changes to school utilization, including co-locations and closures, in the borough of that school. That may lead to more frequent panel meetings. The panel, which typically meets once a month, has scheduled two meetings each in January and February.

Below is a list of the new panel. Those in bold are new:

The mayor’s appointees

Phoebe-Sade Arnold, director of community affairs at Columbia University
Lily Chan, parent of two English language learners and a brand manager for Revlon
Khari Edwards, head of corporate relations at Ayr Wellness and parent of three students
Anita Garcia, retired principal of Coney Island’s P.S. 329
Anthony Giordano, founder and managing partner at marketing firm Legacy Partners USA
Michelle Joseph, parent of a public school student who previously worked in District 79
Alan Ong, previous president of the District 26 parent council
Angela Green, chair of the panel and retired principal of Richard S. Grossley Middle School in Jamaica
Gladys Ward, executive assistant to the CEO of The Ministers and Missionaries Benefits Board
Gregory Faulkner, former chief of staff for New York City council member
Maisha Sapp, led program development for an organization called Blossom For Girls
Marjorie Dienstag, mother of two children who have graduated and a third child who attends a District 75 school
Maria Kenley, mother of a child with a disability

Newly elected members from the city’s parent councils

Naveed Hasan, parent of a public school student, who served several years on District 3’s parent council
Jessamyn Lee, parent of two public school students and a former teacher who worked with students learning English as a new language
Thomas Sheppard, the panel’s first elected member, parent of three public school students and former member of several parent groups, including District 11’s parent council
Ephraim Zakry, parent of two public school students and has served on the Citywide Council for High Schools

Borough president appointees

Queens representative Sheree Gibson, owner of a consulting firm and member of several parent boards, including former co-chair of the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Committee
Bronx representative Geneal Chacon, parent of three public school students and PTA president at P.S. 277
Brooklyn representative Tazin Azad, mother of three public school students and member of several parent groups, including former vice-chair of District 22’s parent council
Manhattan representative Kaliris Salas-Ramirez, medical lecturer at CUNY School of Medicine and former president of District 4’s parent council
Staten Island representative Aaron Bogad, parent of a public school student and member of several parent-led groups, including president of District 31’s parent council

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Rising inflation adds $800M to cost of fully funding New York’s main school aid formula

2022-12-21T20:36:02+00:00

New York school funding advocates have been looking forward to next year, when Gov. Kathy Hochul and the legislature are supposed to finish fully funding the state’s 15-year-old school funding formula, resulting in billions of more dollars for school districts statewide.

But a new problem might put the money in jeopardy: Because of inflation, the increase is expected to be nearly $1 billion more than expected, state officials said.

Advocates said they don’t yet expect that lawmakers will renege their promise of fully funding Foundation Aid, which sends more money to school districts with students who have higher needs.

Regardless, they are already on the offensive ahead of the next legislative session, which begins Jan. 4. They said they’ll still be pressing state leaders on the issue, in light of what happened when the formula was first implemented in 2007, right before the Great Recession.

“We got two years of full funding before there was a financial crisis, and then they froze the funding and started to regress and cut some schools,” said Jasmine Gripper, executive director of Alliance for Quality Education. “And we’ve fought for schools ever since.”

Last year, state lawmakers agreed to fully fund the Foundation Aid formula over three years, with the final phase-in scheduled in time for the 2023-24 school year. Since the Foundation Aid formula accounts for inflation, state officials expect that the final increase this year will cost $2.7 billion — about $800 million more than what the state’s Board of Regents had previously projected.

With that increase, schools across the state would receive a total of $24 billion in Foundation Aid next year.

The increased cost is because this final phase-in of money “happens to occur in a year with the highest inflation rate since the formula began,” according to a spokesperson for the state education department.

Advocates hope that the rising cost won’t deter lawmakers or Hochul from carrying out their promise to fully fund the formula, which she agreed to do as part of a legal settlement last year.

“As long as the state’s finances hold up, it seems as though it’s actually manageable,” said Bob Lowry, deputy director of policy and advocacy with the state’s Council of School Superintendents. “But if we got evidence that a recession is taking hold or revenues from the financial sector are coming in much lower, that could create an obstacle to achieving full funding in the next budget.”

The state’s financial picture is mixed. Through September of this year, the state had collected $3.1 billion more in personal income taxes and other revenue than was expected earlier this year, but there are still budget gaps expected for the next three fiscal years, according to the state budget division’s midyear report. Budget officials wrote that the national economy and the “elevated risk of a recession” could mean a gloomier budget in New York down the road.

State Sen. John Liu, a Queens Democrat who oversees the Senate’s New York City education committee, said cost increases and inflation are going to impact various parts of the budget, and it’s hard to say if better-than-expected tax revenues are enough to help.

Still, Liu said there is a “very high level of commitment” from the legislature to fully fund Foundation Aid.

“There is not enough money for everything everyone wants, but education is our biggest promise, from the state constitution and from the budget agreements over the last couple of years and from the settlement of the lawsuit from the governor’s promise,” Liu said. “I fully expect this final increase in Foundation Aid should be part of the coming budget.”

The governor’s office declined to say whether they’re still committed to fully funding the final projected increase for Foundation Aid. In a statement, spokesperson Katy Zielinski said details about the governor’s budget proposal will be released early next year.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

NYC’s pre-K program will soon have seats for all children with disabilities who want one, mayor says

2022-12-13T21:43:57+00:00

Mayor Eric Adams committed Tuesday to addressing a longstanding shortage of preschool seats for students with disabilities, with plans to open 800 more of those spots for 3- and 4-year-old children by this spring.

The mayor will boost pay for preschool special education teachers, who typically earn up to $20,000 less than their general education counterparts, officials said. The city will also increase the school day in these programs by an hour and 20 minutes, matching the hours for general education preschool programs.

Adams announced the changes at a press conference in which he sharply criticized the system under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, charging that the lack of access for hundreds of students with disabilities “was just wrong” and meant that New York City’s lauded universal preschool program was never truly universal.

“Children who need it more were receiving less,” Adams said. “That is just dysfunctional at its highest level.”

Schools Chancellor David Banks said the teacher pay disparities were a result of “what happens when you don’t think it’s a priority.”

Universal prekindergarten was regarded as de Blasio’s signature achievement. But advocates criticized his administration for failing to provide seats for hundreds of children with disabilities or adequately paying teachers in those programs. At the end of last school year, about 800 preschool-aged children with disabilities were still awaiting seats, an education department official said at a City Council meeting in September.

For students with disabilities who did get seats, disparities remained. An analysis of the 2019-20 school year found that Black and Asian American preschoolers were less likely to be identified for special education services when compared with their white peers. Black and Latino children who were identified for services were more likely to be placed in settings exclusively for students with disabilities rather than classrooms integrated with students of mixed abilities.

The new plan is expected to help providers open more classes with a mix of students with disabilities and those in general education, officials said. The process of adding 400 new seats is already underway, said Deputy Chancellor Kara Ahmed, who oversees early childhood education. Officials did not say exactly when these seats will open.

The department approved funding increases for 65 community-based organizations that provide special education programs for the city’s youngest learners. The additional money will allow those programs to open new seats, extend class hours for students with disabilities, and boost wages for teachers.

The salary bumps will mean increasing salaries from the current range of $50,000-$58,000 up to a range of $68,000-$70,000, Ahmed told reporters. And doing so will allow existing programs to keep teachers and attract new ones, Ahmed said.

The city has also committed to opening another 400 new seats by sometime this spring.

“We plan to hold the administration accountable for delivering on that promise,” said Randi Levine, policy director for Advocates for Children, a nonprofit organization that has for years pushed for more such seats, during Tuesday’s press conference. “The city has a legal obligation and a moral obligation to do so.”

The plan will cost $130 million during this fiscal year and the next one, and is being paid for using federal relief dollars, a department spokesperson said. The spokesperson declined to say how the city plans to cover funding for those seats once the temporary dollars run out in 2024. That’s a larger question for many education department programs funded by relief dollars, including thousands of new 3K seats the city has opened over the past two school years.

Gregory Brender, policy director for the Day Care Council, said the plan includes positive steps, but noted that his organization wants the Adams administration to raise wages for all early childhood educators working for community-based programs. As of October 2020, these teachers are making the same amount as new public school teachers, even with 20 years of experience, Brender said.

In an interview, Levine noted that under the city’s plan, preschool special education teachers will now be paid as much as a new teacher who works for the education department.

“But every step helps,” she said.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Public schools are NYC’s main youth mental health system. Where kids land often depends on what their parents can pay.

2022-11-17T18:23:20+00:00

This article was originally published in THE CITY on Nov. 17, 2022. It was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with THE CITY. Sign up for ProPublica’s Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

On Staten Island, a middle schooler with a hair-trigger temper was in a fistfight every week. In north Brooklyn, a ninth grader cut class for months before he tried to commit suicide. A few miles east, where Brooklyn meets the marshlands of Jamaica Bay, a 13-year-old ended up in a psychiatric emergency room after the COVID-19 pandemic shut down her school.

These kids all had two things in common: First, they were part of a growing cohort of students with serious mental health and behavioral problems that got in the way of their education. And second, they lived in New York City, which meant that their problems became, at least in part, the responsibility of the city’s school system.

Under federal law, school districts are required to provide all students, including those with mental health and behavioral problems, a “free and appropriate education.” In theory, this means that when a student is struggling to learn, districts must conduct assessments, create individualized plans and, if a child’s needs can’t be met in public schools, pay tuition for a private school — all at no cost to kids or their families.

In practice, however, what happens to students in New York City’s special education system often depends on the personal resources a family brings to the table. At each step of the way — identifying a disability, creating a service plan, deciding where a child will learn and who will pay for it — a family’s ability to spend its own money can secure a completely different outcome from the city’s public education system.

In the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, thousands of parents tap their personal funds to send children to private schools for students with disabilities and then sue the city Department of Education to reimburse them for tuition or other services. The schools these kids attend often charge well over $100,000 a year. Many offer the trappings of elite boarding schools, with bucolic settings and promises of advanced college prep. At some, students ride horses as part of their therapy.

The city doesn’t publish specific demographic data about students whose expenses are paid this way — commonly known as “Carter cases” after a 1993 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Florence County School District Four v. Carter, that affirmed schools had a duty to reimburse tuition in certain situations. However, Carter cases are not evenly distributed across New York City, which divides its massive school system into 32 geographical regions sometimes referred to as community school districts. Last school year, more than half of settlement agreements involved students who live in just four of the richest and whitest districts, which include neighborhoods such as Manhattan’s Upper East Side and Park Slope in Brooklyn. The poorest community school districts rarely see Carter case settlement money at all.

Meanwhile, more than 2,600 other kids — most of them Black or Latino and nearly all low-income — are labeled as having an “emotional disability” and shunted into city-run special-education schools, many of which fail across just about every measurable metric: At the schools where the city Department of Education most often places emotionally disabled kids, attendance rates are among the lowest in the city and dropout rates among the highest. By the end of high school, public school students with emotional disability classifications are far more likely to have quit school than to have graduated with a diploma, according to data provided by the New York City Independent Budget Office. Hundreds end up in juvenile justice facilities or on Rikers Island.

The inequities are not new. Critics have long argued that money for private tuition reimbursements should instead be invested in improving services for kids with disabilities in public schools. But the costs of Carter cases to taxpayers have grown exponentially in the past decade, with payouts reaching $918 million last year. And while the cases have historically been driven by kids with autism or learning disorders, something has shifted in recent years: Attorneys who represent students say there is an influx of young people who need private schooling because of mental health conditions. “I’m seeing more and more kids whose anxiety has gotten more severe since COVID, or who are really behind in social skills,” said Lauren Goldberg, a partner at The AGS Firm, which represents students in education law cases.

School closures and other pandemic stressors have contributed to the crisis, Goldberg and other attorneys say. But even before the coronavirus arrived in New York, schools were feeling the impact of shutdowns of another kind: As THE CITY and ProPublica have reported, New York state made a deliberate choice over the past decade to eliminate hundreds of beds for children and adolescents in psychiatric hospitals and residential programs while failing to follow through on promises to dramatically expand community-based mental health care.

When kids can’t find mental health services in their communities, the onus falls on school systems, which don’t have the option to turn students away. “As soon as the residential programs closed, those kids came to us,” said one social worker at a New York City special education high school that serves hundreds of students with emotional disability classifications. “The entire state of New York has shifted the burden of mental health to the school districts.”

In a written statement to THE CITY and ProPublica, Nicole Brownstein, a spokesperson for the city Department of Education, said her agency is working to expand access to high-quality programs that allow students with disabilities to succeed in all schools. The city has invested in software that will improve assessments and service plans, has expanded programs for students with sensory and mental health needs, has conducted trainings on implicit bias, and is creating a strategic plan to support students with emotional disabilities, Brownstein said. “We continue to work towards dismantling inequities in the special education process.”

ProPublica and THE CITY have documented the stories of three New York City kids, each of whom had a very different experience navigating the school system when they had a mental health crisis. We spoke extensively to each child’s mother, though not to the kids themselves; reviewed medical and educational documents; and interviewed dozens of mental health and education professionals who work with these and other students with disabilities. We also asked the city Department of Education to comment on the experiences of the two students who struggled to get the help they needed; Brownstein offered a brief statement on one. We allowed parents to decide whether and how we could identify their children. Read their stories below.

1. A Child and a Crisis

Gary

Gary’s mom was sure that, if she didn’t do something drastic, her son would wind up arrested or dead.

Things had been scary for a long time. Gary was a ninth grader at a prestigious and competitive public school in Brooklyn, but he skipped class more often than he went. At the beginning of the school year, in the fall of 2018, he’d attempted suicide at least once — maybe twice, his parents still weren’t sure — and spent a week in a hospital psychiatric unit, said his mom, who asked us to identify Gary by his middle name to protect his privacy.

Still, it wasn’t until Gary left his Instagram account open that his mom’s worst fears were confirmed. She saw messages, going back for months, about using and selling hard drugs. “My stomach dropped,” she said. “We have serious addiction in the family. My sister drank herself to death.”

Months earlier, a counselor had suggested that Gary go to a residential program for kids with acute mental health conditions, but his parents had dismissed the idea. They didn’t want to send their child away from home, and anyway, they knew that a good program could cost thousands of dollars a week — not the kind of money they had sitting around.

Now, “full-on desperation set in,” said Gary’s mom. She mined her network, contacting other parents of struggling teens, talking to friends of friends who were mental health professionals. She turned to her own mom and her husband’s parents for help with money — a lot of it.

Within a week, she and her husband had a plan: They hired what’s known as a “youth transportation service” — two burly guys who came to Gary’s home in the middle of the night and escorted him by plane to Utah, where, at a cost of $60,000, he spent four months at a wilderness therapy program, getting sober and doing intensive individual and group therapy.

Sending her son away was one of the hardest things Gary’s mom had ever done, she said. But there was more bad news: At the end of wilderness therapy, Gary’s counselors said he still wasn’t ready to come home. His mom would need to find an even longer-term program — one that could keep him safe and continue to provide treatment while letting him move forward with high school.

“They told me, ‘You can’t bring this kid home. He’ll relapse right away,’” Gary’s mom said.

Taylor

Taylor Cardin had just turned 13 when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down schools across New York City, including the school she’d attended for years in Queens. Taylor is autistic, and when her routines disappeared, she panicked, said her mom, Tiffany Caldwell.

Taylor stopped sleeping at night and refused to go outside during the day. She’d always been a gentle, affectionate kid, but now little things infuriated her. As the months at home dragged on, she grew aggressive with her mom, hitting and scratching Caldwell when she got upset. When her school finally opened back up in person, she refused to get off the bus, crying and lashing out at anyone who tried to help her.

Taylor’s doctor recommended that Caldwell take her to a psychiatrist for an evaluation. Caldwell had always thought that she had good health insurance. She’d worked for nearly 20 years for New York state’s Office of Mental Health as an aide in a psychiatric hospital for adults. But when she called the list of psychiatrists in her insurance network, she found that not a single one was available to see Taylor. “They didn’t answer, or they weren’t taking new patients, or, if they were, the first appointment was sometime next year,” Caldwell said.

Desperate, Caldwell paid out of pocket — “money I didn’t have,” she said — for a session via Zoom with an out-of-network psychiatrist, who diagnosed Taylor with depression and anxiety and prescribed her a cocktail of medications that seemed to Caldwell to make everything worse. Taylor picked up new behaviors, like slamming doors and the toilet seat over and over again. “She had this look in her eyes like she was on another planet,” Caldwell said. Taylor’s violent episodes got so bad that Caldwell had to call the police to restrain her and take her to a psychiatric emergency room. Each time, hospital staff sedated her and sent her home. “They didn’t have any beds,” Caldwell said. “Once, I begged them to keep her overnight. They told me, ‘If you’re not here in the morning, we’ll call child services.’ It was like a punitive thing. There’s such a lack of regard and empathy and respect.”

By the end of 2020, Taylor had been out of school for nine months. She was talking less and refusing to do basic things, like shower and get dressed. Caldwell, who raises Taylor on her own, had used up her family medical leave and was on the verge of losing both her job and her apartment. The thought of separating from her daughter broke her heart, Caldwell said, but she realized that Taylor needed a residential school: “I was just watching my child regress every day.”

Davon

For Davon, the problems started in elementary school. He was skinny and shy, and kids picked on him, said his mom, Latoya Patterson, who asked us not to use Davon’s last name to protect his privacy. Patterson asked school officials for help, but Davon was quiet and didn’t cause problems, she said, so the school ignored him until fifth grade, when he started to fight back.

“He got sick of the bullying,” Patterson said. “If someone did something to him, he was reactive right away.” By middle school, Patterson was getting calls at least once a week to say that Davon had been in another fight.

In sixth grade, Davon was classified as having an emotional disturbance, a term that was formally changed in New York this year to “emotional disability.” An emotional disability classification is not a medical diagnosis. Rather, it’s a catch-all term used by education departments for any number of mental health or behavioral challenges that show up in school. An emotionally disturbed student could be a first grader who hits other kids or a 10th grader who has psychotic episodes, or who’s too persistently sad to concentrate. Critics argue that the classification is far too vague and subjective. Under federal and state regulations, for example, students can be classified as emotionally disabled for such criteria as exhibiting “inappropriate types of behavior or feelings under normal circumstances.”

In New York City, Black boys get classified with emotional disabilities at a far higher rate than other kids. In the 2020-2021 school year, the most recent for which data is available, Black students made up less than a quarter of students overall, yet they accounted for nearly half of students classified as having an emotional disability. White students, who made up 15% of all students in New York City public schools, accounted for just 8% of emotional disability classifications.

That’s in part because evaluators may be more likely to interpret Black boys’ behavior as aggressive, advocates and attorneys say. But it’s also because white families more often come to the assessment process armed with detailed private evaluations and attorneys who advise them to push for a classification that carries less potential stigma, such as “other health impairment” or “multiple disabilities.”

“You want to get the right classification,” said Goldberg, the education attorney. “Colleges are going to see this. Middle and high schools are going to see this. You’re thinking about your kid’s future.”

Patterson, who’s Black, raises Davon by herself and works as a construction laborer. She didn’t know that some parents hire lawyers and paid educational advocates to represent them at special education meetings. Certainly, nobody suggested that she get Davon a private neurological or psychiatric evaluation. Instead, she participated in planning meetings, filled out paperwork and, for the most part, took Department of Education staff at their word when they said they wanted to help her son.

It was a belief that she came to regret.

2. ‘Please! We’re Drowning! Help Us!’

Gary

By the time Gary finished wilderness therapy, his mom had spoken to plenty of parents who’d sent their kids to private schools and then sued the city to be reimbursed for the cost. She knew that success depended on hiring the right people.

The frequency with which families pursue these Carter cases has given rise, in New York City, to an elaborate ecosystem of high-priced professional advisers and advocates. Parents frequently start by paying $5,000 to an educational consultant, whose job it is to broker admission to a private school. Sought-after schools often maintain relationships with particular attorneys, who might charge a family anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 per year to pursue tuition reimbursement. In turn, attorneys may point parents to trusted psychologists, who — for another $5,000 or more — conduct detailed assessments and write reports that might support the claim that a child can’t be served in public school. That’s all in addition to the price of tuition, which, even if a family wins its case, may not be reimbursed for months or years.

Not everyone who pursues Carter cases has hundreds of thousands of dollars on hand. It’s not uncommon for parents to refinance their homes or pull cash from retirement plans to pay the deposit on a residential school that a family hopes will rescue their suicidal or addicted child. And there’s no shortage of GoFundMe pages set up by families begging for help with the final $10,000 or $15,000. There are also some attorneys in New York who specialize in taking on severely disabled kids without charging a retainer, and there are private schools that reserve spots for kids whose families can’t pay tuition upfront.

Nonetheless, the typical buy-in costs are high enough to rule out the vast majority of New York City families. “There’s a huge industry around teenage mental health, but it’s only for a particular demographic of our society,” said Gary’s mom, who is white and describes her family as middle-class. “It’s so clearly unjust. At the same time, when your child is attempting suicide, you can’t really get picky about diversity at the institutions you’re sending them to because you need to save your kid’s life.”

Gary’s mom had heard enough horror stories about abusive residential programs to know that she wanted professional advice on which one to choose. Based on recommendations from a friend, she hired an educational consultant who found a therapeutic boarding school in Arizona and then managed Gary’s application. “She had the relationships; she knew what to say,” Gary’s mom said.

With her in-laws’ help, Gary’s mom was able to cover tuition: a $25,000 deposit and then $11,000 per month. The next step was to try to get that money back from the public school system.

Taylor

Because Taylor was diagnosed with autism when she was little, Caldwell had years of experience navigating New York City’s special education system. She knew that most decisions go through a dedicated committee in a student’s local area, which is charged with approving individualized education programs and deciding which services kids should receive. To Caldwell, those decisions often seemed arbitrary. She’d wondered why some kids seemed to get more services than others, and whether Taylor might be getting less help because she’s Black.

After schools closed down in 2020, Caldwell reached out to her local committee, but months went by with no help. “I kept reporting, reporting, reporting: ‘This child is in crisis and it’s getting worse,’” she said. “It all fell on deaf ears.” Some of Taylor’s instructors tried to continue working with her virtually, but Taylor couldn’t engage via the computer screen, so she ended up receiving nothing — no classes, no speech therapy, no contact with anyone except her mom. “It’s like we’re floating around with an inner tube, and I’m yelling, ‘Please! We’re drowning! Help us!’” Caldwell said.

There was no way that Caldwell could pay upfront for Taylor to go to a private boarding school — she’d never even heard of anyone who did that. Her only option was to convince the Department of Education to approve Taylor for placement at a residential school and get the agency to pay the tuition directly.

The New York State Education Department holds contracts with approximately 200 private schools — typically shorthanded as “state-approved” schools — that serve kids from across New York who have disabilities that affect their education, such as intellectual delays, autism or emotional disabilities. While these state-approved schools are free for families, they vary enormously in quality, according to advocates and education attorneys. Some schools have excellent reputations and get far more applicants than they can take; others have been the subject of multiple complaints and lawsuits alleging mistreatment of kids. Little information is available publicly about each school, so parents who don’t have paid consultants or deep networks may have nothing to go on but online reviews.

State-approved schools are also deeply segregated by race. For example, at the Queens campuses of The Summit School, which attorneys describe as being highly sought after, 70% of students were white, while just 22% were Black or Hispanic during the 2021-2022 school year, according to state data. Just a couple of miles away, at the Theresa Paplin School, which is run by a large foster care and mental health services agency, 83% of students were Black or Hispanic, while just 13% were white.

Getting placed at any of these schools can be a long and circuitous process, involving multiple meetings, referrals and interviews. And even then, there’s no guarantee that an appropriate school will have space. Kids sometimes wait months for a bed to open up at a therapeutic residential school on the state-approved list. In the worst cases, they cycle in and out of emergency rooms, sit in psychiatric hospitals or land in the juvenile justice system while they wait.

On her own, Caldwell couldn’t even get to the first step: scheduling a meeting to review Taylor’s special education plan. By the time Taylor had been out of school for close to a year, Caldwell’s own health was suffering, and she was exhausted and furious. “Children with disabilities are disregarded and pushed to the side,” she said. “They’re treated like second-class citizens.”

In January 2021, Caldwell found an education attorney who was willing to take Taylor’s case against the Department of Education without charging an upfront fee. “You have to fight for everything,” she said, “because they’re not going to willingly give it to you.”

Davon

While many parents battle to get their kids approved for private placement, Patterson found that Davon’s school was all too happy to recommend that Davon go elsewhere.

That’s not unusual for kids who are seen as aggressive, education experts say. Once a student has been classified with a disability, federal law requires school districts to educate them in the least restrictive possible setting, integrated with their nondisabled peers. In reality, teachers often don’t have the training to deal with kids who have repeated behavioral problems, said Kristen GoldMansour, a former teacher who works as a consultant in dozens of New York City schools.

The result is that struggling kids get punished for behaviors that are beyond their control, GoldMansour said. “If a kid is coming in to us completely traumatized and we just keep saying, ‘Sit down, pay attention, calm down,’ we’re not helping.”

Over time, the pressure can build up to drive difficult students out of general education schools, even if that child is academically and cognitively capable of doing grade-level work. A Brooklyn-based social worker who conducts special education evaluations, and who asked to remain anonymous for fear of repercussions at work, described the process like this: “My supervisor would be saying, ‘Let’s try a smaller class. Let’s try a paraprofessional.’ But the principal wants that kid out of the school immediately. It’s a touchy thing.”

At first, the special education committee that reviewed Davon’s case suggested that he transfer to a special day program for kids with mental health challenges, but the waitlist was months long, so the Department of Education changed his recommendation to a state-approved residential school. To Patterson, it sounded like Davon would be placed in a specialized boarding school, with all the mental health services that she couldn’t find for him at home. “They’re saying he’ll get therapy,” she recounted. “He’ll get a lot of different programs that will help him. I’m thinking this will be great.”

It was only after Davon got to the residential school — a campus in Westchester operated by the social service agency Graham Windham — that Patterson learned that many of the students had been placed there by a judge and seemed to have far more serious behavioral and psychological problems than Davon. Sending him there “was the worst decision I ever made,” she said.

Davon had been slightly behind his grade level when he left home; now he fell way back. Patterson said he never got the therapy he was promised because — like many mental health providers that rely on public funding — the school couldn’t keep counselors on staff. “It was like a revolving door,” Patterson said. “If he got two months of consistent therapy, I’d be surprised.” She asked the special education committee if she could bring Davon home, but was told that since he’d left the system with a record of behavior problems, a community school would be unlikely to take him back.

Graham Windham did not respond to requests for comment.

Davon started sneaking off campus with other kids and getting into increasingly serious trouble. He was arrested for being a passenger in a stolen car, and then again at the scene of a robbery, Patterson said. After he violated the curfew in his probation agreement, a judge sent him to a juvenile justice group home in Brooklyn, where he spent nine months.

To Patterson, the irony was excruciating. She had agreed to send Davon to the residential school in part because she was afraid that at home he’d end up in trouble with the police. Now she believed that the school system had put him on a direct path to the criminal justice system.

It’s a common trajectory for young people with emotional disabilities, who make up close to half the students enrolled at schools in New York City’s juvenile detention centers and in the Rikers Island jail, according to data from the Independent Budget Office. “There’s a school-to-prison pipeline for these kids,” said Dawn Yuster, an attorney who directs the School Justice Project at the community group Advocates for Children.

3. An Education in Treatment

Gary

Gary’s therapeutic boarding school was exactly what his mom had hoped. It was small and family-run. Most of the staff had many years of experience; several were in recovery themselves. Gary got individual therapy multiple times a week, as well as evidence-based addiction treatment and full weekends of intensive family therapy. He and the other residents spent hours every day outside, taking care of horses and riding them through the desert. For years before Gary went to the program, “our house was so sad and tense,” his mom said. Now, “he was free. It was the coolest thing ever, to see your kid be a cowboy.”

From the start, Gary’s attorney was optimistic about the family’s prospects of getting a tuition reimbursement. “They won’t tell you that you’ll definitely win. They were like, ‘You have a good case,’” Gary’s mom said. “The suicide attempts help; making it a life-or-death situation helps.”

From a historical perspective, there was good reason to be hopeful. Back in the early 2000s, then-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg staffed up on lawyers to make it harder for parents to force the city to pay for private schools and services. In 2014, his successor, Bill de Blasio, changed tack, promising to make the settlement process easier and faster for families. The number of New York City students receiving Carter case settlements shot up, growing from less than 5,300 in 2015 to more than 17,700 in 2022, according to data provided by the Independent Budget Office. The city Department of Education declined to say what percentage of Carter case filings are successful or how many are settled without going to a hearing. But education attorneys say that they win reimbursement cases far more often than they lose.

It’s unclear whether the current administration under Mayor Eric Adams will try to bring the Carter case numbers down. At an advisory meeting over the summer, New York City’s schools chancellor, David Banks, infuriated some advocates by saying that private school parents had “figured out how to game this system,” siphoning funds at a time when public schools are contending with massive budget cuts. At a later City Council hearing, Department of Education staffers attempted to walk that accusation back, pinning the blame instead on attorneys and consultants who’ve turned filing Carter cases into a business model. In response, parents and City Council members argued that families wouldn’t need to resort to private schools if the city weren’t so abjectly failing students with disabilities.

In the end, Gary’s case didn’t even go to a hearing. The city agreed to settle, reimbursing his family for $100,000 of the more than $140,000 they had paid in tuition at the therapeutic boarding school.

Gary came home in 2021, after 13 months at the private school, and enrolled in 11th grade at a public alternative school. He still gets hit by intense bouts of depression, his mom said. “It’s a hard road, and it probably always will be.” But he has strategies for dealing with his illness now — a fact that his mom credits almost entirely to the excellence of the treatment he received. “He came away with a lot of coping skills, a lot of integrity and a very clear understanding of who he is,” she said. “That’s a testament to the quality of the program, one hundred percent.”

“That place saved his life,” she continued. “The horses, the other boys, the therapists — they saved his life.”

Taylor

About the time that Gary was flying home from Arizona, Taylor’s case began to crawl its way through the New York City special education system.

On the advice of her attorney, Caldwell made a formal request that the Department of Education reevaluate Taylor and write her a new education plan. “Taylor has regressed significantly,” she wrote in a January 2021 email. “I have been voicing my concern with the team for months.”

In response, the special education committee had Caldwell fill out forms and conducted a brief social-psychological assessment by video. But more months passed, and nothing changed: There was no meeting, no plan, no new services.

In April 2021, Taylor’s attorney filed a due process complaint with the Department of Education, charging that the city had failed to provide Taylor with a free and appropriate education. By law, that should have triggered what’s called an “impartial hearing” within 30 days, but the hearing system is notoriously backlogged, and Taylor and Caldwell waited four months. (This year, the city moved impartial hearings to a new administrative office and hired 40 new hearing officers, which has reduced the standing backlog of unassigned cases from thousands to hundreds, wrote Brownstein, the city Department of Education spokesperson.)

When Taylor’s hearing finally took place, the hearing officer ruled in her favor on all counts. The Department of Education must not only consider approving her for placement in a residential school, the officer wrote, but must also immediately start providing the services she should have been receiving all along, including tutoring, counseling, and speech and occupational therapy.

Even then, every step was a battle, Caldwell said. The Department of Education refused to provide in-home instruction; a request for an iPad to help Taylor communicate dragged on for months. Meanwhile, the question of Taylor’s residential school placement inched forward while Taylor sat at home. Two months after the hearing officer’s order, the Department of Education sent an application packet on Taylor’s behalf to multiple schools on the state-approved list. Six of those schools rejected her outright, probably because of her history of aggressive behavior, the attorney told Caldwell. One school — The School at Springbrook in Oneonta, New York — offered Taylor a spot, but they were full and couldn’t say how long it might take for a bed to become available.

In January, the Department of Education offered Caldwell a new option: She could send Taylor to a residential school in Pennsylvania, which had vacancies and would accept her right away. At first Caldwell was thrilled, but then she looked up online reviews for the facility and found dozens of stories referencing abuse and neglect. One reviewer alleged that her daughter had been raped by a staff member; others said their kids came home with bruises. Caldwell turned the placement down.

A space finally opened up for Taylor at The School at Springbrook in April, after she’d been at home for more than two years. Taylor’s thriving at the school, which uses evidence-based therapies designed for people with autism and emotional disabilities, Caldwell said. She’s going on field trips, getting along with other kids and regaining some of the skills she lost. Caldwell plans to move upstate, closer to the school, because she wants Taylor to stay.

But it still hurts her to think about the time that Taylor lost, Caldwell said. “She’ll never get those two years back.”

“I’m not going to let anyone dehumanize my daughter,” she continued. “She’s going to get the same quality education as if she didn’t have a disability. She should have the same rights as her peers. She’s human. She matters.”

Davon

Ironically, the juvenile justice group home was better for Davon’s education than the residential school. He caught up on credits and did well in his classes, according to teachers who described him in written reports as a “polite student” who helped his peers with their work. By the time he left, he’d decided that he wanted to go to college and become a lawyer.

Still, when it was time to come home, rather than allowing Davon to attend a general education school, the Department of Education placed him at South Richmond High School — a special education school on the south shore of Staten Island. Like all such schools in New York City, South Richmond is run by an administrative entity called District 75.

Advocates have long argued that the city places far too many students in District 75 schools, where they receive a vastly inferior education with fewer resources and little hope of graduation. More than a decade ago, a city-commissioned report found that District 75 students were more isolated than students with disabilities in any other major urban school district. “District 75’s expectations for the students that it serves need to be elevated. Its programs and supports need to be improved,” the report said.

The Department of Education told THE CITY and ProPublica that it is working to ensure that students can receive the social and emotional support they need in all school districts. “We cannot live in a system,” Brownstein wrote, where “students receiving District 75 special education services are separated physically, academically and socially from their peers.”

Still, students with emotional disability classifications are placed in special education schools at an extraordinarily high rate: In the 2020-21 school year, over 33% of students with emotional disability classifications were in District 75, according to data provided by the Independent Budget Office. And within the district, those students were heavily concentrated into just a handful of schools. At several, students with emotional disability classifications made up close to half the student body.

Concentrating kids with emotional and behavioral problems into one school is a setup for failure, say parents, advocates and staff who work at the schools. “These schools tend to be … I don’t want to say ‘dumping grounds,’” said another social worker who has spent years working in District 75 high schools with very high concentrations of students with emotional disability classifications, and who did not have permission to speak on the record. Students come in throughout the year, often directly from juvenile justice facilities or residential foster care programs. One dysregulated student can easily set off others, leading to fights and chaos that make it impossible for other students to learn, the social worker said. “They’re in fight-or-flight all of the time.”

While most people who work in the schools are doing their best to make positive connections with students, the social worker continued, “We also have a number of staff who couldn’t get jobs in any other school.”

At South Richmond, where Davon was referred, nearly 60% of the school’s students were classified as having an emotional disability in the 2020-21 school year, compared to less than 1% of New York City public school students overall, the Independent Budget Office data shows. (The remaining South Richmond students have other educational disabilities, such as cognitive delays.) Like other schools where the city concentrates students with emotional disability classifications, South Richmond has exceptionally high rates of chronic absenteeism — 60% of students missed 20 days or more in the 2019-20 school year — and a dropout rate that is nearly five times as high as that of high school students citywide. Every year, it is on a short list of the schools that most frequently call in police officers to respond to students in emotional crisis, according to an analysis by Advocates for Children.

After a Daily News article highlighting problems with District 75 was published in July, New York City Mayor Eric Adams promised to improve conditions for kids with emotional disability classifications. Like several other District 75 schools, South Richmond has an on-site partnership with a mental health care agency, Brownstein wrote. This school year, the Department of Education is expanding after-school and Saturday programs for students with intensive sensory needs that affect their learning and behavior.

The city is also building on a pilot project that began in 2021, which places kindergarteners with emotional disability classifications in classrooms that are intentionally integrated with nondisabled peers. The program is now running in three classrooms, each of which has two teachers, a dedicated counselor and an occupational therapist to support students. An additional three classrooms are slated to open in January in community school districts with high numbers of referrals to District 75 schools.

“These are students who may have been on a trajectory to District 75,” Christina Foti, the city’s special education chief, told THE CITY and ProPublica. “We are rerouting them.”

To Patterson, any changes are too little and too late. Placing Davon at South Richmond was evidence that the school system had long since given up on her son, she said. “He felt like the classes were boring. The work was too easy. I think they just didn’t expect him to graduate.” Outside of class, Patterson continued, “the school was chaotic. They have a lot of fights. They can’t control the kids. Why are you putting a bunch of kids that get into trouble in the same place? It doesn’t make sense.”

Nearly as soon as he started at the school, Davon felt that he was being targeted by an assistant principal and school safety officers who knew that he had a history of being arrested. Things came to a head in May, when, according to Patterson, Davon refused to allow a school safety agent to search his bag. The school called the police, and Davon was handcuffed and eventually taken to a precinct. School officials told Patterson that Davon had marijuana in the bag and that he’d head-butted a safety agent. Davon said that the agent knocked him down when he was already in handcuffs. The Staten Island district attorney’s office declined to pursue a case against Davon, Patterson said, but he was briefly assigned an attorney, who advised Patterson to get in touch with Yuster from Advocates for Children.

The Department of Education said Davon was passing classes and earning credits at South Richmond High School. “He was offered the opportunity to participate in summer school programming for additional credit accumulation, which his family declined,” Brownstein wrote.

After months of letters, phone calls and meetings, Yuster helped Davon get a new education plan, which allows him to attend a general education school this year for the first time since seventh grade. “That’s what I wanted, to get him out of District 75,” Patterson said.

But it’s hard to have faith, Patterson continued, in a school system that seemed ready to throw her child away when he was in middle school. “My son is really smart,” she said. “But it feels like he’s never going to have a fair shot.”

Chalkbeat New York is partnering with THE CITY to host an event related to this story virtually and in person early next year. Sign up for Chalkbeat New York’s daily newsletter and THE CITY’s daily newsletter The Scoop, which will include more event details when they are available.

NYC test scores drop in math, increase in reading

2022-09-28T17:53:55+00:00

Nearly half of New York City’s third through eighth graders passed their state reading tests last school year, while about 38% passed math, according to scores released by city officials Wednesday.

The scores are the first measure of how students across the five boroughs have fared in reading and math since the coronavirus pandemic upended in-person schooling and left many children grappling with isolation and grief. Though schools gave students other city-mandated assessments last year, officials have refused to publicly release the results.

“During the pandemic, kids went through all kinds of challenges that they’re still recovering from,” schools Chancellor David Banks told reporters Wednesday. “No matter what the latest test results tell you, I can tell you the system is broken in far too many ways. We are trying to create a new way forward.”

Overall reading scores increased slightly, up 1.6 percentage points from 2019, while math scores dropped significantly, down 7.6 percentage points. The city didn’t release results for charter schools.

Looking at grade-by-grade data, however, provides a different picture for reading scores: For the youngest students, third and fourth graders, scores fell by 4 percentage points and 6 percentage points respectively.

City officials compared the scores to 2019 results, noting the past two years of disruptions. The state canceled the exams in 2020. The following year, the state allowed families to opt into taking them the following year. Just one-fifth of city students took them.

State officials, however, cautioned against comparing the test results to 2019 because of the ongoing effects of the pandemic and the “different rates of participation among students.” Roughly 10% of city students opted out of either reading or math exams, compared with 4% in 2019, education department officials said.

The percentage of children who passed math tests dropped for every major student group, with the largest decline among Latino students, by 10 percentage points. In contrast, passing rates for reading grew for every student group, with the largest increase among students known as “ever ELLs,” or students who were once considered learning English as a new language but are not anymore.

Disparities remained between white and Asian American students compared with their Black and Latino peers. About 70.5% of Asian American and 67% of white students passed reading exams, compared with 35.8% of students who are Black and 36.8% who are Latino. For math, 68.3% of Asian American students and 58.5% of white students passed compared with 20.6% of Black children and 23.3% of Latino students.

Disparities also persisted among students with higher needs. Among students with disabilities, 18.3% passed reading and 14.4% passed math. Among students learning English as a new language, 12.7% passed reading, while 15% scored proficient in math.

The scores could be one tool for schools to understand which students need more support this year. In response to the dip in national test scores, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said schools should be prioritizing COVID relief funds to boost academic support and extra tutoring.

However, as federal funds dry up, schools are receiving less money this year to create extra tutoring programs or provide extra support to students with disabilities. And unlike last year, schools can use that pool of money to hire staff as schools grapple with budget cuts, tied to projected declining enrollment.

Aaron Pallas, a professor at Teachers College and an expert in testing, doesn’t believe the scores can be compared to 2019 because of declining enrollment and higher opt-out rates. Compared with 2019, 21% fewer children took math tests and 18% fewer children sat for reading tests, according to city data.

Pallas said he expects people to use the scores to bolster arguments that traditional public schools don’t work, as Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin has, but that there’s not enough information to make those conclusions.

“Quite honestly, I don’t really think [the scores are] that useful, certainly not for building level or district-level decisions about the allocation of resources,” Pallas said, adding that parents also won’t have the right context to understand their children’s results.

Some advocates said the scores signal that schools need more resources, particularly for younger children who were learning to read when the pandemic first hit, pointing to the dip in reading pass rates for third and fourth graders. Kim Sweet, executive director of Advocates for Children New York, said “it will be critical” to learn from new programs focused on improving literacy.

The scores could be a factor in middle and high school admissions this year. Schools that screen students were previously allowed to use test scores as one factor for admission, but that was paused during the pandemic and barred last year under former Mayor Bill de Blasio. City officials are expected to announce this year’s admissions criteria soon.

Banks has been critical of standardized testing, saying that schools that are laser-focused on exams can’t offer a “fully comprehensive learning experience.” On Wednesday, after touring classrooms at his alma mater, Hillcrest High School, Banks emphasized that the measure of student success is whether they’ll be prepared for quality jobs after they graduate.

“The return on investment is not the scores that they got on standardized exams,” Banks said. “Test scores are important, but they’re not everything.”

Unlike past years, Wednesday’s test scores could not immediately be compared to other New York districts or even statewide. In a departure, this year’s scores were released by New York City rather than the state, which has not yet released statewide results.

After initially barring districts from sharing the scores, state officials gave the OK last week for local districts.

Officials plan to release statewide scores sometime this fall, but have not said when, and blamed the delay on a cumbersome process for releasing both preliminary and final scores this year.

Amy Zimmer and Alex Zimmerman contributed.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

NYC schools lays out plan to enroll hundreds of asylum-seeking students

2022-08-19T21:51:56+00:00

As New York City sees a surge of new immigrants seeking asylum from Central and South American countries, officials announced Friday that they will provide extra enrollment help to hundreds of new students expected to attend city schools.

City officials estimate that about 6,000 such immigrants have entered the city’s shelter system over the past three months, which the administration has blamed, in part, on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sending migrants on buses to New York.

At least 1,000 new students are expected to enroll in district schools, including preschool-aged children. However, that figure is “fluid” and will continue to change, said education department spokesperson Nathaniel Styer.

Many of these students may need extra support, such as legally mandated services for children learning English as a new language.

“Our public schools are prepared to welcome families seeking asylum with open arms,” said Chancellor David Banks in a statement. “We are working alongside our agency partners to set students up for success by addressing their academic, emotional and social needs, and ensuring there is no disruption to their education.”

As part of a city plan dubbed “Project Open Arms,” shelters will host “pop-up” enrollment offices, where education department staff will help new families sign their children up for school. Staff will also accompany families to Family Welcome Centers, which are city offices where people can enroll their kids and get more information about school.

Staff will give out backpacks and school supplies and connect new asylum-seekers with the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Clinics for medical care, officials said. The city also plans to work with community-based organizations that work with immigrant families so that they can provide families with “critical resources and services.”

Enrollment officials are placing students in schools with open seats that are near their shelters, and considering a family’s preferred choice of language instruction, according to the department. Children who are learning English are entitled to traditional English as a new language instruction, meaning their classes are in English but they’re supposed to get extra support and translation help during and outside of class. They can also choose bilingual programs or dual language instruction, but most city schools lack such programming, according to program data from last school year.

So far, students are concentrated in Districts 2 and 3 in Manhattan, District 10 in the Bronx, District 14 in Brooklyn, and Districts 24 and 30 in Queens, officials said. These new students range across ages and grades, said Yesenia Escalante, an education department enrollment counselor.

Students who enroll after the traditional admissions process has concluded tend to have higher needs, such as this influx of asylum seekers. In the past, late-arriving students have been sent to lower performing schools, raising questions about where these new immigrant students will be enrolled and whether they will be adequately served.

Enrollment has declined across the city, meaning there could be enough seats available across many different types of schools.

In Manhattan’s District 2, officials have been speaking with families at shelters, then connecting them to individual schools, said Kelly McGuire, superintendent for the district.

“Our schools have pulled together some of their office staff, they have folks who are enrolling students directly at the school site, and that’s kind of the critical piece in terms of evaluating who the students are, what their language needs are, their students with disabilities, making sure that they are getting connected with the services that they need,” McGuire said.

Kamar Samuels, superintendent of District 3, noted that they’re working with organizations and schools’ staff to ensure students “are feeling welcome.”

“We’re working with CBOs, we’re working with school staff to just make sure that we tap into all of the resources that we have regarding language and making sure that we have access to those languages,” Samuels said.

The new wave of students comes as schools across the city are seeing budget cuts due to projected declining enrollment, though a legal fight could eventually overturn those cuts. Deputy Chancellor Dan Weisberg said that schools seeing an influx of new students, particularly those with extra needs, will be able to request more funding, such as to hire more staff — a process, he added, that’s not unique to this school year.

“You might need to immediately post and hire for an additional guidance counselor, or an additional (English as a new language) teacher, and if you need to do that, you’ll talk to your budget director, you talk to your superintendent, and you’ll get it posted very quickly,” Weisberg said of principals. “It won’t be, ‘Oh, gosh, you’re gonna have to wait a few months,’ and then do it then, because you need it right now.”

Advocates lauded the city’s effort to work across various agencies to address immigrant students’ needs.

However, they worried about historic barriers to adequate schooling for new immigrants, which have been the subject of a longstanding state-issued corrective action plan. For example, the city has for years failed to provide legally required services to all bilingual students with disabilities, in part due to a shortage of trained bilingual educators.

“We know there aren’t enough bilingual programs in the city for all of the English language learners that qualify for them,” said Rita Rodriguez-Engberg, director of the Immigrant Students Rights Project at Advocates for Children New York. “We also know schools don’t always inform families of their right to elect bilingual programs.”

Additionally, city officials should ensure that school workers and those at Family Welcome Centers are trained on the legal rights of immigrants, especially those who are undocumented, said Vanessa Luna, co-founder of ImmSchools, which trains schools on supporting immigrant families.

Rodriguez-Engberg and other advocates worried that there won’t be enough bilingual social workers to help these students, who may be experiencing varying degrees of trauma after fleeing their home countries and relatives or friends. City officials said they plan to evaluate every student’s social-emotional needs using screeners that the district launched last school year.

“We want kids to be in schools that can support them – schools that create a sense of safety for the child and for the family,” said Alejandra Vázquez Baur, an education policy expert who focuses on immigrant students for think tank Next 100. “That is critical for the child’s educational opportunities and also the child’s well being in the school.”

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

NYC special education recovery services program to be scaled back this fall

2022-07-29T20:25:15+00:00

In response to pandemic disruptions, New York City officials required every school to offer special education services last year outside regular hours to any family who wanted them.

But that won’t be the case this coming school year, education officials said. Instead, the education department is vowing to determine what extra instruction or therapies children may need on an “individual basis” — decisions that will be left to the teams that set students’ individualized education programs, also known as IEPs.

Extra small group instruction or “related services” such as physical and occupational therapy, may be provided after school, on Saturdays, during the school day, or through a voucher for students the city determines need extra help, officials said. The city is also expanding a new program for students with significant sensory issues, which has been popular with some parents. It will launch at 70 sites this fall, up from 10.

The education department is setting aside $100 million for those extra services, down from roughly $200 million last year, according to city officials. Last year’s recovery program was delayed for months after the school year started. Schools struggled to attract staff to work the extra hours and the vast majority of students did not participate, though officials have yet to provide a final tally. The program earned mixed reviews from parents and educators.

There are many unanswered questions about how this year’s program will operate, including which students will be eligible, when parents will be informed of how they can access extra services, who will be responsible for providing them, and even when they’ll begin. City officials did not say if they will provide yellow bus service for programs that will be provided outside of the regular school day, a major roadblock to participation last school year.

“To the outward facing part of the world, it’s very last minute,” said Maggie Moroff, a special education policy expert at the nonprofit Advocates for Children. “It’s hard for me to imagine, if this hasn’t been communicated to the schools yet, how it’s going to play out successfully.”

Students with disabilities have a legal right to “compensatory services” if their school does not provide all of the specialized instruction or therapies included on their IEP. And a significant share of students with disabilities missed out on special education instruction or therapies that were difficult or impossible to provide during remote learning or as staff were stretched thin.

But successfully advocating for compensatory services can be time consuming and require legal help. If the district does not agree to provide those extra services, families can go through an administrative legal process to compel the city to provide them, though that process is complex and has faced extreme backlogs that often stretch many months. Advocates for Children filed a lawsuit in an effort to force the city to create a more streamlined process, though that suit has not been successful so far.

The city’s promise to assess whether students with disabilities need these extra compensatory services could signal that they will be easier to get without going through that cumbersome process, though it’s unclear how generous the city will be in recommending additional support.

“This administration is committed to course correcting any pandemic-related learning loss for our most vulnerable students and expanding access to critical programs that address unique, individual needs,” Nicole Brownstein, an education department spokesperson, wrote in an email. She added that extra services will be available on Saturdays at multiple sites in every borough.

Even if the city instructs schools to provide more compensatory services, Moroff noted that many students aren’t scheduled to have an IEP meeting until the spring, raising questions about how quickly students will have access to extra help.

“If a student’s last IEP happened last April, they’re not regularly scheduled for an IEP meeting until next April,” she said. “Sure, a family could ask, but that shifts the burden onto the family.”

Bronx mom Damaris Rodriguez said she is eager to know if her 12-year-old son Maliek, who is on the autism spectrum, might be eligible for services and when they may be provided.

Maliek missed some of his speech and occupational therapy sessions during the pandemic because they conflicted with remote instruction. She said extra services could help him self-regulate when he’s feeling antsy, work on reading comprehension skills, and even learn how to share his feelings with his peers and teachers.

Damaris Rodriguez with her son, Maliek.

“Maliek faced a lot of different challenges emotionally in terms of expressing himself,” Rogriguez said, “whereas pre-pandemic he was able to talk or open up.”

But she is also wary of the department’s special education recovery programs. Last year, she pulled Maliek out of the recovery program after a month because he wasn’t receiving the therapies she believed he needed. Figuring out transportation without yellow bus service was a challenge.

Rodroguez said she’s frustrated the city hasn’t communicated more clearly to parents what extra services to expect this school year and when they will be provided, as she is setting up extra activities like basketball that might conflict with Saturday special education programs.

“Will I have to tell my son he can’t play basketball because it falls on Saturdays?” Rodriguez wondered. “When are you going to let parents know?”

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Hochul signs NYC mayoral control bill into law – with a tweak

2022-07-01T14:58:40+00:00

Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a bill late Thursday that extends mayoral control of New York City schools for the next two years.

But her signature came with a tweak: The eight-member expansion of the city’s education panel, which was passed under the original bill, will be delayed by five months.

Mayoral control — which allows the mayor to choose the schools chancellor and appoint a majority of members to the city’s education panel — was set to expire at midnight Friday.

The bill, passed by New York lawmakers on June 3, needed the governor’s signature to become law. Legislators typically allow the governor’s office to request bills for her review as she has hundreds to consider and sign. But Hochul did not call up the mayoral control legislation until about 9:20 p.m. Thursday.

Hochul’s office has declined to say why she waited to sign the bill or whether Mayor Eric Adams was lobbying for changes, saying only in statements this month that she has “consistently supported mayoral control.”

On Thursday evening, Queens Democratic Sen. John Liu, a chief sponsor of the bill, said he was negotiating changes with Hochul. She ultimately signed it with an agreement with lawmakers to delay the expansion of the Panel for Educational Policy, or PEP — a largely mayor-appointed board that approves major contracts and policy decisions, such as school closures and the city’s school funding formula. Originally scheduled to expand from 15 members to 23 starting Aug. 15, the expansion and first-ever term limits for panel members will now be pushed to January 15, 2023.

Lawmakers will vote in January, at the start of their next session, to adopt those changes, which is a routine time for voting on amendments to bills they’ve already passed, said Soojin Choi, a spokesperson for Liu.

The change to the bill was to “ensure that the City has sufficient time” to establish the larger PEP, Hochul wrote in her letter approving the bill. It gives appointers of panel members — most notably, Adams — five more months to make their choices. Adams failed to appoint all nine of his current appointees on time, with one forced to resign, resulting in the city failing to gain enough votes on some policy proposals.

Adams, who endorsed Hochul in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, and schools Chancellor David Banks both expressed disappointment about the bill when it passed earlier this month. It extended mayoral control for half of the time that Adams and Hochul had called for, and it added provisions meant to water down Adams’ control over the Panel for Educational Policy.

Legislators passed the mayoral control bill earlier this month as part of a package deal with a separate bill that would force the city to lower class sizes across all grades. The class size bill passed nearly unanimously, but city officials and a budget watchdog have raised concerns that it’s going to be too costly to implement.

Hochul still hasn’t requested the class-size bill, angering some lawmakers, advocates and the city’s teachers union.

“We are calling on the governor to sign this legislation now,” Michael Mulgrew, president of the teachers union, said in a statement Friday morning. “Our students can’t wait.”

Asked whether Adams was lobbying the governor for changes to either bill, City Hall spokesperson Amaris Cockfield said they do not comment on “private conversations.” In a statement Friday morning, Adams thanked Hochul for signing off on mayoral control.

Had the bill remained unsigned, the city would have had to reconstitute the previous system of 32 community school boards, plus a citywide board of education, made up of members appointed by each of the five borough presidents and two by the mayor’s office.

But it’s unclear that much would have changed in the immediate aftermath. When mayoral control lapsed for a month under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the reconstituted board voted to appoint then-Chancellor Joel Klein.

Here’s how mayoral control will change in New York:

The mayor’s powers will be extended through June 30, 2024.
The PEP will grow from 15 to 23 members.
The mayor will still appoint a majority of the PEP, with 13 picks starting Jan. 15, 2023, four more than he currently chooses. Each borough president will each continue to appoint one member. The presidents of the city’s 32 Community Education Councils, or CECS, which represent each local school district and can shape school zone boundaries, will elect five members – four more than currently – who each must represent a different borough.
Four of the mayor’s appointees must be parents of a child attending city public schools, up from two currently. They must include at least one with a child with disabilities, one with a child in a bilingual or English as a second language program, and one with a child enrolled in District 75, which serves students with the most significant disabilities.
Each PEP member will serve a one-year term that can be renewed annually. The mayor and the borough presidents can no longer remove PEP members for voting against their wishes. Previously, appointers did not have to share a reason for why they wanted to remove someone.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Most NYC schools are losing funding. See what’s happening at your school.

2022-06-28T17:59:30+00:00

New York City educators and families are finishing this school year worried about how hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to school budgets will impact their classrooms in the fall. They’re hearing about rising class sizes, losing teachers, and cutting enrichment.

City lawmakers passed a budget deal earlier this month slashing school budgets based on declining enrollment projections: The city’s public schools (excluding charters) have lost 9.5% of their students since the pandemic began.

Mayor Eric Adams’ $215 million cut to schools was somewhat softened by federal coronavirus stimulus dollars. Without that federal funding, Adams would have cut budgets by $375 million, which he plans to do by the 2024-2025 school year.

Schools must typically return money if they enroll fewer students than projected midway through the school year. But Mayor Bill de Blasio held schools harmless from these cuts over the past two years, largely using COVID stimulus dollars. Adams’ plan reverses this policy and goes back to a funding system that’s more closely tied to enrollment.

To show how those cuts affect each school, Chalkbeat created a lookup tool examining changes to Fair Student Funding — the pot of money that makes up 65% of school budgets and is sent to schools months ahead of the next school year. It’s what principals use to hire staff and create programming. The formula provides more money to schools with higher shares of students with disabilities, those learning English as a new language and those struggling academically.

A majority of schools — just over 1,200 — will see cuts in Fair Student Funding, as high as $5 million at Brooklyn’s Fort Hamilton High School, according to a Chalkbeat analysis. Close to 300 schools will see an increase, up to $2.5 million at Queens’ Thomas J. McCann Woodside Intermediate School.

Some education advocates have encouraged families to look up current school budgets and compare them to what’s posted online for schools for next fiscal year, which begins July 1. However, that won’t show an “apples-to-apples” comparison, since schools typically receive all kinds of funding throughout the course of the year.

“A true apples-to-apples comparison would be looking at preliminary budgets for this current school year compared with the preliminary budget for [next year], because that’s really what schools are using to plan for school opening,” said Sarita Subramanian, assistant director of education policy at the city’s Independent Budget Office.

To account for those discrepancies, this tool shows how much Fair Student Funding each school had as of June 2021, as principals planned for this current school year, and compares that to how much schools have right now, ahead of this fall. We included money that schools received to cover for enrollment losses, but excluded additional funding schools may have received for this halfway through this school year, since school leaders didn’t have that money when they planned for the year.

We also included forgiven debts related to enrollment losses that schools may have owed to the education department.

(Some programs and schools may not show up in our tool because there was no information posted for them in Galaxy, the public website where school budget allocations are posted.)

Numbers don’t add up

Education department officials at a Friday City Council budget hearing said about 400 schools are seeing increases, though did not share details on how they calculated those numbers. Nathaniel Styer, a spokesperson for the education department, declined multiple requests for comment on Chalkbeat’s analysis methods.

While the city has said the cuts total $215 million, the actual blow to individual school budgets would have been closer to $132 million, since a chunk of the money was related to fringe benefits that are covered centrally, according to Comptroller Brad Lander. However, a new analysis by Lander found that the cuts this year will actually total nearly three times that amount, at about $372 million. Department officials did not immediately explain the discrepancy.

Schools may see cuts or increases based on rising or falling enrollment projections, but also based on how many high-needs students they are projected to enroll, since those students receive more money under the formula, Styer said.

On top of all of this, the city has reduced the amount of per-pupil funding it provides to schools through Fair Student Funding by about $25 per student, due to a drop in average teacher salaries across the whole system, as first reported by the New York Post.

Schools with veteran teachers earning higher than the citywide average get an extra cushion to help pay their salaries, Subramanian noted.

As they plan for next school year, principals and educators are reporting plans to excess staff and eliminate enrichment programs. While it’s true that fewer students may mean fewer teachers are needed, less funding could mean that principals can’t build out new programming or must increase class sizes — even as the city faces a potential new state law to shrink class sizes.

Additionally, principals have criticized the city for incorrect enrollment projections, resulting in fewer dollars than they’ll need next year. At Friday’s hearing, one City Council member said a principal in her district surveyed every family in her school and found enrollment would be dozens of students higher than the education department’s calculation.

Both City Hall and education department spokespeople have repeatedly refused to share how much enrollment is projected to drop next year. Schools could get money back if they enroll more students than expected, but that money typically arrives after schools have finished hiring for the school year.

Families and educators have forcefully protested the cuts and have questioned why the remaining $5 billion in unspent stimulus dollars can’t be used once again to protect school budgets.

Many City Council members pressed education department officials at Friday’s hearing about why these cuts are happening, in hopes of restoring the funding. The cuts briefly held up a final city budget deal, though all but six of the 51 council members approved the deal earlier this month.

Correction: An earlier version of the lookup table used an incorrect data point for fiscal year 2022. The table and story have been updated to reflect the correct figures, including new totals for schools with highest and lowest increases.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Getting real-world experience: High schoolers design a ‘life skills’ lab for students with disabilities

2022-06-16T18:00:00+00:00

A collaboration between two schools co-located in a midtown Manhattan campus has bridged both of their missions in the most fruitful way possible: a hands-on project giving their respective students real-world life skills.

Students at Urban Assembly School of Design and Construction have donned the role of architects, designing a one-bedroom apartment for their “clients” at P.S. 138M, a District 75 school serving children with moderate to severe disabilities.

Allie Collacchi, a special education teacher and unit coordinator from the District 75 school, had long tried to find a space for her students to practice basic household skills, like making a bed or hanging clothes in a closet.

“We can watch videos, and we can practice on worksheets, but we can’t show them the physical skills of how to do it,” Collacchi said.

While thinking about ways to improve the teaching of life skills, she noticed that the second floor at 525 W. 50th St. had a large storage room that was mostly unused. She started dreaming of turning the space into a one-bedroom apartment where students could get hands-on practice.

She detailed her vision during a campus-wide meeting with the five school principals who share the building. As soon as Collacchi described her idea, Meredith Matson, principal of the Urban Assembly School of Design and Construction, thought about a collaboration: her students could design the layout for the apartment.

That’s when the project was born.

“My students are always creating projects, but to be able to actually speak to the clients directly, get input from them, and then to be able to make the layout seems like such an amazing opportunity,” said Matson.

Matson’s students are high schoolers in a Career and Technical Education, or CTE, program. CTE programs are designed to provide academic and work-based experiences to high school students. There are more than 130 high schools in New York City with CTE programs. At the School of Design and Construction, students learn design and architecture skills.

“The mission of our school is to ensure that all of our students are able to design a pathway outside of high school, whether it’s college or career. And I think that a project like this is so essential to having real-world, hands-on experience where students can self discover who they want to be and what they want to explore,” said Matson.

Bartek Walicki, design teacher at Urban Assembly School of Design and Construction, explains how students create design prototypes.

Under the guidance of design teacher Bartek Walicki, students started working on floor plans for the space and created a furniture wish list. Meanwhile, P.S. 138M teachers had the idea to approach IKEA in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

Teachers have been taking students to IKEA on field trips prior to COVID for more than a decade, Collachi said, making it a natural fit for a partner.

“The idea of walking through apartment layouts and having the kids navigate different environments has been a nice thing for us to add into our curriculum,” she explained. The school was excited when the Swedish-based company was on board to provide the furniture.

But the project, which started in January, isn’t ready for that part yet.

As the academic year comes to an end, the students from the School of Design and Construction have their final blueprints. They had shared drafts with the other school’s special education teachers, who then sent them critiques. Finally, the students made alterations, just like a professional architect would make for a client.

The building process is expected to start in September. The schools’ custodial department will lead the building process, but students from both schools will be welcomed to help assemble furniture. The goal is to get the project done at no cost.

The two schools found an authentic connection through the collaboration. “Our schools are working together for a common goal, regardless of the students’ ability or disability,” said Collacchi.

Students at P.S. 138M are 14 to 21 years old and have a variety of physical, cognitive, and emotional disabilities. Practicing life skills for living independently is a foundational part of their school work. Through the brand-new life skills learning lab, they will be able to practice with their hands rather than using worksheets.

“The idea is to teach them about each part of the apartment and what it takes to maintain a living space. How do I clean my entire apartment? How do I stock the fridge? Being able to make your own meals, looking at expiration dates, and setting a table. We’ll teach them about rent, bills, and electricity,” Collacchi said. “For some of our kids with mobility issues, being able to go from their bedroom to the bathroom independently would be a huge increase to their life at home.”

During the remote part of the pandemic, Collacchi’s students struggled.

“We have a big group of students who cannot access remote learning. Sitting at a computer for anything over a couple minutes was just not feasible,” she said.

“Coming back, after a couple years, what’s been really ingrained in our minds is how important these life skills are. And we’ve kind of let go of some of the intensity of reading about a current event, as opposed to knowing how to get up and brush your teeth and put on deodorant and pick out clothes and come to school and appropriate dress for the winter.”

Many of the architecture students also struggled with remote learning, and the project has given them a chance to practice hands-on skills.

Design teacher Walicki instructed his class to think of Collacchi and her students as their clients, giving them a chance to practice a real-world scenario. They visited the space and learned about the group’s specific needs.

Walicki divided the students into groups and broke down the tasks into brainstorming, measuring, and prototyping. Then they used the three-dimensional software SketchUp to design their final models. “The biggest challenge for them was to work in a team measuring an existing space, remembering there are three dimensions not just two and using fractions,” Walicki said.

Cinthya Rocano, a 17-year-old junior, said the project was fun and a new experience for her.

“We usually would do mini-apartments or cubic houses for practice, but for this we had a specific purpose and mission to help the students in P.S. 138. We had to keep other people in mind to help improve their environment,” she said.

Rocano said that they designed cabinets and shelves thinking about the height that would allow people who use wheelchairs to comfortably reach. The kitchen counter, for example, needed to be low in height while also having space to fit a wheelchair underneath.

Juan Calero, a 16-year-old sophomore, said working on this project was exciting and a good transition from virtual school. “During remote learning, it was all paperwork. We would draw floor plans. But this project really helped us see how school was before [COVID] started. It was a good project to get us back to normal school. We were able to start implementing skills like cutting, drawing, and gluing things together.”

Aaron Adlam-Ferguson, who is also a 16-year-old sophomore, wants to be a residential architect and go to college for architecture. “I really enjoyed this project because it opened my mind. We had to think about what we had to put into the room corresponding to the kids’ needs.”

Having to think of a specific client made this project a new experience for the students.

In December, the Board of Regents asked for increased funding for CTE programs, but didn’t get it approved in Albany. Mayor Eric Adams and New York City schools Chancellor David Banks have often voiced support for CTE programs, highlighting that high school should put young people in a position to succeed as young adults regardless of their desire to pursue further education.

That was the case for 16-year-old transfer student Jovany Amaro. Amaro said that before this experience he had no idea what was behind construction and design. But the project led him to research careers and now he feels confident about his future as an architect or designer.

“It just opened a lot of doors for me. And I’m still learning because I’m so new to it, but I want to keep going,” he said.

Nathaniel Bastardo, a 16-year-old sophomore, wants to be a certified architect and this project helped him get a little closer to his dream.

“This school completely takes your mind off of COVID or whatever stress you have outside school. It is like a hug you always wanted, it shelters you from everything,” Bastardo said. “It basically gives you the necessary skills to put yourself on a good future, unlike other schools that I’ve been to. It prepares you for your life. And I love it.”

Marcela Rodrigues-Sherley is a reporting intern for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Marcela at mrodrigues-sherley@chalkbeat.org.

NYC budget deal cuts school funding amid declining enrollment

2022-06-10T23:08:10+00:00

New York City lawmakers reached a $101 billion budget deal Friday that finalizes cuts to school budgets for the 2022-2023 school year.

Many details of the agreement, which sets the city’s financial plan from July 1 through June 2023, were still unavailable Friday evening. But in April, the mayor’s proposal showed a $1 billion drop for the education department, to just under $31 billion — largely because federal coronavirus relief is beginning to dry up. That budget is made up of state, federal, and city funding, and under Adams’ proposal, the city would boost its own spending on education by about $720 million.

Mayor Eric Adams and the City Council were expected to reach a deal this week. But, Politico reported that an 11th hour disagreement developed over cuts to individual school budgets after school and union leaders decried the decreases, which they saw for the first time this week.

Those cuts were announced in February, but they made it into the final budget.

The cuts, totaling $215 million across all schools this year, represent a reversal of a policy over the past two years, which covered schools financially for enrolling fewer students than expected halfway through the year, during the pandemic.

While schools will see a drop in funding compared to this year’s budgets, Adams would not call them cuts.

“We had a major drop in student population in the [department of education], so what we’re doing — we are not cutting, we are adjusting the amount based on the student population,” Adams told reporters after a ceremonial handshake with Council Speaker Adrienne Adams.

Separately, the budget also sets aside $2 billion in coronavirus relief funds for next school year and expands summer programming for children and young adults.

Here are some highlights from Thursday’s budget agreement:

School budgets

Many schools will see smaller budgets due to the city’s projections of declining student enrollment, which has dropped by 6.4% since the pandemic’s start in 2020.

For the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, schools will be funded in a way that’s more closely tied to their enrollment, but school and union leaders are worried about the impact of the cuts on students and staff.

Before the pandemic, schools were required to send money back to the education department if, by halfway through the year, they had enrolled fewer students than originally projected.

To blunt the financial blow on schools during the pandemic, Mayor Bill de Blasio spent $177 million — 75% of which came from federal coronavirus relief dollars — to cover budgets for 870 schools that saw mid-year enrollment drops. Again this year, the administration spent $324 million to forgive mid-year enrollment drops at 1,200 schools, again with roughly three-quarters covered by stimulus dollars.

In February, Adams announced he wanted to reverse this policy and gradually cut budgets over the next two years. Using federal stimulus dollars to backfill the cuts, Adams plans to cut school budgets by $215 million this fall, just under $300 million for the 2023-2024 school year, and finally $375 million in 2024-2025.

“We are in a very dangerous time that many people are not realizing,” Adams said. “We are dropping students so much.”

Fewer students could mean a need for fewer teachers. But reduced funding complicates plans that principals had for their schools, such as launching new programs or hiring new staff. The city is also facing a new state law requiring New York City to reduce class sizes, but officials have not explained how they’ll reconcile the new mandate with cuts to school budgets.

Principals are also worried they may need to “excess” staff, meaning those staffers would leave the school and could look for jobs elsewhere in the system. If unsuccessful, those staffers could enter the Absent Teacher Reserve, where they still get paid.

Asked how the city devised enrollment projections, a City Hall spokesman said officials calculate them based on recent trends in each grade level from kindergarten through 12th grade. Principals, superintendents, and other education officials who work with schools “review and provide significant feedback” before enrollment projections are finalized.

The plan received blowback from educators and some city officials.

Comptroller Brad Lander said the city must address enrollment drops, but schools should not see cuts yet as schools emerge from the pandemic. He also suggested the city should revisit the Fair Student Funding formula, which is based on enrollment projections but also sends more money to schools with high shares of students with disabilities, learning English as a new language, or facing academic struggles. The city has plans to begin reviewing the formula this year — a process that happened once before in 2019 but never resulted in changes.

“Our schools have endured the hardest two years and need every penny to provide the social, emotional, and academic supports that all our students deserve this summer and fall,” Lander said in a statement.

COVID stimulus spending

The administration plans to spend about $1.8 billion in COVID stimulus money next school year. City schools received about $7 billion in stimulus money, of which $2 billion has been spent through the first week of May, according to City Hall.

While hundreds of millions of dollars went directly to schools this year to create academic recovery programs, some schools struggled to spend the money because they couldn’t recruit teachers to work overtime to staff tutoring programs. Roughly a third of the city’s students with disabilities were expected to have received stimulus-funded recovery services by the end of this school year.

About $160 million will go toward softening the blow of enrollment declines for schools (leading to the overall $215 million cut for next year). Another $125 million is expected to go directly to schools for “academic recovery” and arts instruction, with more funds slated for schools with higher needs students. Schools must use the money to provide academic intervention and additional support for students learning English as a new language.

The mayor’s executive budget proposed some other initiatives to be covered by COVID stimulus dollars, including $176 million for Summer Rising, the city’s universal summer enrichment program.

Summer programming and community schools

The budget calls for $110 million to cover an expanded summer enrichment program that will have 10,000 more slots for kindergarten through eighth grade students, reaching a total of 110,000 elementary and middle school students and 210,000 across all grades.

The budget also includes $79 million to expand the city’s Summer Youth Employment Program, which provides summer jobs for youth ages 14-21. The program will be funded to have 90,000 slots, plus another 10,000 through other city programs. While it’s open to any city resident, the program is not available to undocumented children.

Additionally, the city has restored planned funding cuts for organizations that provide extra support to students in dozens of community schools, said Jonah Allon, a spokesperson for City Hall. The schools provide wraparound services for students in high-needs schools. The cuts, related to a changed funding formula, meant that these organizations would have to lay off staff and shrink their services, such as attendance monitoring and mental health support.

The city will spend $14 million to restore those cuts, but the organizations had only requested $9 million. It wasn’t immediately clear what accounted for increased funding.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

NYC educators wrestle with budget cuts for 2022-23 school year

2022-06-08T00:33:04+00:00

Educators across New York City are grappling with millions of dollars in planned cuts to school budgets, released this week for the 2022-23 school year.

While school leaders had expected the cuts, many saw for the first time in two years what their budgets will look like as the federal stimulus funding starts to wind down and they continue to grapple with declining enrollment, which has dropped by 6.4% since the beginning of the pandemic.

For many schools, the cuts will mean rolling back plans to hire more teachers or cutting back on programming. While schools see budgets that are more closely tied to their enrollment, they’re still grappling with losing students — all while New York City also has been newly tasked with lowering class sizes over the next five years.

“Maybe some people have dealt with huge attrition, but [the education department is] really lowballing people, and they need to go back to the drawing board,” said one Bronx principal, who spoke on condition of anonymity and may need to cut back on extra support at her school.

Over the course of the pandemic, former Mayor Bill de Blasio used federal stimulus dollars to allow schools to keep money if, midway through the school year, fewer students actually enrolled than the city had expected. Before the pandemic, in those situations, schools were typically required to give money back to the education department.

Mayor Eric Adams has decided to phase out that pandemic policy as part of his budget proposal for next year. Under Adams’ proposal, the overall city budget for the education department would drop by about $1 billion next year to just under $31 billion, largely due to the drop in federal stimulus funds provided during the pandemic. While the city is boosting its own contribution to the education department by $720 million as it attempts to expand some initiatives, they’re also planning for a gradual cut to individual school budgets in response to declining enrollment.

Adams wants to cut school budgets gradually over the next two years by backfilling a portion of the cuts with federal stimulus dollars — meaning schools will see a $215 million cut for this fall, just under $300 million for the 2023-24 school year, and finally, $375 million in 2024-25.

Last school year, the city spent $177 million to cover budgets for 870 schools who saw mid-year enrollment drops, with 75% of that cost covered by federal stimulus dollars, according to the city’s Independent Budget Office. This year, roughly 1,200 schools saw mid-year enrollment drops. In response, the city spent $324 million in additional funding, with roughly three-quarters of that cost covered once again by federal stimulus dollars.

The policy reversal means many schools are likely experiencing cuts that are deeper than they’ve known over the past two years, especially with the infusion of billions in federal stimulus dollars.

“During the current school year, the tension between rightsizing school budgets based on actual student enrollment, even as schools’ needs have increased as a result of the pandemic, continues,” the IBO said in a recent report.

According to the IBO, these cuts are coming out of Fair Student Funding, a city formula that sends more money to schools with larger shares of students with disabilities, those learning English as a new language, and students with academic struggles. That pot of money covers about 65% of school budgets and can be used flexibly to hire staff and create school programming.

Officials have said that they’re not expecting layoffs, but for the city to simply not fill vacant positions. City officials did not respond to a question about whether there are other cuts to school budgets on top of those to Fair Student Funding.

Generally, fewer students could mean that fewer teachers are needed, but in practice that’s a far more complicated problem to solve, said Sarita Subramanian, assistant director of education policy at the Independent Budget Office. For example, a principal might have planned to offer a new Advanced Placement course but won’t have the money to cover a teacher licensed in that subject area, she said.

“It depends on what types of offering a school has and wants to make for students,” Subramanian said.

An additional complication: the city is now tasked with limiting class sizes over the next five years, which could require the hiring of more teachers and creating more classroom space. Officials did not respond to a question about how it plans to meet those requirements while also cutting school budgets amid declining enrollment.

On Twitter, the teachers union chastised Adams for the planned cut, insisting that the billions of dollars left in federal stimulus funding and an increase in state funding could help cover costs — including separate costs for lowering class sizes.

“Does the mayor need a math lesson, or is he just playing games with our schools?” one tweet said.

The Bronx principal said the education department projects about 12% fewer students at her school in the fall, even though she’s anticipating an increase in students. She is still calculating the total cuts to her school but city records show about $100,000, or about 4% less, in Fair Student Funding.

She may lose a music teacher and move two teacher-mentors back into the classroom. She may also need to cover some classes with a teacher who specifically teaches students learning English as a new language, and she isn’t sure she can replace any of the three teachers who are leaving.

“I hope they forgive our budgets, or at least really try to forgive a large amount,” the principal said.

Harlem’s Central Park East I elementary school will see just over $11,600 in cuts to Fair Student Funding alone, compared to the current school year. Parent Kaliris Salas-Ramirez, who is a member of its School Leadership Team and a member of the city’s Panel for Educational Policy, said that’s not as severe as other schools. School officials have assured families they’ll be able to manage the cuts without decreasing staff or increasing class sizes.

But even with that cut, they won’t be able to hire a full-time art teacher, she said.

“It’s a big thing in terms of what we believe children need to get a full educational experience,” she said.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

‘Sensory canoes’ and climbing walls: Inside NYC’s recovery program for students with disabilities

2022-05-20T15:42:41+00:00

Five-year-old Bradley often struggles to sit still and is prone to wandering. But on a recent Saturday morning, he was calm, sprawled on a bean bag chair in a Brooklyn classroom, the lights turned down, and his socks cast aside.

The only glow came from four illuminated vertical tubes filled with bubbles and a laptop playing soothing piano music. One therapist narrated breathing exercises while another gently squeezed his arms and legs.

Bradley, who has autism and is non-verbal, was participating in an education department program to help make up for occupational and physical therapies that were often difficult or impossible to deliver remotely. The initiative, called Sensory Exploration, Education & Discovery (SEED), serves students with disabilities who have sensory issues that are “dramatically impacting their school performance,” said Suzanne Sanchez, the education department’s senior director of therapy services who helps oversee the program.

The SEED program operates after school and on Saturdays at 10 sites across the city — two in each borough. It’s part of a broader effort backed by roughly $200 million in federal relief funding to provide students with disabilities extra services outside of the traditional school day to address pandemic disruptions, Sanchez said.

To participate, students must be nominated by therapists or psychologists from their home schools. More than half come from District 75, a specialized set of schools that serve students with the most significant disabilities.

Once selected, students are eligible to attend at least 10 weekly 45-minute sessions where they receive help from therapists one-on-one or in small groups. They work on skills such as developing strength and coordination, learning to build social bonds, or even how to react if someone bumps into you, which can trigger a more intense response among students with sensory issues.

“Children have to be regulated in order to relate and then in order to reason,” Sanchez said. “The goal is that the kids internalize the sensory strategies.”

The therapists also work directly with caregivers, who are required to stay for the sessions, giving them approaches to try out at home.

Bradley’s mother, Patricia Hector, said the therapists helped teach her to massage Bradley’s arms and legs to help soothe him. She also bought some of her own glow-in-the-dark lights after she saw how much they seemed to calm him down.

“Going to the program, he’s a lot happier — he enjoys it,” Hector said. “Anything extra to expose him — to get him more of the therapies he needs.”

Patricia Hector picks up her son, Bradley, from a SEED site in Brooklyn.

But the city has struggled to attract families to recovery services for students with disabilities outside the regular school day at programs run by individual schools as well as the SEED program, which is operated centrally. To date, roughly 650 students have participated in the SEED program, short of the 3,500 children the education department projected to serve by the end of the year, officials said.

Some families may struggle with transportation to sites that may be further away from where they live. Hector, for instance, takes a 25-minute Uber from East Flatbush to the program in Cypress Hills. She gets reimbursed for her travel through a state agency.

Other students with disabilities may be exhausted and reluctant to spend even more time in school. And a surge in COVID cases when the SEED program launched in January dissuaded some families from participating, Sanchez said.

“Obviously we want to reach as many kids and their families as we can,” Sanchez said. But she noted the smaller numbers allowed the city to shrink group sizes to two or three students in many cases. “We feel like this is an opportunity to focus on quality not quantity.”

In the ‘green zone’

After Bradley’s session ended, a group of three slightly older students arrived and began gliding across the linoleum floors on small scooters. They completed a small obstacle course, jumped on a trampoline, wiggled through a tunnel, and climbed up the rock wall.

Soon after, 8-year-old Adrian Soriano took a turn tossing bean bags from a perch on the sensory swing. Each bean bag had a letter printed on it, and Soriano shouted out a corresponding word — “N is for nut!” and “D is for dog!” — before chucking them into a blue bin.

The therapists encouraged Soriano to take stock of his emotions, using a color-coded chart from red (angry) to green (happy) meant to help students communicate whether they’re feeling sad, calm, annoyed, or out of control.

“What zone are you in?” one therapist asked, after ticking off several options.

“Green zone!” Adrian replied.

At one point, another student became overwhelmed and retreated to a “sensory canoe” — a small pouch made out of mats — before rejoining the group.

Wyatt, 11, takes a turn on the sensory swing.

Although the SEED program is housed inside different public school buildings, the centrally run program has a standardized curriculum developed by education department therapists. The rooms across the sites include the same equipment, and the walls were repainted a uniform blue and white.

Since the program is considered enrichment, Sanchez said it is not bound by individual students’ learning plans, known as IEPs, which therapists typically use as a blueprint for sessions delivered during the regular school day.

“This idea of being a little more prescriptive is I think something that’s surprising us — but for the better,” Sanchez said. “It’s this kind of nuanced dance: How do we make a therapeutic curriculum fit with an individual IEP?”

Occupational therapist Ketsia Bosse-Colasme

Ketsia Bosse-Colasme, an occupational therapist, said she was excited to work at the SEED program because it allowed her to use sensory techniques and equipment that most classrooms don’t have. Typically, during the school day, Bosse-Colasme focuses more heavily on handwriting skills or helping students use a planner during a 30-minute session.

The program is making a difference, she said.

“I have kids who first came here and they did not talk,” she said. “By the fifth session or the seventh session, even if it’s a simple ‘hello,’ or even saying, ‘I’m happy,’” she has seen students come out of their shells.

Planting SEEDs for summer

Parents cycling in and out of the gleaming Cypress Hills SEED site on a recent Saturday generally said they were pleased with the program, and the education department plans to continue it at five summer school sites where they expect it will serve about 400 students.

Still, there have been some administrative problems. The education department failed to pay many therapists on time, prompting at least one to quit the program midyear.

Education department spokesperson Suzan Sumer said addressing outstanding payment issues is a priority and that “most” have been resolved. She declined to say many therapists have left the SEED program or answer questions about its cost.

Alicia Hibbert, whose 11-year-old son attends the Cypress Hills site, said she wanted him to participate in part to help develop social skills after so much isolation. Her son, who has autism, would often ask when the pandemic would end so he could see his friends again.

Over the course of the program, she has seen growth. He is working on improving his eye contact and staying calm when he feels frustrated, which can manifest by hitting himself in the head.

“He’s getting some improvement here, which I like,” Hibbert said. “He’s improving his basic skills.”

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

NYC education panel approves school funding formula after last month’s rejection

2022-05-19T01:26:50+00:00

Following a stunning rejection last month, New York City’s education panel approved Wednesday the city’s school funding formula for next year, as Schools Chancellor David Banks promised to create a group that will review the 15-year-old formula.

The commitment from the city followed concerns from some panel members and public school advocates who want the current funding formula to provide more support for additional groups of high-needs students, such as students living in temporary housing.

The panel voted 12-1, with an additional abstention, to approve the formula, known as Fair Student Funding. The 15th member, a Staten Island borough appointee, quit last month. Chancellor David Banks said he, too, supports a more equitable formula, calling it a “horrible and ridiculous” situation that he inherited from previous administrations. He said he would put in writing his commitment on a working group.

But Banks, who called last month’s vote “deeply disappointing,” said schools could not afford a delay in getting their budgets if the formula was rejected again. Receiving a delayed budget could hamper hiring decisions, making it tougher to plan out classes for next year — an issue schools faced over the past two school years as the pandemic wore on, officials said.

“Passing it tonight does not mean that this is a chancellor who doesn’t give a damn — quite the opposite,” Banks said. “I have to keep the system moving.”

Officials had planned to get budgets to schools this month before the panel’s rejection in April. After Wednesday’s approval, it was not immediately clear when schools would receive their budgets.

Each year, department officials ask the Panel for Educational Policy (PEP), composed mostly of mayoral appointees, to reapprove the funding formula. The formula accounts for $10 billion in funding and 65% of school budgets. It is structured to send more money to schools that are struggling academically, as well as those with higher shares of students with disabilities and English language learners.

But after hearing from public speakers last month who opposed the current formula, six panel members, who were not appointed by the mayor, shared their own concerns. Some pressed city officials about why the previous administration never released a report created by a 2019 task force that was charged with reviewing the funding formula.

Even then, the formula likely would have been approved at last month’s meeting. But Mayor Eric Adams, who appoints nine of the panel’s 15 members, had failed to replace an appointee who was forced to resign in March, and another of his appointees was absent. As a result, five panel members appointed by borough presidents abstained from voting on the formula after raising concerns, and a sixth elected representative voted against approval — leaving the city one short of the necessary votes.

Hours before Wednesday’s meeting, City Hall officials announced the appointment of Kyle Kimball to fill the final mayorally appointed seat which became available after the panel member was forced to resign over anti-gay remarks. Kimball is a former Bloomberg and de Blasio administration official who oversaw the New York City Economic Development Corporation. He is now vice president of government relations for Con Edison.

It’s possible that a future working group could look at what the 2019 task force came up with. A draft report from the task force called for adding weights to the formula for more student groups, such as children who are homeless, living in poverty and in foster care, as well as increasing weight for high schools to match those that have specialized academic portfolios — a matter related to how the formula sends money to some higher performing schools, which tend to enroll fewer Black and Hispanic students. The report did not specify what the weights should be.

On Wednesday, Banks said he would have First Deputy Chancellor Dan Weisberg oversee the creation of the new working group and put that commitment in writing. He also said before the vote that revamping the formula would take time, and that another rejection of the formula “would bring the system to a grinding halt.”

Still, roughly two dozen people — mostly parent leaders — asked the panel to again reject the formula because it was not equitable.

“This is not new,” said Isha Taylor, a member of the parent council in Bronx’s District 10. “We appreciate the new [department of education] administration for creating a space for us parents to be a part of this process, but we really ask you, take a hard look and hold your team accountable for making these decisions.”

Some speakers asked the city to create a commission that would be independent of the education department so that it would feel free to analyze and pick apart the formula. Panel member Kaliris Salas-Ramirez, who is an appointee of Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, said she voted to approve because the panel received a commitment from the chancellor to review the formula. Still, Salas-Ramirez wants a commission with experts who can conduct a financial analysis of the formula.

Tom Sheppard, the lone elected member of the panel who voted no, said he was torn over how to vote but couldn’t ignore what he heard from the community. He, like Salas-Ramirez, said he wants a commission with financial analysts.

“That said, please don’t take my no vote to mean that I am uninterested in fixing this — I am very much interested in fixing this,” he said.

Christina Veiga contributed.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

New York to increase weekly instruction for medically fragile students

2022-05-17T20:45:15+00:00

New York state officials will increase the number of hours students with medical conditions must receive after a flurry of questions from parents and school districts — but the mandate won’t take effect until the 2023-2024 school year.

The changes affect students who, for medical reasons, won’t be in school for at least 10 days over a three-month period and are learning from home or a hospital setting. Starting in 2023, these students must receive at least 10 hours of weekly instruction, up from five, if they’re in elementary or middle school, and at least 15 hours for high schoolers, an increase from 10 hours a week.

The increase does not go into effect until 2023 because state officials wanted to give districts time to budget properly, according to a spokesperson for the state education department.

“I think there was a common understanding that the five to 10 hours were not nearly enough,” Mary Beth Casey, assistant commissioner at the state education department, told the Board of Regents Monday.

State officials say the new regulations come after hearing many questions from caregivers and districts as the pandemic wore on about how to provide instruction for medically fragile children, including immunocompromised students. They’re also, for the first time, requiring districts to follow a timeline to approve and provide such instruction for these students.

In New York City, 20 different conditions qualify children for medically necessary instruction. This school year, just over 2,500 students applied for such services, and 84% of them were approved, according to an education department spokesperson, who did not immediately share the equivalent pre-pandemic data. Sixty-five percent of these children received in-person instruction, which involves a teacher coming to their home or another setting to teach them, while the rest was virtual.

At the start of this school year, parents whose children have medical conditions and were at higher risk for severe COVID infections faced agonizing decisions about whether to send them back to school buildings. Should they risk their child getting infected, or should they apply for the home instruction program, which would mean getting 1-2 hours of schooling a day?

“We had to make a really difficult decision to send her to school,” parent Rodney Lee told Chalkbeat in October about his daughter who has a seizure disorder and was at a higher risk for severe COVID. “Every day we pray, and we hope that she stays healthy.”

The new rules will mean just an extra hour of learning a day for these students. Still, it’s a “really critical” change for families, said Maggie Moroff, a special education policy expert at Advocates for Children, who said that even pre-pandemic students at home were getting far fewer hours of instruction when compared to their peers in school.

“There was so little oversight, and experiences were so dramatically different, but in a world where more and more students are needing to learn from home in order to remain healthy and safe, we really want to make sure that they get the supports that they need,” Moroff said.

The state also created several more requirements that districts must meet.

Previously, there was no required timeline around how quickly students could be approved and receive such instruction. Starting this July, districts must start home or hospital instruction for a child within five school days of either being notified of that student’s medical condition or a guardian’s request for such instruction — whichever happens first. Districts must decide and notify parents whether their child is eligible for home or hospital instruction five days after a parent or guardian sends a doctor’s note verifying the child’s medical condition. Parents can appeal a denial within five days, but the district must continue providing services while the appeal is being considered.

Creating an approval timeline could also have a big impact on families. Moroff said some cases took so long for services to be set up, that some children lost months of schooling.

“We would wait sometimes for months for their home instruction to start, even after it had been approved,” Moroff said.

The state is also requiring districts to create plans for these students that describe how many hours of instruction they’ll receive and how their lesson plans are keeping them on track — something New York City already does, the city spokesperson said.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Proposal would make it easier for NY students to pass Regents exams

2022-05-17T14:50:38+00:00

Update: The Board of Regents approved this proposal on Tuesday, May 17.

After a third school year disrupted by the pandemic, New York state officials want to allow students to more easily appeal failing scores on Regents exams, starting this spring through the end of next school year.

Students now must earn a 65 or higher to pass Regents exams, which are required to earn a high school diploma. But students could appeal scores of 50-64 if they pass the related course under a proposal expected to come before the state Board of Regents Tuesday. If approved, the change would go into effect immediately, likely allowing more students to meet graduation requirements.

The changes are meant to soften the blow COVID has had on schools across the state this year and would mark the third year in a row that officials have changed rules around New York’s high school exit exams. The pandemic has “continued to have adverse impacts on students and schools,” and that instruction has “varied significantly across the state,” state officials wrote in a memo about the proposed changes.

New York is approaching a “high alert” level for COVID with hospitalizations on the rise, and it’s possible schools could see yet another major disruption to student and staff attendance. During the omicron variant surge after winter break, cases skyrocketed among New York City schools students and staff, disrupting schooling and leaving children at home with little to no instruction.

While attendance improved after that surge, chronic absenteeism in New York City could reach the worst levels since at least 2000 if attendance rates don’t improve.

The temporary changes proposed Monday make it significantly easier for students to appeal failing scores. That may ultimately help to once again boost the state’s graduation rate, which was on the rise before the pandemic but has continued to increase as Regents have been canceled or decoupled from graduation requirements.

Currently, students can appeal failing scores of 60-64, with some exceptions for students learning English as a new language and students with disabilities. But there are a slew of other restrictions: Students can only appeal a score if they’ve failed the exam at least twice, have passed the related course, have received extra academic help in the subject, and are recommended for an exemption by a teacher or department chair. Students can only appeal scores on two of their five Regents exams that are required to graduate. Under the proposal, students must pass the related course but don’t need to meet any of these other requirements through next school year. Their parent or guardian, however, may refuse a granted appeal if they want the student to receive more instruction.

Regents exams have been a long debated topic in New York, one of about a dozen states that administers a high school exit exam. State officials are rethinking the role of the exam and will launch a pilot program looking at new ways to earn a diploma. In recent years, the Regents have made it easier to meet exam requirements by approving more pathways to graduation and lowering the score needed for an appeal.

This will be the third school year that state officials have tweaked rules about Regents exams in response to the pandemic. State officials canceled the exams when the pandemic first hit in the 2019-2020 school year. In the 2020-2021 school year, students were not required to pass exams in order to graduate as they currently are, and most Regents exams were canceled. January exams were canceled this year during the omicron surge.

Regent Roger Tilles, who represents Long Island, criticized the department’s decision to continue with the exams this year and said they are “twisting like a pretzel” to make the exams work instead of rethinking how they are being administered this year.

“Virtually everything on Long Island is being disrupted fairly drastically, and I’ve talked to a number of school superintendents, and their numbers are very high of kids who are out of school right now, and I think we ought to reevaluate how we are re-administering the Regents,” Tilles said.

Asked why the state didn’t instead remove the exams as graduation requirements, a spokesperson pointed to the proposal memo, which said the exams are important “as one of multiple measures of student achievement in the 2021-2022 school year.” The tests can help determine whether students are achieving state learning standards, the memo said, and help state officials determine steps “to foster equity and improve educational opportunities.”

But decades of research shows these exams don’t better-prepare students for life after high school and, in fact, can harm students of color from low-income families.

One Brooklyn high school principal said he expected the state to expand safety net options for students this year, as rates of chronic absenteeism have shot up and COVID has continued to disrupt instruction with many students and staff forced to isolate at home.

But the principal, who requested anonymity to speak freely, questioned the decision to make the exams easier to pass rather than canceling them.

“The breadth of material tested is so large that every teacher who teaches Regents feels that content pressure at the best of times,” the principal said. “This year, so many students are out so many days, the crunch becomes exacerbated.”

Even though the exams will be easier to pass, students still will face pressure to score well above a 50, as low Regents scores typically appear on student transcripts, the principal said.

“On top of all the trauma and challenges they’ve been through over the past two years, I’m not sure what the state is hoping to accomplish by having the Regents exams at all,” he added.

Alex Zimmerman contributed.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

In a seismic shift, NYC to mandate elementary schools use phonics-based curriculum

2022-05-12T22:09:41+00:00

This is part of an ongoing collaborative series between Chalkbeat and THE CITY investigating learning differences, special education, and other education challenges in city schools.

New York City will require all elementary schools to adopt a phonics-based reading program in the coming school year — a potentially seismic shift in how tens of thousands of public school students are taught to read.

The announcement came as part of a wider $7.4 million plan by Mayor Eric Adams to identify and support students with dyslexia or other reading challenges, including screening students from kindergarten through high school and creating targeted programs at 160 of the city’s 1,600 schools.

“We’re going to start using a proven, phonics-based literacy curriculum that’s proven to help children read,” Adams said at a press conference at Harlem’s P.S. 125. “This is our opportunity to really move the needle on something that has been impactful for our children for a long time.”

City officials said teachers will be required to implement one of the education department’s recommended phonics-based curricula for kindergarten through second grade as part of the initiative. This shift is a major change in approach, as the department traditionally defers to principals on curriculum choice, with widely varying results.

Thursday’s announcement represents a significant victory for parents — some of whom wept at the press conference — who have long been frustrated with the city’s inability to educate many struggling readers. Some families have sought outside evaluations, which can run thousands of dollars, and sued the city for private school tuition reimbursements, a process that often requires significant time and resources.

Parents Jeannine Kiely, Ruth Genn, Emily Hellstrom, Akeela Azcuy (left to right) were part of a push to launch new programs for students with dyslexia.

City officials are now vowing to better equip educators across the nation’s largest school system to serve students with reading challenges. They plan to launch programs specifically geared toward students with dyslexia at two elementary schools and provide deeper support for students at 80 additional elementary schools and 80 middle schools.

The efforts are intended to help address one of the city’s most entrenched problems: Just over half of students in grades 3-8 are not proficient readers, according to state tests. Profound learning disruptions caused by the pandemic have only amplified concerns that students have been knocked off track.

Adams often speaks about his own struggles with dyslexia and promised on the campaign trail to make it a priority. He framed the announcement Thursday as a “first-of-its-kind” effort and even as a bulwark against incarceration.

“Dyslexia holds back too many children in school, but most importantly in life,” Adams said. “Dyslexia is not a disadvantage. It’s just a different way of learning. And all the children need — they need the tools to know how to comprehend information.”

‘Watching our children’s suffering’

Adams shared his personal story of how his peers would tape a sign on his chair that read “dumb student,” which made him want to avoid school. And, indeed, some of his friends dropped out because of their learning struggles, he said.

But with his mother’s support, Adams pushed ahead, and he acknowledged the emotional toll on parents forced to advocate for their children and fight with public schools unable to provide the proper support.

Two groups of parents have been working on creating programs for students with dyslexia and other reading-based challenges. Literacy Academy Collective in P.S. 161 in the Bronx and Lab School for Family Literacy in P.S. 125 in Manhattan will both offer specialized programs for students with dyslexia and other language-based learning disabilities. The DOE will immediately move to build programs at additional schools with the goal of having at least one school offering specialized instruction in each borough by fall 2023.

Some experts estimate that 10% to 20% of children have some form of dyslexia, while others put the figure much lower. Regardless, many literacy experts argue that systematic reading instruction emphasizing phonics is beneficial for all students who may struggle with reading, regardless of whether they have a specific diagnosis.

Naomi Peña, a mother of four children with dyslexia and one of the forces behind the program set to open in the Bronx, talked about how “watching our children’s suffering” inspired her to team up with five other moms to create the new endeavor.

“I was desperate to find support,” she said, fighting back tears. “My only option was costly tutoring programs because my children’s learning styles could not be met in the classroom.”

City officials are promising to reach other students by ramping up efforts to train all teachers on how to identify and support students with dyslexia. By April 2023, teachers in all subjects will participate in a two-hour introductory training created by Made By Dyslexia. Educators will also have more opportunities to be trained in evidence-based phonics programs, including Wilson and Orton-Gillingham. Additionally, all grades will have access to literacy coaches in targeted schools, officials said, though it was not clear how many.

“Literacy cannot be a skill that is relegated to a class, and we must support educators in every subject area to become allies in the work of making sure that every child can read,” said schools Chancellor David Banks.

Return to phonics

Banks has consistently said he wants a heavier focus on phonics. In March, he made waves by arguing a popular Teachers College reading curriculum that was previously embraced by the education department “has not worked.”

The city will offer a few options for schools to choose from such as the PAF Reading Program, Ready for Reading, and Fundations. The phonics program will need to be paired with a comprehensive literacy program, officials said.

Students at P.S. 236 in the Bronx participate in a phonics lesson.

This effort is separate from a previously announced initiative to create a universal culturally responsive curriculum known as Mosaic, which will focus more narrowly on middle schools and be available by fall 2023.

During the Bloomberg administration, then-Chancellor Joel Klein pushed schools to use a reading approach known as “balanced literacy,” which has increasingly come under fire for failing to emphasize systematic instruction on the relationships between sounds and letters. Twenty years later, that model remains entrenched in many schools.

The city does not centrally track what curricula schools employ, but officials believe that roughly 200 of the city’s 700 elementary schools do not currently use phonics-based instruction, according to a Department of Education spokesperson. They also believe that dozens, or even hundreds more, are not implementing phonics as effectively as they should, despite a growing consensus among experts that explicitly teaching the relationships between sounds and letters is crucial.

Changing a literacy curriculum is no easy process and can be challenging without buy-in from educators and solid training. The education department pledged to provide ongoing professional development throughout next year to help with the shift.

For the screening, children will be assessed on literacy three times a year, and those who continue to struggle will have access to a more targeted screening for dyslexia, Banks explained. The city will continue using a tool called Acadience Reading, the latest iteration of an assessment known as Dibels (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills), which was implemented this year for kindergarten through second grade.

City officials did not immediately say how they will measure the initiative’s effectiveness.

The plans “could have a transformative impact if implemented well,” said Kim Sweet, of Advocates for Children, which has spent decades fighting for low-income students who are struggling with reading and are unable to be supported in public schools.

Her organization looked forward to “digging into the details” and working with the education department so that “all children learn to read, no matter where they go to school,” she said in a statement.

The city is also creating a task force on dyslexia, and Adams said he is working with Public Advocate Jumaane Williams to push for dyslexia screening in jails across New York state.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

What to know about the hottest ticket in NYC, Summer Rising

2022-05-04T19:35:27+00:00

Just one week after New York City opened up applications for Summer Rising, its ambitious program that melds academics and camp-like activities, most elementary school sites have already filled up.

Of 267 schools offering K-5 programs, fewer than 30 still had openings, according to the education department’s enrollment portal as of Monday afternoon.

This is only the second time that the city has opened its revamped summer program to all students, not just those who are struggling with coursework. Mornings will focus on academics led by education department teachers. The afternoons will offer enrichment such as field trips, art activities, and outdoor games run by community organizations.

The $350 million program offers 110,000 seats for elementary and middle school students in charter schools or traditional public schools. The city serves about 682,000 children in those grades, according to state data. The seats are first-come, first-served, with no waitlists. (Separately, former Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently donated $50 million for charter schools to run their own programs.)

Education department officials were excited to see the “immense interest” in this year’s summer program, but because of staffing constraints are not planning to add more seats.

“In order to maintain student safety, we are unable to add seats to Summer Rising sites at this time,” education department spokesperson Jenna Lyle said in a statement.

Additionally, the program gives priority to students in temporary housing and those with disabilities who are mandated to attend school year-round. Schools are also holding spaces for students who are required to attend for academic purposes.

High schools will offer separate programs for students needing to retake courses, and the city is offering 100,000 slots for young people ages 14-21 in its summer jobs program.

Here’s what families should know about Summer Rising:

What are the dates and hours?

The seven-week elementary school program runs from July 5 through Aug. 19 and is being offered at 267 schools across the city.

The six-week program for middle school runs from July 5 through Aug. 12, with nearly 230 schools offering seats for grades 6-8, with some of those campuses also offering K-5 seats.

Both programs run until 6 p.m.

Can my children attend their own school for Summer Rising? If not, what are other options?

Not all schools are hosting Summer Rising programs in their buildings, but all schools are affiliated with a school that is. Your child’s school is supposed to provide you with the name of the building that is partnering with your child’s school. Most seats, however, have already been snatched up, so options are limited.

Unlike last year, the new enrollment portal will only let families sign up for one program per child rather than allow multiple applications. You’ll know immediately if a site is booked since it won’t appear on the drop-down screen when you go to the enrollment page. (The list of participating schools can be found here.)

Last summer, the program got off to a rocky start, with glitches in the online signup portal and unregistered children showing up at sites, which resulted in students sitting in auditoriums for the first few days at some schools as enrollment issues were sorted out.

What if my child has special needs? What kind of accommodations will there be?

The city is aiming to improve on last summer’s performance, when some community-based organizations lacked staff like paraprofessionals to support certain students.

The city has increased training for people from organizations running enrichment programs. The city also will allow time during the summer for those staffers to learn from teachers how to support students with disabilities. City officials also promised more information soon about how they will better support students needing paraprofessional or nursing support to fully participate in both academic and enrichment programs.

“There’s been a more intentional push to include students with disabilities. If this was a normal time, it would be fine, but staffing overall is a big concern,” said Nora Moran of United Neighborhood Houses, an umbrella organization for community-based organizations. “Providers have had a hard time staffing their school-year after-school programs this year; they want to serve this population but need the right staffing and resources to do so.”

At 80 sites, the city is co-locating programs for students in District 75, which serves those with the most significant needs, with programs serving typically developing students. The program for students with disabilities ends at 2:30 p.m., and then those students may join afternoon enrichment programs. Staffers from afternoon programs will be in the classroom with special education teachers in the morning, to learn how to support students.

My child gets bused to school. Will Summer Rising offer busing?

Transportation was a major issue last summer for children who rely on busing during the school year, including those with disabilities or students in temporary housing. Some students who rode the bus in the morning had no bus ride home in the afternoon. The city eventually offered to pick up the tab for car services, but advocates stressed that many working families don’t have time to use the services, which require a caregiver to accompany a student.

“For many parents, it is not possible to transport their child with significant disabilities to and from their school,” said Randi Levine, from Advocates for Children. “We know many students with disabilities last year were unable to participate in the Summer Rising afternoon activities due to lack of bus service.”

City officials said that they will offer busing to eligible students through 3 p.m, and are working on options for children staying until 6 p.m.

“Unfortunately, operational constraints make wide-scale busing at 6 p.m. a significant challenge,” the education department’s website says.

Officials are exploring prepaid rideshare or taxi service, including vehicles that are wheelchair accessible.

Alex Zimmerman contributed reporting.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Correction: This story initially said Summer Rising would cost $101 million, per a city press release. Officials later clarified that the city budget is allocating that amount to it, but another $249 million is being paid by stimulus funding and tax levy dollars.

What the education panel’s rejection of NYC’s funding formula means for schools

2022-04-28T23:52:27+00:00

What began Wednesday night as a routine vote by the city’s Panel For Educational Policy ended with concern among principals, union officials, and even the schools chancellor about the potential delay of school budgets and plans for the upcoming school year.

The panel, a mostly appointed board that makes decisions on major contracts and policies, rejected an annual request from the city to approve its 15-year-old school funding formula, which sends more money to schools that are struggling academically, as well as those with higher shares of students with disabilities and English language learners.

The formula accounts for about $10 billion in funding and makes up 65% of a school’s budget, most of which goes toward hiring staff, and the vote could delay school leaders’ ability to build classes for their students next year, said Lindsey Oates, the department’s chief financial officer. Though city officials said they are “committed” to reviewing the formula, Chancellor David Banks called the vote “deeply disappointing.”

The matter may be made moot by a May 18 meeting if all of Mayor Eric Adams’ appointees are present — one of them was absent Wednesday night — or if he appoints a new panel member to replace one he forced to resign in March.

Either way, the controversy highlights longstanding concerns about whether the formula is equitable enough, such as it not providing extra support for students who are homeless. When members of the public raised those concerns, at least one panel member who had planned to vote “yes” abstained instead.

“It was a moral vote in the sense of making sure that we held the city accountable for once again forgetting the most vulnerable students,” said panel member Kaliris Salas-Ramirez, who was appointed by Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine. “We do not in any shape or form want it to impact school communities, and we will definitely do our best to push forward and to have some form of clarity or agreement.”

The panel’s vote is unlikely to have an immediate effect on school budgets, according to a former senior education department official who spoke on condition of anonymity to speak freely. But if the panel does not approve the funding formula at its next meeting in May, or if panel members approve a modified version that requires recalculating school budgets, that could delay principals’ ability to plan and make hiring decisions for next school year since they won’t have a clear sense of their upcoming budgets.

“Do I think it’s the end of the world? No,” the former official said. “Do I think it’s a really bad practice? Yes.”

How did this happen?

The mayor appoints nine people, or a majority, to the 15-member board, meaning the administration’s proposals are rarely rejected. However, Adams has failed to replace a minister who was forced to resign after the New York Daily News revealed her anti-gay writing.

Additionally, another mayoral appointee was absent because of a family emergency, according to Gregory Faulkner, panel member and mayoral appointee. That left the administration with seven of the eight votes they needed. While they all voted yes, the members appointed by borough presidents all abstained, and the elected member, Tom Sheppard, voted no.

Wednesday night’s vote stunned some observers. To some, the vote suggested that City Hall and the education department were not paying close enough attention to how PEP members planned to vote — or even ensuring they had filled every vacancy allocated to the mayor.

“Weeks leading into a PEP meeting you had to understand where people were on the issues,” the former education department official said. “Is someone managing this process?”

Still, the former official said: “The likeliest outcome is they commit to the PEP to rethink the funding formula for next year and they bring it back for a vote.”

That’s along the lines of what Salas-Ramirez is hoping for. Ahead of Wednesday’s vote, education department officials briefed the panel members on the funding formula.

Salas-Ramirez said she raised concerns about the formula during her group briefing and in a one-on-one discussion with a department official.

Eventually, Salas-Ramirez felt that Oates and other department officials were frank with her, understood that the formula needs to change, and were committed to reworking it, so she had planned to vote “yes” Wednesday night.

“But then last night, the community outreach was so powerful,” Salas-Ramirez said. “Having so many [Community Education Council] members and folks in the community talking about the inequities in the Fair Student Funding formula for students with disabilities, the limitations that it has in terms of serving marginalized communities, the lack of accountability of students who live below the line of poverty and temporary housing — all of those things really resonated with us.”

Some of the panel members seemed to be swayed by NeQuan McLean, president of the parent council in District 16, who said that he was part of a city task force that spent nine months making recommendations to change the formula that were ultimately not released to the public.

A copy of that draft report, which was never officially released by the de Blasio administration, shows nine recommendations. They include adding new weight to the formula for students living in poverty, are homeless or in foster care, and increasing weight for high schools to match those that have “specialized academic portfolios” — an issue related to how the formula sends money to some higher performing schools, which tend to enroll fewer Black and Hispanic students.

There were no specific recommendations about what the weights should be, but instead suggestions on what steps the city should taske next. Some of the recommendations appeared to have the support of a majority, but not all, task force members.

Members of the panel asked why that report wasn’t released, and some asked to see a copy, including Salas-Ramirez. Faulkner, the mayoral appointee, said in an interview that he’d like a copy, too.

On Wednesday night, Oates, who worked during de Blasio’s tenure, said she “cannot speak to the previous administration’s decision to not release the report,” but noted that the release was planned around when the pandemic hit.

She said the city should discuss how the formula can be improved and that she understands “the frustration” around the task force’s work not being released or enacted upon. But what should also be considered is that the recommendations in the report “would require new resources to pay for [them]” which won’t be an easy lift. Despite this, the city previously addressed one of the biggest criticisms by giving schools all the money they were owed under this formula, following historic increases in state funding and an infusion of federal stimulus dollars.

Salas-Ramirez said she and other borough appointees had no plan to abstain together during the Wednesday vote, and said she abstained instead of voting “no” because she had not discussed the matter with Levine, her appointer. Still, she called the resulting vote “a strategy” to get the city to commit to working on a revamp of the formula.

“What we can do with this vote is take this opportunity to have a formal commitment to make a change by next year,” she said.

Faulkner said he felt fully informed during his briefings. He agrees that there are problems with the formula, but last night felt like the wrong time to vote it down. He also felt “somewhat surprised” by the comments because no one on the panel had raised issues with the formula until Wednesday night.

“I think there are definitely issues with the formula but because it was last-minute, we need to err on the side of, ‘What’s gonna do the least harm?’” Faulkner said. “If this was a bad formula, like, OK, I get it, but do we now put all of the kids in jeopardy?”

What does this mean for schools?

It wouldn’t be the first time school budgets would be delayed. Oates said schools received their budgets in July and June in 2020 and 2021, respectively, due to the “extreme fiscal crisis” the city was facing due to the pandemic.

Before the pandemic, schools typically received their budget plans in mid-May, meaning that they knew how much money they would get for the following school year and could begin to make decisions on hiring and how many classes they may need.

Former Washington Heights principal Julie Zuckerman said the delay in her budget last year caused a hiring mess at her school. She was feuding with the education department over an apparent miscalculation, which prevented her from hiring another teacher before the start of the school year — issues that perhaps could have been resolved had her budget come on time.

“It’s a many-tiered situation, and when one little piece goes off, it has a lot of repercussions,” Zuckerman said.

Mark Cannizzaro, head of the city’s principals union, said he doesn’t anticipate a major impact to school budgets if the PEP approves the funding formula at its next meeting but warned of disruptions to school planning if funding uncertainty extends beyond that.

“It’s got to be straightened out at the next meeting,” he said. “The city and the DOE should have made sure this was going to pass prior to the vote.”

Before the vote was cast, Banks said his immediate reaction upon hearing concern from panel members was to table the matter, but it was too late to do that.

“Essentially what we’re saying is that we don’t have time to address it now, which leaves you essentially with no choice as PEP members in how we should be moving forward,” Banks said. “I’m not happy with that process.”

An education department spokesperson declined to say what the city was planning to do next.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Some therapists in NYC’s special education recovery program still haven’t been paid

2022-04-20T11:00:00+00:00

Occupational therapist Larissa Gomes has seen the pandemic’s toll on students with disabilities, so she jumped at the chance to offer extra sessions through an education department program that provides makeup services outside the regular school day.

But for four months, the education department didn’t pay her for most of the hours she worked, representing over $5,000. After putting her daughter’s college tuition on a credit card, she decided she was finished with the extra afterschool and Saturday sessions.

“I could not keep working without being paid,” she said. “There was never any kind of explanation why it’s taken the DOE so long.”

Gomes filed a grievance through the United Federation of Teachers and was recently paid for the hours she worked, but has no plans to return to the program.

Larissa Gomes

Thanks to billions in federal relief funding, the city’s education department set aside $200 million to offer students small group reading and math instruction in addition to therapies that were missed or difficult to deliver during long stretches of remote learning. Despite the influx of resources, occupational and physical therapists across the city have struggled to get paid on time since the recovery services program launched on most campuses in December, according to therapists and union officials.

It’s unclear how many therapists like Gomes have quit the special education recovery program due to payment issues. Education department officials did not say how many have not been paid correctly or left the program for that reason. Still, the payment problems may make some therapists hesitant to sign up for similar programs, potentially leaving students without access to services and complicating future efforts to provide extra help to students with disabilities.

“Many therapists know this is the DOE’s MO, so they don’t take work,” said Melissa Williams, an occupational therapist and union chapter leader. “I refused to work [the recovery program] because I was worried this would happen.”

Officials at the United Federation of Teachers, which represents many occupational and physical therapists, said they are working with roughly 75 therapists who have not yet been paid at all and another 75 who have only been partially paid. The union has successfully resolved payment issues for another 150 therapists, officials said.

Surveys of therapists from early in the year suggested hundreds of therapists were not being paid on time. Williams and UFT officials indicated that there have been improvements since then.

Williams said there have been a series of bureaucratic problems in the payment process for therapists, which is run through a separate system than the one for teachers. She blamed the education department for failing to quickly train school payroll secretaries to properly enter payment information, arguing the agency “didn’t have a plan for how they were going to pay us.” She also said the city incorrectly denied waivers that are needed to pay therapists for overtime work.

“What has happened is unacceptable,” Alison Gendar, a UFT spokesperson, wrote in an email to Chalkbeat. “The union is focused on getting members the money they are owed, speeding up the process for the remaining payments, and pushing the DOE to improve the new payment system it finally created so we don’t have this problem going forward.”

Nicole Brownstein, a spokesperson for the education department, said the city has issued new guidance for payroll secretaries in an effort to address payment issues.

“Therapists are essential to providing Special Education Recovery Services for our students with disabilities, and they deserve to be compensated in a timely manner for their important work,” Brownstein wrote in a statement. “We are making progress in clearing the backlog, and we will work hard until all providers are paid in full.”

Since its inception, the recovery program for students with disabilities has faced setbacks. Its rollout was delayed until December at many schools. The city did not guarantee yellow bus transportation, making it difficult for many students to participate, and schools often did not clearly communicate with families about what services their children would receive during the extra hours. And despite being open to all students with disabilities, only about 35% of them are expected to participate by the end of the year, city officials said.

Still, some parents and therapists have said the additional sessions have been helpful.

Jenny Clavin, an occupational therapist who provided extra therapy for two schools in Queens, said she was glad to connect with students to give them more support, including movement activities and help with motor skills. Some of her students struggled to log in for remote sessions.

“During the last two years, it’s been so stressful,” she said. The recovery program “was a nice way to connect with them and give them more support.”

But getting compensated for her work has been a hassle. Although she started working for the program in December, she said she wasn’t paid at all until March. Even then, there were ongoing errors in her pay, Clavin said, including money for days she didn’t work and lack of payment for days that she did. She said the city has deducted some of the incorrect payments from subsequent paychecks but has not fully paid her for all the days she worked.

“I don’t know how I’m ever going to work out the mistakes that are in my pay,” she said. “The uncertainty of not knowing what my paycheck is going to be until I get it because of the errors is a major source of stress.”

Some advocates said the payment issues were concerning because any disincentive among therapists to sign up for initiatives like the after school and Saturday recovery program could lead to students missing out on crucial services.

Maggie Moroff, a special education policy expert at Advocates for Children, said occupational and physical therapists provide support that is often a precondition to academic success, such as learning to grip a pencil or helping students build up enough endurance to navigate the school building and focus during class without becoming exhausted.

“If providers aren’t being paid, or if they’re not being paid quickly, then they’re not going to stay in the work,” Moroff said. “And if they don’t stay in the work, then the kids aren’t going to get the services and it’s a disaster.”

For her part, Gomes said she was torn about her decision to stop providing extra sessions of occupational therapy through the recovery program. She had been offering therapy sessions at an elementary school in Harlem in addition to a specialized site on Staten Island geared toward students with sensory challenges — and she acknowledged it may be hard for the elementary school to quickly find a replacement for her.

“We are seeing progress with the students,” she said. “I really like the [recovery program], but I just can’t go through anything like that again.”

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Here are education highlights from New York’s state budget

2022-04-18T19:37:04+00:00

New York state lawmakers passed a budget over the weekend that will boost funding for New York City schools by about 4% per pupil next school year.

The city’s public schools will receive just over $12 billion in state funding. State funds represent roughly 40% of the city’s education operating budget.

School funding is usually a bitter battle among lawmakers and advocates during budget season. But lawmakers reached a deal last year to fully fund Foundation Aid, the formula that sends more dollars to high-needs schools.

As a result, even the most fervent school funding advocates shifted their attention to expanding other programs and initiatives. One of the largest pushes went toward expanding subsidized child care across New York.

The final budget deal calls for $7 billion in early child care funding over the next four years, which could pave the way for universal child care and greatly expand access for New York City families. But some advocates and lawmakers were disappointed by that level of funding and are frustrated that it still excludes children who are undocumented.

Lawmakers also passed legislation to mandate electric school buses and instituted some funding changes for private special education programs, which serve public school children with the most challenging disabilities and have been struggling to retain teachers.

Here are highlights from the state budget.

NYC schools get $56 million less than proposed

New York City schools will see about $475 million more in state funding next school year. That figure is $56 million less than what Gov. Kathy Hochul had proposed; it wasn’t immediately clear why the final budget sent less money to the city.

Unlike previous years, it was clear from the governor’s proposal in January that school districts would receive an influx of cash following commitments last year to boost Foundation Aid, which gives districts the most flexibility, including the ability to hire more teachers or create new programs.

Some advocates, however, were disappointed not to see a funding increase for career and technical education programs. The New York State Educational Conference Board, a coalition of large school organizations, including the state teachers union, had called for updating a three-decade-old formula that helps fund career and technical education. The state’s Board of Regents also asked for more funding.

“Completing high school should put every young person on a path toward success in adult life,” Charles Dedrick, executive director of the New York State Council of School Superintendents, said in a statement. “Quality CTE programs have proven to be an effective option for students, including those planning to enter the workforce, to pursue further education, or both.”

Thousands more NYC families will be eligible for subsidized child care

The state’s $7 billion, four-year agreement for expanding subsidized child care would make it more affordable for families earning up to 300% of the federal poverty limit, or around $83,000 for a family of four. Previously the upper limit was around $55,500 for a family of four, or 200% of the poverty level.

While the final deal did not make care free, keeping in place co-payments that advocates had hoped would be eliminated, those payments are now capped at 10% of a family’s income.

About 74,000 more New York City children under the age of 5 will be eligible for significantly subsidized care, for a total of about 290,000 children across the five boroughs, according to an analysis of 2019 Census data conducted by United Neighborhood Houses, which represents child care providers.

Children who are undocumented will not be included, leaving an estimated 5,000 children across the state excluded from the program. Because state and federal dollars are “co-mingled” for subsidized child care, covering undocumented children would violate federal law, according to a spokesperson for Hochul’s office.

But advocates believe officials could separate out state funds and use them specifically for excluded children. It could work like the state’s excluded workers’ funds, which provided benefits to New Yorkers who lost work during the pandemic but were left out of federal relief programs, said Gregory Brender, director of public policy for the Day Care Council.

Many advocates called the investment “historic” for the industry and for families desperately in need of support. But some who had called for even more funding said the plan will fall short and cause families long waits for subsidized care — leading at least one leading lawmaker behind the universal childcare push, Sen. Jabari Brisport, to vote against the budget.

New York City in recent years has significantly expanded free child care for 3- and 4-year-olds through free preschool programs, but families with infants have struggled to find and afford care.

It remains to be seen how many families will take advantage of more affordable care and how the rollout will work. In 2019, more than 93,000 families qualified, yet only about 8,000 were enrolled in publicly supported programs, according to public data analyzed by the Citizens’ Committee for Children, or CCC, a nonprofit advocacy group.

The annual cost of care is about $18,000 to enroll in center-based programs or about $10,000 for programs that are run out of providers’ homes. Many women who left the workforce during the pandemic have not returned, with 35% of those reporting lack of childcare as the reason, according to census data analyzed by CCC.

Providers, meanwhile, have struggled since well before the pandemic. Many operate as private businesses, while those that participate in public programs say the rates they’re paid do not come close to covering costs. COVID only made things more difficult, with more expenses and plummeting enrollment. Many were forced to close.

Districts will start purchasing electric buses

The final budget requires all school districts to use zero-emission school buses that don’t use gasoline by 2035. Starting in 2027, districts can only purchase or lease green buses, or they must require the same of companies they contract with for transportation services.

This follows a law passed by New York City Council in November 2021 requiring that all school buses in use are zero-emission by 2035. Roughly 10,000 school buses service New York City, according to the New York State Association for Pupil Transportation, or NYAPT.

Former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio had committed last April to changing 75 of 960 city-operated buses to electric by 2023, costing $30 million. The city contracts with other companies to run other school buses. An education department spokesperson said there have been no changes to de Blasio’s commitment.

Hochul had pitched the change in her budget proposal in January, earning pushback from NYAPT and other school advocates over the complicated logistics that could arise from the mandate. The groups worried about the costs that would come along with the mandate, such as building charging stations.

To meet the mandate, a district without any electric buses would have to convert close to 8% of its fleet on average annually in order to meet the new requirements by 2035.

NYAPT estimated the new mandate will cost at least $1 billion a year across the state, assuming about 4,000 new zero-emission buses are purchased annually. That organization had called for allowing districts to convert 5% of their fleets annually beginning in 2029, or pushing the start date of the mandate out to 2035, while letting districts choose a fleet of all-electric school buses or “a diversified fleet of school buses is more appropriate when considering the safety, environmental, and economic factors of their school district.”

A spokesperson for the association did not immediately share its response to the final budget.

The budget dedicates $500 million for zero-emission school buses in the state’s environmental bond act, a borrowing plan that must still be approved by voters this November. It also allows districts to apply for a two-year extension to meet the requirements of transitioning their fleets.

Dedrick, from the state’s superintendents group, said the $500 million allocation “will be a significant help to school districts.”

Private special education funding

Advocates and education policymakers had hoped for changes in how New York funds state-approved, privately run special education programs that serve thousands of school-age and preschool children with severe disabilities.

But those requests didn’t make it into the final budget.

Advocates welcomed a commitment from Hochul to boost funding for these programs by $240 million. But there was no final deal to freeze a complicated policy called “reconciliation,” which they argue could make the funding increase moot.

Under reconciliation, not only must programs return state funding they don’t use in a given school year, they also lose that funding in the following year. That means, for example, that if a teacher quits, and the school is unable to hire a replacement, then the school will not get the money for that position in the following year, said Chris Treiber, associate executive director for children’s services at InterAgency Council of Developmental Disabilities Agencies, Inc., which represents these programs.

“Our schools are so understaffed, they’re unable to recruit teachers, teacher assistants and clinicians,” Treiber said. “If they had to spend all this money in one fiscal year, they never would be able to.”

Last school year, 853 schools which serve school-age children had a teacher vacancy rate of 29%, while preschool programs had a vacancy rate of 33%, according to figures from Treiber’s organization.

The final budget allows these programs to retain a certain portion of unspent funding. Over the next three years, schools can hold on to up to 11% of surplus funding. That percentage would decrease to 8% in the 2025-2026 school year, to 5% the following year, and then 2% by 2027-2028 and annually after that. Treiber said his organization is still working to understand how exactly this would impact their programs.

Stagnant state funding has contributed to the closure of these programs and a shortage of seats for 3- and 4-year-olds with disabilities.

More than 22,000 New York City children are enrolled in these programs. Rate increases for the preschool special education programs stalled after the 2008 recession. Since 2015-16, the state has approved a 2% annual rate increase, which trails what public schools and programs for older children have received.

Hochul vetoed a bill in December that would have provided preschool special education programs with the same annual rate increase that school districts receive.

On Monday, State Education Commissioner Betty Rosa said she’s concerned about these programs closing due to funding issues, leaving children with the most severe disabilities with fewer options. Her team also requested just over $1 million to begin reviewing the tuition rate-setting methodology, but that, too, was left out of the final budget.

“While we are still looking at this issue, we do believe the tuition rate setting methodology is one that has to be addressed,” Rosa said. “We are hopeful we can continue the dialogue because there has to be a full understanding of the long-term implication this has.”

More mental health and tuition help

A total of $100 million in state grant matching funds will be available over the next two years to match what school districts are spending to address the fallout from the pandemic, including for student mental health and academic recovery. Hochul pitched this in her budget proposal in hopes of helping school districts address a youth mental health crisis spreading across the nation.

That funding will match what school districts are spending, including on extended day and after school programs and hiring mental health professionals.

The state will also spend $150 million toward New York’s Tuition Assistance Program in order to help cover tuition for 75,000 more part-time college students.

Christina Veiga contributed.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Correction: This story previously stated the state has expanded free child care. In fact, more families will now qualify for subsidized care, but families will still be required to contribute a co-payment capped at 10% of their income.

NYC schools have spent just half of this year’s COVID relief, report says

2022-04-12T22:32:08+00:00

Last spring, New York City schools celebrated its receipt of $7 billion in federal stimulus dollars as the administration of former Mayor Bill de Blasio planned how it would reopen buildings following two school years disrupted by the pandemic.

But as of the first week of March, the education department had spent just half of the $3 billion in federal COVID stimulus dollars it had planned to spend through June 30, according to a new report from Comptroller Brad Lander. All of the money can be spent through the 2024-2025 school year.

De Blasio and his administration last year devised a plan to spend those stimulus dollars on a slew of items. That included operating school buildings, extra academic support for students, and an ambitious new reading and math curriculum.

The report, based on data obtained from the education department, found the city has spent:

Less than a quarter of the $984 million plan for boosting academic recovery and instructional support
24% of what had been planned for investments to care for “the whole child,” which includes social emotional supports
65% of costs associated with reopening school buildings

The education department called the report a “mischaracterization of our stimulus spending to date” because “the snapshot of data as of early March does not account for all spending,” said Dan Weisberg, first deputy chancellor, in a statement.

“This funding continues to be available to the Department of Education beyond this year, and we are evaluating ways to utilize any unspent funds to continue supporting students and schools going forward,” Weisberg continued.

New York City’s slow spending mirrors issues seen in school systems across the nation facing labor shortages and supply chain issues that have struggled to spend their COVID relief dollars.

In response to questions from the comptroller’s office, education department staff blamed the underspending on many reasons, including pandemic-related delays, difficulties in hiring and supply chain issues, and problems with contracting and procurement, the report said.

But separately, a department spokesperson said the “full and final account” of stimulus spending won’t be known until the fall, when the city completes its fiscal year accounting. She added that spending in many categories, such as building accessibility, will rise “significantly” before the end of this fiscal year.

Reasons for underspending can include “work not beginning until later in the fiscal year to goods and services having not yet been fully received,” for various initiatives, the spokesperson said.

In a news release, Lander raised concerns about his office’s findings.

“The city cannot afford to squander this opportunity to invest in the programs and supports to help our young people begin to succeed again academically, process the trauma they’ve experienced, and address long-standing inequities in our school system,” he said. “We still have an opportunity to spend this one-time funding wisely – but the clock is ticking.”

In some areas, the department appeared to be near or on track with that spending. It has spent most of the money it earmarked for reopening school campuses, which includes health and safety costs, and to “maintain current services.” It spent about 70% for its Summer Rising program that wrapped up in August, but city officials said the remainder of the money can be used in the future.

The comptroller’s office raised concerns about the low spending for academics and so-called “supporting the whole child” initiatives, which include social and mental health supports. Spending delays, the report said, “mean that schools are failing to provide urgently needed additional support” after “the trauma of the prior two school years.”

Slow spending on academic support

The city has spent 22% of the nearly $1 billion it had planned for extra academic support and programs, the report found. Included in that bucket was $350 million that went directly to schools to provide extra tutoring for their students and professional support for teachers. Schools have spent just under a third of that money, according to the report. Chalkbeat reported in February that some school leaders were struggling to spend this money because they couldn’t persuade enough staff to work overtime and oversee such programs and services. This money was reserved for this year only, and schools must return any unused money.

Academic recovery also included a $49 million initiative called “Early Literacy for All,” which included a tool to screen K-2 students for reading skills, as well as hiring more reading coaches and providing more training to K-2 teachers. The city has spent $10 million for this.

The department has only spent 12% of the $251 million it planned for extra support in special education and creating more pre-K special education seats. At least $158 million of that money went directly to schools to provide extra services for students with disabilities. But Chalkbeat recently reported that just 35% of the children who were offered services will have participated. On top of staffing issues, children were not guaranteed transportation to these programs, and some parents said it was unclear what services their children would receive.

About $17 million has been spent of $202 million planned for the creation of a new culturally responsive reading and math curriculum, called “Mosaic.” The plan was originally to roll out the curriculum by the fall of 2023, but education department officials told the New York Daily News last month that it will only be available to middle school grades by then.

Low spending on ‘whole child’ investments

Similar to academics, the city has spent about 24% of its planned investments in initiatives to support “the whole child.” The city has spent just a third of its planned $80 million for social-emotional support, which includes plans to hire more social workers and a three-year, $18 million contract for a screener for schools to assess their students’ social-emotional skills. Officials have spent $1 million of the $12 million reserved for expanding restorative justice programs.

Lander’s office noted that these funds can be rolled into the $1.8 billion in federal funds planned to be spent next fiscal year, which begins July 1. They can either be used as planned or allocated to different priorities.

The report suggests the department could use unspent funds to provide salary parity to teachers and staff at community-based preschool special education programs. It could also be used to increase support for English language learners, for whom advocates had hoped there would be specific, dedicated COVID stimulus funding, similar to the money for students with disabilities.

The education department is expected to release an updated spending plan for stimulus dollars “in the coming weeks,” according to Lander’s report.

Here is a link to the report.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

NYC created a massive after-school program to help all students with disabilities catch up after COVID disruptions. Most never showed up.

2022-04-07T10:45:00+00:00

This is part of an ongoing collaborative series between Chalkbeat and THE CITY investigating learning differences, special education, and other education challenges in city schools.

Bronx mom Damaris Rodriguez jumped at the chance to sign her son up for the city’s ambitious after-school program designed to help students with disabilities catch up after two years of disrupted learning.

Maliek, an 11-year-old on the autism spectrum, had missed speech and occupational therapy sessions, which sometimes overlapped with other remote instruction. So when he started attending this year’s after-school recovery program, his mom was surprised to hear he was mostly receiving math tutoring rather than the therapies he had missed.

“I was never told exactly what services he’s going to get,” Rodriguez said. “In my mind, it was ‘where’s the OT?’”

With no yellow bus service, transportation was a struggle. Plus, at pick up, he seemed exhausted and frustrated.

After a little more than a month, she stopped sending him.

The special education recovery program was pitched as a cornerstone of former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to help students make up for lost learning during COVID. The city set aside about $200 million of federal stimulus funding to enable every school to create their own after-school and Saturday programs, offering small group sessions in reading and math or services like speech and physical therapy that had been difficult to deliver remotely.

“The bottom line is we’re going to do something that’s never been done in the history of New York City public schools, huge new investments, very bold and ambitious approaches to bring us back from COVID and then go farther,” de Blasio said last summer.

But interviews with over a dozen parents, educators, and advocates suggest that the program’s rollout hasn’t matched the mayor’s soaring rhetoric, even as some parents say their children have benefited from the additional help.

Education department officials said the program was offered to all of the city’s roughly 192,000 students with disabilities. By the end of the school year, education officials expect 35% of these students across the city will have received the extra, voluntary services. Education department spokesman Nathaniel Styer declined to say how many students have participated to date.

The program got off to a shaky start, with the education department delaying implementation until December at many schools. School leaders couldn’t find enough educators interested in working after hours, and school officials did not guarantee yellow bus transportation, making it difficult for many children to participate.

Some parents were turned off by limited communication about what services their children would receive, even as officials vowed the program would be individually tailored based on conversations between families and teachers.

On top of that, key details were left up to individual principals, which allowed them to be flexible and meet students’ needs, but also created big gaps in the type and quantity of available services.

At certain schools, the program lasted just 10 weeks, while others are continuing through the end of the school year. City guidance said students should be eligible for additional cycles of services “as needed” beyond the fall. And with the education department’s blessing, schools had the option to provide recovery services virtually, which garnered mixed reactions among parents.

“It seems to be really inconsistent in how much they’ve been able to do for kids at different schools,” said Maggie Moroff, a special education expert at Advocates for Children, a nonprofit group. Schools are “offering what they have as opposed to what the kids need.”

Education department spokesperson Suzan Sumer emphasized the benefits of giving school leaders some leeway in running their own programs: “Our schools know our students best, and this program operates at the school level to give our students exactly what they need.”

Parents give mixed reviews

For Manhattan mom Carolyn Castro, the extra instruction has been a big help for her 8-year-old son Michael, who has a language-based learning disability.

Michael slid backward during the pandemic as his previous school struggled to provide individual help with reading and writing skills. Assignments that should have taken 20 minutes dragged on for hours.

This year, Michael is in third grade at Manhattan’s Central Park East II, where he’s getting 45 minutes a day of recovery services after school, including additional occupational therapy, which is helping him with skills such as properly writing between the lines and spacing out words on the page.

“He’s reading independently. He’s writing independently — it’s half a sentence, but it’s progress from last year,” Castro said.

Carolyn Castro with her son, Michael.

But other parents said the program wasn’t what they hoped.

Brooklyn mom Michelle B. said there was no teacher available during her 12-year-old son’s first day, so he mostly played the video game Fortnite. The second session was focused on reading even though she believed he needed the most help with math.

After just a couple weeks she pulled her son, who she said fell behind during remote learning and suffers from anxiety along with outbursts that she believes are related to his academic challenges.

“I did hope that something would take shape, but it didn’t look like anything was going to get any better,” said Michelle, who asked that her last name be withheld.

Jeannine Timpone also pulled her 14-year-old daughter from her school’s program offering one hour of instruction per week with an online computer tutorial called IXL, where students would work on math lessons on their own under the supervision of a teacher.

Timpone said her daughter learns best from direct instruction. Additionally, the Bronx school offered no busing services, which would have forced Thompson to pick her daughter up at 2:30 p.m. on Mondays and drive her back to school for an hour at 4 p.m.

“They never sat with me or confirmed anything with me, so it’s not an individual recovery program,” said Timpone. “If you don’t provide the right services, I’m not sending her.”

Instead, Timpone enrolled her daughter in a paid tutoring program to ensure she didn’t fall even further behind.

Not only did some parents stop sending their children — some schools stopped offering services.

In Manhattan, one ninth grade teacher said she was able to offer her students one 10-week cycle — totaling 20 hours — of what she described as virtual tutoring. Her students also received an hour a week of extra speech therapy from a different instructor.

But her principal halted the program at the end of February, after the cycle completed, citing lack of communication and uncertainty about funding from the Department of Education.

“The idea was we would do some kind of assessment, but nobody has asked me to show any assessment of their growth,” said the teacher, who requested that her name not be published. “[Our principal] hadn’t gotten any guidance about whether the DOE would give them more funding, so we stopped.”

Long day can be hard on kids and teachers

Enticing students who are already struggling with school to stay for more academic enrichment has been a challenge — and so has luring teachers who may be burned out themselves after two years of pandemic-related disruptions, said Matt Brownstein, an assistant principal at P.S. 330 in Queens.

There have been some benefits to the program, including giving students additional focused reading instruction and creating opportunities for extra help without pulling students out of their classrooms, Brownstein said. But he wishes that schools had flexibility to spend the funding on instruction students are getting during the regular school day, such as additional literacy coaching for teachers.

“All in all, it’s more time with kids. It’s not bad,” Brownstein said of the academic recovery program. Still, after a full school day, “it’s not [the] time that kids are doing the most productive learning.”

Some schools have recognized that the long day is hard on their students and have tried to partner with families to make the time work. Brooklyn mom Sandra Pelligrini said the principal at P.S. 164 made accommodations for her twin 7-year-old sons, allowing them to attend her school’s 3-hour program for just 90 minutes every Wednesday, with their speech and physical therapy moved to the beginning of the session.

“She really made it work so that they got the services and they had the shorter time,” said Pelligrini.

Sandra Pelligrini, a mom of twin sons at PS 164 in Brooklyn.

Other schools have used the time in less conventional ways.

Amy Tsai said her 10th grade son, who has autism and attends a District 75 school for students with more serious disabilities, was ultimately offered a virtual recovery program from 5 to 7 p.m. twice a week. Rather than offering academic work, the school is focusing on social-emotional activities such as restorative circles where students can talk about how they’re feeling.

“He enjoys it, because he gets to at least have a conversation as opposed to always work, work work,” Tsai said. He also participates in virtual sessions of speech therapy on Saturdays, which she said had been helpful.

(From left) Amy Tsai’s children, Michaelangelo and Seanmichael’s, participated in the recovery program for students with disabilities.

Still, after her son spent much of the last two years learning remotely, she wishes he could have attended the program in person with dedicated bus service and focused more on academic work to help him adjust to the rigors of high school. She was also frustrated that the services offered across schools were inconsistent. Meanwhile, her other high-school aged son, who is in ninth grade, received in-person services that stopped after 10 weeks.

“It shouldn’t be that one school is having more than the other,” Tsai said. The program “just didn’t seem like it was what it was promoted as.”

NY judge tosses lawsuit for students with disabilities seeking services lost during the pandemic

2022-03-30T21:02:03+00:00

A federal judge dismissed a class action lawsuit this week that attempted to force the city’s education department to fast-track makeup services for students with disabilities in response to pandemic-related disruptions.

The lawsuit, filed in November 2020 by the nonprofit Advocates for Children, claimed that tens of thousands of students with disabilities missed crucial services and instruction after the city’s school buildings shut down. In the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, city officials struggled to provide functional remote learning devices for every student, leaving some without access to instruction. Some services such as physical therapy were extremely difficult to deliver virtually.

Students with disabilities have a right to “compensatory services” if their school doesn’t provide the specialized instruction or therapies listed on their Individualized Education Program or IEP. But the process for seeking those makeup services in New York City has faced extreme backlogs, with cases often taking hundreds of days to resolve despite the legal limit of 75 days. In its lawsuit, Advocates for Children argued the city should create a streamlined process due to the urgent need for makeup services.

A New York federal judge rejected that argument this week and dismissed the lawsuit. He noted that none of the families involved in the suit attempted to use the existing administrative process, which involves requesting an “impartial hearing” with an officer who reviews the evidence and adjudicates the dispute.

“That they want to speed up the process of obtaining compensatory education does not change the fact that the administrative process provides the exact relief sought,” wrote the judge, Andrew L. Carter Jr. “Plaintiffs must exhaust their claims before coming to federal court.”

Advocates for Children was “disappointed by the decision and are considering all options,” the organization’s litigation director, Rebecca Shore, wrote in an email. She did not immediately say whether the organization planned to appeal.

The ruling comes as federal education officials have urged school districts to proactively determine whether students with disabilities need additional services after two years of interrupted schooling. Many school districts are grappling with whether and how to provide additional tutoring, therapies, or other special education services. Federal officials say some districts have incorrectly assumed they don’t have to provide make-up services because the pandemic-related disruptions to student services weren’t their fault.

New York City has taken some steps to catch students up, including a program launched this school year that offers additional instruction and related services such as occupational therapy outside the regular school day.

“We are committed to providing students with disabilities in DOE schools additional services to address unfinished learning disrupted during the pandemic by proactively developing and implementing a special education academic recovery services program this year,” wrote Nathaniel Styer, an education department spokesperson.

Styer said the city strives to provide services without going through the hearing process and will continue to assess students’ needs during IEP meetings, which are held with parents and school officials to determine what services students are entitled to.

Jesse Cutler, a lawyer who handles special education cases at Skyer Law, said it is rare for the city to proactively offer compensatory services during students’ IEP meetings. And the reviews of the after-school and Saturday programs have been mixed, with some parents saying the sessions haven’t been specifically tailored to their child’s needs.

Advocates said that without a streamlined process for offering makeup services, families will get tangled in the existing impartial hearing process or may simply forgo support to which they’re entitled.

“These existing procedures are time-consuming and often favor families able to afford lawyers, leaving economically disadvantaged students behind,” wrote Isabella Rieke, a spokesperson for Advocates for Children. “This is especially true now, given how backlogged and overburdened the city’s special education impartial hearing system already is.”

The judge wrote that he was “sympathetic to the fact that some families may face some difficulty navigating the administrative hearing process,” but emphasized that the court should give some allowances for delays resolving cases owing to disruption caused by the pandemic.

As recently as December, the impartial hearing office had a backlog of 16,000 cases, as the number of complaints filed has grown considerably in recent years. But delays were pervasive even before the pandemic hit. In February 2020, the average time it took to close a case was 259 days. (City and state officials did not immediately provide more recent figures.)

City officials have launched an overhaul of the impartial hearing system, though Cutler said there are still significant delays and some cases are taking 150 days to be placed before a hearing officer.

“That’s five months. That puts us into the end of the summer before a hearing officer is even assigned,” he said. “Kids are back in school. If there’s a 265 day delay, that’s problematic.”

Kalyn Belsha contributed.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org

To reduce stigma, New York moves to change ‘emotional disturbance’ label to ‘emotional disability’

2022-03-14T21:30:51+00:00

Roughly 8,400 of New York City students with disabilities are classified as having an “emotional disturbance,” a term that has rankled advocates and families for creating a stigma around behavioral challenges. That term may soon be scrapped.

New York state officials proposed Monday to end using the term emotional disturbance as a designation for children who struggle with regulating their behaviors, including certain mental illnesses.

Policymakers want to replace the term with “emotional disability,” in hopes that it will reduce the stigma that may come along with “emotionally disturbed.”

The matter will go out for a 60-day public comment period before it gets a final vote from the state’s Board of Regents later this year.

If the change is finalized, New York would join 13 other states that use “emotional disability.” Currently, New York is one of 27 states that use “emotional disturbance” or “serious emotional disturbance.”

State Education Commissioner Betty Rosa called the change “critical” because the current terminology “created the kind of labeling and internalizing for young people that really did not serve them well.”

The current terminology, advocates and families say, disparages students with behavioral differences and is applied disproportionately to Black students. In the 2020-21 school year, Black students comprised nearly 48% of those who were labeled as emotionally disturbed, even though they make up roughly a quarter of all students. Three-quarters of students with this label were boys.

State officials first considered changing the term in January 2020, then paused as they responded to the pandemic. Currently, emotional disturbance is one of 13 designations for students with disabilities. The definition of who qualifies as having an emotional disturbance can be broad and somewhat vague. A student might meet the criteria, for instance, if over a long period of time they cannot create “satisfactory” relationships with students and teachers or they display “inappropriate” behaviors “under normal circumstances.” Children with a “pervasive” mood of unhappiness or depression could be classified with the disability as can those who exhibit “physical symptoms or fears associated with personal or school problems.”

The number of children classified as emotionally disturbed dropped more than 16% last school year from 2018-2019, according to city data. The dip, however, could be the result of fewer referrals for special education services during the pandemic.

Last fall, state officials surveyed nearly 1,100 people — including special education teachers, families of students with disabilities, and related service providers — on their opinions about the term “emotional disturbance.” Eighty-nine percent of respondents said the term carried a negative perception, according to the state.

Lori Podvesker, a policy expert at disability rights advocacy organization INCLUDEnyc, applauded the change and called it “the beginning” of a systematic change in how people think about students with various disabilities.

The term emotional disturbance “implies that a student is extremely disruptive and demonizes” them, Podvesker said. That could affect how a teacher or someone else aware of the label treats a student. In contrast, using the word “disability” makes it clear that these students are a protected class of people, just like other people with disabilities, she said.

“The cultural implications of this and the power of language and how it will help us as a system humanize people with mental health disabilities is paramount,” Podvesker said.

Podvesker pointed to how students classified as having an emotional disturbance were disproportionately placed in District 75 programs — where they learn alongside other students who have more severe disabilities — when compared to students with disabilities citywide. She hopes that Monday’s move is one of many steps that could further integrate students with disabilities with their peers without disabilities.

“If we can talk about these kids and educate them in a way that we see autistic kids or kids with learning disabilities, we can get these kids into general education settings and change their lives,” Podvesker said.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Here’s how NYC schools are spending $7 billion in COVID federal relief

2022-03-08T23:10:11+00:00

With a stalled economy and projections of plummeting tax revenue, elected officials feared last winter that school budgets across New York would have to be slashed. Then, the federal government approved billions of dollars in relief to local governments and school districts, including more than $7 billion for New York City schools.

Families and educators dreamed big. Many called for smaller class sizes. They wanted more social workers and reading specialists. They wished for new after-school programs and devices for children, according to readers responding to a Chalkbeat survey last spring.

Some of the funding will cover many of the items on the readers’ wishlists, as well as providing funds to cover the costs of keeping school buildings operating and academic recovery, according to an analysis by the Independent Budget Office, or IBO. But the largest chunk — about $1.9 billion — will be for an expansion of the city’s prekindergarten program for 3-year-olds over the next several years.

A little less than half of the total pot is being spent this school year, with the rest earmarked for initiatives through the 2024-25 school year. Mayor Eric Adams, who took office in January, inherited spending plans outlined by his predecessor, Bill de Blasio. He signaled last month that he supported the pre-K spending but could change other plans before the stimulus funds run out.

“We’re going to examine the dollars we have remaining to spend and make sure that we spend it correctly,” Adams told reporters. “Would I have done some things differently? Yes. But we have to look at what’s in front of us right now.”

Advocates and parent leaders say there is still confusion on how the nation’s largest school system is using this windfall of COVID relief, as well as what it means at the school level. The publicly available data doesn’t show how individual schools spent their portions of COVID relief — and much of the money is being spent centrally.

“Parents are actually really interested, especially when they hear the dollar amount,” said Jasmine Gripper, executive director of Alliance for Quality Education, a school funding advocacy group. “They’re asking, ‘How do I see what my school got or what my school is doing with it?’”

Chalkbeat looked at the top line funding breakdown to spell out how the money will be spent this year and down the road.

Where the money is going this year

New York City’s education department has earmarked 43% of its stimulus money for covering expenses during this fiscal year, which ends June 30. To date, the city has spent about half of that $3.1 billion, per an IBO spending tracker.

The single largest piece of the pie for this year — about $820 million — is propping up “existing costs that might otherwise have required budget cuts if we had not received federal aid,” according to an education department spending plan. Asked for more details, a department spokesperson said this money includes “supporting custodial workers who helped keep school communities safe during these challenging times.” (Similarly, the first COVID relief package the city ever received — separate from the $7 billion in stimulus dollars currently in play — was used to cover paychecks for custodians.)

The city has also created various programs to catch students up this year, including its summer enrichment program before the start of this school year, assessments to screen for literacy, extra services for students with disabilities, and other academic recovery initiatives. Taken together, these programs add up to more than $750 million.

Part of this is $350 million that the city sent directly to schools to create their own after-school or weekend tutoring programs, provide extra support for English language learners, offer more professional development and boost arts programming. While they can spend the money to pay teachers overtime to run any programs they create, they can’t hire new full-time staff since the funding is temporary. But as some schools have found it difficult to persuade burned-out staff to work overtime, they may have to return unused dollars to the education department.

Roughly $200 million is being spent on a massive project to create a new universal math and English curriculum called “Mosaic,” meant to focus on the diversity of the school system’s students. That curriculum is expected to be in schools by the fall of 2023.

City leaders have planned to spend about $80 million on mental health this fiscal year. The money is covering hiring more social workers so every school has at least one full-time social worker or access to a school-based mental health clinic, according to officials. This funding also includes the cost for a new social-emotional screening tool, used to see where students may need more support in bolstering social skills after prolonged isolation due to the pandemic.

Category	Description	Funding
"Maintain current services"	Pays for "existing costs" that might have been cut without federal aid	$823M
Universal 3-K	Expanding preschool for 3-year-olds	$378M
Academic recovery	Money for schools to create extra tutoring programs, provide professional development, cover certain salaries and create more arts programming	$350M
Special education	After-school and weekend programs for students with disabilities, additional pre-K special education seats, extra support to eligible students ages 21+	$251M
Universal Mosaic Curriculum	Creating a new English and math curriculum that reflects "the variety of histories, languages and experiences that make up the city."	$202M
Miscellaneous	Variety of "smaller projects such as school safety training and professional development." (DOE did not provide further details)	$175M
Restoring enrichment programs	Restoring previously slashed programs for arts, Learning to Work, "Equity & Excellence" programming, such as AP For All	$172M
Backfill cuts for school funding	Held schools harmless for last year's enrollment drops	$150M
Reopening school buildings	Health and safety costs associated with reoopening buildings during the pandemic, including covering extra staff	$135M
Technology and devices	Buying more devices, expanding Computer Science For All, training 5,000 educators in advanced computer science	$122M
Summer Rising	Creating universal summer school in the summer of 2021	$100M
Fair Student Funding	Ensuring every school received 100% of funding through the city's formula	$95M
Social-emotional and mental health support	Hiring more social workers and buying a social-emotional screener for schools to assess their students	$80M
Building infrastructure	Updating buildings and making them more accessible	$70M
Early Literacy for All	A screening tool and training to evaluate K-2 students, hiring additional teachers and literacy coaches for interventions.	$49M
Restarting and expanding school sports	Creating more high school sports programming	$21M
Expansion of restorative justice programs	The DOE did not provide further details	$12M
College and career readiness	College counseling for all juniors and seniors, expanding college-credit courses, and mentorship opportunities for immigrant students	$10M
Expand community schools	Increase the number of community schools to 400	$10M

COVID stimulus spending for the 2021-2022 school year

Concerns for the future

The relief money runs out by the end of the 2024-2025 school year, and 56% of the city’s pot is being spent on programs that are expected to expire.

But the temporary cash infusion is also funding some long-term projects — like mental health support and the expansion of 3-K —that the city envisions continuing after federal funding runs out.

Those programs will require the city to pony up $802 million annually, starting in the summer of 2025, according to the IBO.

City officials have repeatedly said they expect city revenue to improve greatly with time as the economy bounces back from the pandemic.

The IBO is more cautious. “This optimism,” the IBO warned in a report, “is not reflected in the revenue outlook in the financial plan for the adopted budget, however, raising questions about the sustainability of these expanded DOE programs.”

The state required districts to explain how they’ll pay for long-term programs once federal relief funding runs out. The education department’s public-facing presentation has no explanation about this, and officials declined to provide further information.

“They do have the time to fix it if they’re willing to find the efficiencies elsewhere and prioritize,” said Ana Champeny, deputy research director for Citizens Budget Commission, a budget watchdog group.

Concerns about transparency

The rollout of the funding has raised questions about the transparency of the spending, as well as how education officials will measure success or progress of programs meant to help students catch up academically.

When creating their spending plan, education department officials solicited feedback from families last school year, receiving about 2,000 emailed responses, a spokesperson said. Officials held town halls in each borough, where they said they polled “thousands” of attendees to help the education department rank its proposed investments. But those meetings were overshadowed by discussions about building reopening plans and other COVID safety measures, parent leaders say.

Harlem resident Gisele Hearn, who is active with the PTA at Thurgood Marshall Lower Academy, where her grandson is a fifth grader, said she wasn’t aware of those town halls. Had she been, she would have advocated to fund tutoring parents and caregivers in math since their children turn to them for help. She also would have liked funding to address overcrowding at her grandson’s school.

When state lawmakers passed a budget last April, they required school districts to solicit feedback from the public and explain on their websites how they’re spending federal COVID relief dollars. The city’s education department has posted various details of their plan, but it’s not easily accessible on its website and requires some digging to find.

Gripper, from Alliance for Quality Education, wants data on how students are progressing through the year.

For example, her organization has been seeking an explanation from the education department on how they measured success in the city’s Summer Rising program, which for the first time opened summer school to all students who wanted a seat. The scaled-up program had a messy rollout but served as an important bridge to the fall for children who had not attended school in person since March 2020.

“We would like the city to be more intentional and more transparent about how students are doing,” Gripper said.

Andrew Rein, executive director of the Citizens Budget Commission, agreed. There’s a difference between outlining academic recovery costs, for example, and describing what the end goal is.

“Not only do we have to track the dollars, but we also have to make sure the dollars deliver what the students need,” Rein said. “How do we know that’s actually happening?”

The education department has required most students to take a battery of assessments in order to measure where they stand academically after two disrupted school years. They have not released test results, though some experts cautioned that information might not be useful because there might not be enough data to compare results, or because the variety of assessment options available to schools might complicate the data.

Education department officials did not share any specific benchmarks for the projects funded with stimulus money.

“At this time, our main focus and priority is on championing our school leaders and teachers to utilize the data found through screeners to understand students’ strengths and where supports are needed,” a spokesperson said.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

11th-hour changes may be coming to NYC’s high school admissions

2022-03-04T20:14:32+00:00

Despite New York City’s looming high school application deadline, last-minute changes might be on the horizon, schools Chancellor David Banks suggested Friday.

Banks has been listening to concerns from parents and elected officials about the new admissions process and could announce changes “very early next week, Monday or Tuesday, exactly what position we will take,” he said during a state hearing over mayoral control of city schools.

Every New York City public school student must apply to attend high school. They rank their top-12 high school programs and are eventually matched with a school. Banks noted that he’s up against a deadline: Applications are due March 11. Any new changes to the labyrinthine admissions process stand to cause panic among families who have navigated the new system and have already submitted applications or have, at the least, decided which schools to rank.

Banks didn’t detail what changes he’s considering, but he noted that the process at some of the city’s coveted “screened” schools is a lottery this year — which has resulted in backlash from parents of students with high grades and been criticized for harming Asian American students.

“It’s a process that I kind of inherited as I got here, and I didn’t have a long time to fully absorb all of it,” Banks told state lawmakers. “And I know decisions had to be made for parents to know what’s going to be happening for next year ... And if there’s a change that’s going to be made, you’ll know about that over the next couple of days.”

Announced this winter, the process now includes a “centralized” screening rubric that schools can choose to use instead of creating their own admissions criteria. Schools can screen for grades from a student’s seventh and eighth grade years — whenever their marks are the highest. They cannot consider attendance or test scores, since last year’s state tests were opt-in and most students did not take them.

This year, students will be placed in four different groups based on how high their grades are. The education department will then run a lottery, beginning with the students with the highest marks.

While most high schools in New York City have no admissions criteria, about 100 screen for at least one program. Eight of the city’s prestigious specialized high schools admit students based on an exam. (A ninth specialized school for the arts uses auditions.)

Integration advocates welcomed the changes, but backlash stemmed from families of children with high grades about how students will be chosen.

At a Queens public meeting last month, department officials said they expect the new process to result in a 13% increase in offers made to Black and Latino students, who, along with English language learners, students with disabilities, and low-income students, are underrepresented at many of the city’s most competitive schools

Vocal parents have complained that the new model doesn’t acknowledge the hard work of students with top grades, and that the rigor of instruction will be watered down if students with a greater range of academic achievement are admitted to the city’s most competitive schools.

Felicia Wilson, a parent in Morris Park in the Bronx, hasn’t been very concerned about the new lottery system because there aren’t as many screened schools in the Bronx as other boroughs. She’s not sure she wants her son traveling very far because she’s worried about his safety, so Wilson said she would like to see more screened schools in her borough.

The biggest obstacle in the process, she said, has been simply trying to find information about schools near her. Wilson started a Facebook group just for Bronx parents weighing their high school options, but said it would be more helpful if the city centralized information, such as when campuses host open houses.

“If you are a parent who is in the Bronx, a lot of the schools that are here are not being talked about in those groups, and a lot of the schools that are also being talked about tend to be the schools that are the screened schools — the schools that everybody is killing themselves to get into,” she said. “If you’re a Bronx parent, a lot of the things that they’re talking about may not apply to you.”

Francine Almash, a member of the Citywide Council on High Schools, an education department advisory group, said she has been dismayed by debate around the lottery system. She said it has taken focus away from how the process disadvantages certain students, including those who, like her own son, have a disability.

“I am of the camp that I thought the high school process was bad to begin with. I actually think the changes that we’re making are a move in the right direction,” she said. “I actually think there is a small number of parents making a lot of noise about this idea, that one of the things that’s happening is that we’re losing our ability to sort and segregate students the way we used to be able to.”

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Christina Veiga is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on school diversity and preschool. Contact Christina at cveiga@chalkbeat.org.

How a hamburger emoji became a powerful teaching tool

2022-03-03T13:00:00+00:00

When COVID-19 hit, I was a fifth grade special educator teaching in a general classroom set up to support students with autism spectrum disorder. As is typical of children with autism, my students do really well with structure and knowing what to expect. When the pandemic arrived, my students had so many questions about what would come next — and we didn’t have the answers.

I remember sitting in “afternoon circle” with my students, asking them to share how they were feeling. They were scared about school closing. They were worried about not seeing their teachers and their friends. They were scared that members of their own families might die. This is heavy stuff for developing brains.

Christina Ramsay

As we shifted to remote learning, I did my best to incorporate as many in-person routines as I could into our virtual classroom to make it feel “normal” and positive. Yet despite our best efforts, things weren’t normal. I could tell some of our students struggled to connect, communicate, and come out of their shells.

One of my fifth grade students was learning several grade levels behind. Her family recently immigrated to America and did not speak English, so I used Google Translate and relied on another teacher in our school who spoke Russian to communicate with her.

This student wasn’t on the autism spectrum, but her family had recently immigrated to America, and she benefited from many of the same interventions as my other students. She was very quiet and shy, so I’d ask her if she understood the material, and I’d call her name to see if she had questions. Although we worked in small groups, she wouldn’t tell my co-teacher and me if she didn’t understand something.

I texted my co-teacher: ‘There’s a hamburger in the chat; I’m going to a breakout room.’

She stayed on her computer during lunch, and I began to build a relationship with her. Eventually, she told me, “I like learning in school better than I like learning online.” I asked her what was different about being in school versus online, what she liked about in-school learning, and what was hard about being online.

She said, “When I’m in school, the teacher walks around the room, and she can see what I’m working on. She can whisper suggestions to me, but you can’t do that online.”

I thought, “Maybe we can.” I told her we should brainstorm on a solution. We settled on choosing an emoji she could enter into our class chat. Only she and I knew what the emoji meant.

“It’s kind of like you whispering to me that you need help,” I told her. “When I see your emoji, we can go into a breakout room, and it’s just you and me. We can work together.”

The hamburger emoji strategy was born.

When she entered the hamburger emoji in the chat, I texted my co-teacher: “There’s a hamburger in the chat; I’m going to a breakout room.”

Because I was using Pear Deck, a presentation tool that engages students in individual and social learning, I could also privately view her activity on the interactive slides. I could see if she had (or hadn’t) started to answer a question. And she could use the tool to ask for help discreetly when she was stuck. By the end of the school year, she was my student who’d improved the most. She started the year below second-grade level, and she was achieving at a fourth-grade level by June.

To celebrate at the end of the year, I invited her into a breakout room and told her how proud we were of her work. She had the biggest smile on her face. Something as simple as a hamburger emoji made all the difference for her — not just for her grades but also for her confidence and sense of belonging.

Many students worry that their peers will overhear them asking for help. They worry about being judged. That’s where technology can come in — allowing students to connect with their teachers in private, judgment-free ways. This continues to be true in person; we now use Chromebooks and iPads in our physical classroom to inspire and elevate quieter voices. The lesson of the hamburger emoji will be with me for many years to come as I seek to create a more equitable learning environment for all of my students.

Christina Ramsay is currently a third grade special education teacher in New York City. She is passionate about teaching and social justice, and seeks to empower her students as well as to help them discover their strengths and talents.

NYC schools received a windfall in relief dollars. Some are struggling to spend it.

2022-02-28T18:43:34+00:00

The promise of more than $7 billion in federal COVID relief funding for New York City schools inspired some families and educators to imagine big changes in this year’s classrooms.

And while hundreds of millions of dollars have been distributed directly to schools to create extra tutoring, professional development, and more arts programming, some schools have struggled to spend the money.

There are varied reasons why some of this funding remains unused. Tutoring and enrichment programs require finding staff to work extra hours in a moment when educators feel overworked. Some parents and students have been slow to sign up for programs held after school or on weekends. In other cases, schools that already receive grants for arts programming are finding it difficult to spend even more money on the arts.

The result could mean schools leave money on the table. Any unspent funds “will not be rolled into next year,” according to a spokesperson for the city’s education department. City officials will review how unused dollars can be spent after this year, but a spokesperson declined to elaborate.

This could put principals in a tricky position, balancing burned out staff with the need to help students.

“People are tired, and it’s difficult to find people at this point that are willing to trade whatever little precious time they have — with families and at home — for money,” said Mark Cannizzaro, president of the principals union.

New York’s experience spending the cash seems to mirror national trends. Schools across the country have had trouble convincing existing staff to take on additional responsibilities, even for extra pay, following several stressful years.

Direct relief to schools

Much of the city’s COVID relief dollars will be spent centrally for school building operations, expanding pre-K for 3-year-olds, and other district-wide initiatives. But hundreds of millions have been sent directly to schools. In one pot, $350 million is slated for academic, arts, and social-emotional support for their students. Each school received between $75,000 to $600,000, based on enrollment and their share of high-needs students. One-fifth of these dollars must be used for arts programming.

The potential uses for the money are broad. Schools are required to use some portion for professional development and planning time for staff overseeing literacy instruction as well as for providing extra support to students learning English as a new language.

In addition to those requirements, schools can use the money to pay teachers overtime for overseeing enrichment programs, to buy supplies for enrichment programs, and to hire outside organizations to oversee extra support for students. And some can also be used to bolster academic recovery programs for students with disabilities, on top of $158 million schools received this fall to help those children, according to education department budget documents.

Schools cannot use their portion of the $350 million to hire full-time staff since it is temporary funding, but principals can spend it on part-time staff in certain areas, such as for art classes. (Officials have urged schools to use funding increases outside of COVID relief to hire more staff if they need.)

It’s unclear how much money city schools have spent. A department spokesperson said it is “too soon” in the school year to provide spending data.

But Cannizzaro, with the principals union, said a “high percentage” of schools have struggled to earmark all of their relief dollars, and he hopes the city will provide more flexibility. “A lot of schools feel they’re gonna end up giving money back,” he said.

Teacher burnout, student turnout

One Manhattan principal has been unable to get more than three teachers to sign up for a new Saturday tutoring program that offers English and math instruction as well as STEM-related activities. At the same time, student turnout has been low. Originally for students with disabilities, the program is now open to any students who need extra help. Separately, the principal used some of the arts funding to hire a vendor who could teach tap dancing.

“We’re not servicing as many kids as we would have liked,” said the principal, who requested anonymity because she was not authorized to speak to the press. “If I can’t spend it all before the deadline, what can I do?”

Recognizing her teachers are burned out, one Bronx principal used some of the COVID relief money to create what she thought to be a low-lift for her staff: a program to tutor elementary students for one-and-a-half hours daily after school. The program serves students with disabilities, English learners, and children who are struggling with reading and math. But getting teachers on board has still been “absolutely insane.” She convinced five teachers to rotate shifts, but one of them quit several months in, she said.

The principal said she understands it’s been a hard year — as tough as a first year for many teachers — but still felt disappointed.

“They would just have to stay one hour with their kids and [I was] trying to make it as cush as possible, and they’re like, ‘Uhh I kinda can’t,’’ she said.

One Brooklyn principal used his portion of the dollars to partially cover the salary of one of the school’s teaching coaches, who work with early career teachers — one of the allowed expenses. But he said he’s struggled to spend the pot of money dedicated specifically for extra services for students with disabilities, which only became available to schools nearly two months after school started. Eight teachers have offered to work before or after school for about an hour with roughly 20 students with disabilities. But because of limited staffing, the school is offering the program in cycles over the course of the year and has about 40 students on a waitlist.

“We probably need 40 hours a week of people working,” said the principal, adding that he can’t provide the speech and occupational therapy parents are asking for.

To be sure, some schools have torn through the dollars. As of October, Bronx High School of Business had spending plans for 93% of its $172,000 slated for general academic recovery services, said Robert Effinger, a history teacher at the school who also sits on the School Leadership Team. But the school had only used about 11% of its dedicated arts funding, he said.

Effinger said he’s noticed many more “per session opportunities,” or ways teachers can earn extra money, he said. The largest of these opportunities is to help oversee extra support for students with disabilities, while another is tutoring and grading students who are trying to make up a course they didn’t complete last year, which he’s helping with. But he also noticed that none of his colleagues were rushing to sign up for a Saturday program the administration tried to launch about a month after the school year started. That program did not come to fruition, he said.

Despite the challenges of spending all her money, the Bronx principal thinks it might get easier as the year wears on. She’s noticed teachers becoming more open to considering overtime opportunities. She said she will find “creative” ways to spend the money, such as on more programming during the school day but she’s not sure about other principals.

“On my end, it will be spent, but I know I have colleagues who will not,” she said.

NYC’s planned school for students with dyslexia comes too late for my son

2022-02-24T20:11:45+00:00

I was heartened to hear recently about New York City schools Chancellor David Banks’ plans to open a school specifically for students with dyslexia.

A new school for kids with reading challenges and other learning disabilities is what many parent advocates have been waiting for. It is highly unlikely, however, that it will be available in time to help those of us who have suffered through an already broken system that has been further hobbled by the COVID crisis.

Dolores Swirin-Yao

New York City’s current approach to special education for kids whose needs cannot be met in public schools is an adversarial system based on the false assumption that parents of kids with special needs are trying to take advantage of the system to get private school tuition paid. I do not know one parent whose child is in a private special needs school who would not be overjoyed to have the child in a public school that met the child’s needs.

For many of our kids, that school does not exist.

My son Jeremy, now 17, is a smart, sweet, and funny kid, an aspiring chef with high-normal intelligence and a million-dollar spoken vocabulary who was not recognizing numbers and letters by the end of second grade.

I desperately and, in retrospect, irrationally wanted to keep my son at the progressive public school where he attended from kindergarten through second grade and where my younger son also attended. I had a picture in my mind of giving him a mainstream experience in which he would ride the school bus with his brother every morning through elementary school.

But the earnest and well-meaning teachers and therapists at that school did not seem to think that Jeremy was capable of reading. We knew that he had ADHD, but his language-based learning disabilities were missed. The school did not suggest an outside evaluation or indicate that it might not have the expertise to meet his needs.

I tried everything possible to have my child’s needs met in a public school, including supplementing what he received at school with private speech and occupational therapy. I was able to get a paraprofessional for Jeremy on his IEP but learned at the end of the school year that the para assigned to him was absent or late almost every day.

Jeremy was totally demoralized by the time I recognized that he was not getting what he needed. In an evaluation when he was 7, he answered “I don’t know” to everything, including, “What is a cow?” Later he joked that he wanted to get a pet cow and name it “Steak.” I asked why he had told the evaluator that he did not know what a cow was. He replied that he just did not know what she was asking him.

Once I let go of my idea that the best school experience for Jeremy was a mainstream one, he was able to get the education that he needed. Because of Jeremy’s academic level, he was offered a spot in what seemed like a cheerful and well-run District 75 school. Yet, the kids there were severely disabled, many of them nonverbal, who were not at all well matched with Jeremy’s capabilities or social skills.

Once I let go of my idea that the best school experience for Jeremy was a mainstream one, he was able to get the education that he needed.

I will forever be grateful that Jeremy was able to get a first placement in a wonderful private specialized school, the Children’s Academy. The reading specialist was an expert in teaching kids with dyslexia. When Jeremy first met her, he told her, “I am sure you are a very good teacher, but I am not going to be able to learn to read.” It was heartbreaking to know that he was so convinced he would not read and yet was so concerned about not hurting the teacher’s feelings. Within a few weeks, he was reading.

Now, at his current school, the private Aaron School, he is getting As and Bs at modified academic work and is thriving on all levels. He can read young adult books, though he prefers manga like his non-learning-disabled brother. His maturity makes him a natural leader and a good friend.

There is no doubt that the private, specialized school was the only option that made it possible for Jeremy to learn. Yet the current system for placing students in private specialized schools does not do justice to families, the New York City Department of Education, or the taxpayers.

Enormous resources are being poured into a system that does not work. The education department is paying for a legal department and a dysfunctional, backlogged, and underfunded system of impartial hearing officers tasked with deciding the right place for students. (It’s not clear yet what effect a recent handoff of that system to OATH, the city’s Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, will have.)

Families, meanwhile, are required to shell out tens of thousands of dollars of tuition and sign contracts with the schools promising to pay tuition whether or not the education department eventually pays it. This process is repeated every single year.

The financial impact on families of the current system cannot be overstated. Tuition can be well into the six figures depending on the child’s needs. Tuition for the school year must be fully paid to the school by December, and even when the city has agreed that there is not an appropriate public school option, parents do not see a dime of reimbursement for months and do not see the full refund until at least the following July. Sometimes, full reimbursement takes until the following fall, when another year’s tuition is already due. In the last two years, these processes were further delayed by COVID.

At one point, my family was out a whopping $125,000 waiting for reimbursements. Carrying that much debt has impacted every aspect of my financial life, making it more difficult to buy a house and decimating my retirement savings.

The system is also skewed to serve people with privilege. My son is Black, and I am white, and I am aware of using my white privilege to advocate for him. We are not wealthy, but I am educated, have access to credit, speak English as a first language, have legal citizenship, and have a job with enough flexibility to make a call during business hours or take personal leave time to go to a hearing. This makes the opportunity to be in a specialized school virtually inaccessible to many less privileged families whose kids do not get what they need and can develop behavior issues when frustrated or bored, feeding the school-to-prison pipeline.

The current system needs to be completely dismantled and replaced by a collaborative one. Once a child’s needs have been established, and until the city can open schools that meet those needs, tuition should be paid directly to the specialized schools without an annual legal fight.

Families would be free of the financial pressure and anxiety caused by having to pay tuition in advance. The education department, which I know ultimately cares about providing an appropriate education to children, can focus its resources on doing just that. And New York City’s taxpayers will be paying to educate the next generation of citizens rather than sustain an overwhelmed impartial hearing officer system (or its successor) and an army of lawyers.

The ideal outcome is for public schools to better serve students with learning disabilities in the first place. Chancellor Banks, please also consider reimagining the current system for students while you create schools that will meet future needs.

Dolores Swirin-Yao is the mother of two teenagers living in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. She has worked in the nonprofit sector for more than 35 years.

Bucking national trends, NYC’s 2021 graduation rates inched up as state eased requirements

2022-02-16T21:40:29+00:00

You can find your school’s graduation rate using the searchable table at the bottom of this story

Graduation rates in New York City rose to 81% last school year, about 2 percentage points higher than the previous year, state officials announced Wednesday.

Across the state, 86% of students graduated — roughly 1 percentage point higher than the previous school year.

New York’s data comes as graduation rates have dipped in at least 20 states.

For the second year in a row, as the pandemic disrupted teaching and learning, state education officials made it easier to graduate in the 2020-2021 school year. They canceled most Regents exams and allowed students to be exempt from taking the exams to graduate, since many students were learning exclusively from home. Instead, students had to pass the course tied to the normally required Regents exam.

In New York City, about 60% of students remained fully remote by the end of the school year, while the rest spent most of the year splitting their weeks between learning from home and inside a classroom.

With two years of school disruptions, many students who graduated in 2021 did not have the opportunity to take Regents exams during their junior or senior years, which is when many of the exit exams are typically taken, state officials said. Because of that, a total of 44,545 New York City seniors — or nearly three-quarters — were granted at least one waiver last year for the exams, compared with roughly 8,000 seniors in 2020. Statewide, 82% of seniors were granted an exemption.

Betty Rosa, the state education department’s commissioner, told reporters that canceling the Regents exams was “likely a factor” in the graduation rate increase. But, she added, the magnitude of the effect “can not be determined, as many of these affected students would have passed the Regents exam” had the tests still been offered.

Along with rising graduation rates, dropout rates dipped. Five percent of city students dropped out — 1 percentage point less than last school year — compared to 4.2% statewide.

‘Identify where inequities exist’

Graduation rates of New York City’s Asian students far outpaced their peers. Roughly 91% of Asian students graduated within four years, compared with 82% of white students, 79% percent of Black students and 78% of Latino students.

White students saw graduation rates dip by 2 percentage points year-over-year, unlike their Asian, Black and Latino peers, who saw rates increase.

Students learning English as a new language and children with disabilities continued to graduate at significantly lower rates than their peers — but there was improvement compared to last year.

English learners posted a graduation rate of 60%, more than 14 percentage points higher than last year. The big jump might be due to the cancellation of the English Regents exam, state officials said. Additionally, students who may no longer have met “English Language Learner” status could not test out of the program in 2020, since the exam was canceled that year, and was not required for remote learners last year. Former English language learners tend to post graduation rates that are higher than students citywide, and these students may have skewed this year’s results.

About 58% of students with disabilities earned their diplomas, 5 percentage points higher than 2020.

While graduation rates were highest in Staten Island and Queens at about 85%, they grew the most in the Bronx, to 77% up from 73% in 2020. About 82% of Manhattan seniors graduated, and 78% of Brooklyn’s did.

“Graduation rates are one metric we use to identify where inequities exist so we can better support our students and education communities,” Board of Regents Chancellor Lester W. Young Jr. said in a statement. “Every student can succeed when given the support to do so. Until we address them, inequities will continue to diminish opportunities for too many students.”

‘Focused on graduating’

The state is planning to administer Regents exams this June and August, even though officials canceled the exams in January amid a spike in coronavirus cases, Rosa said.

“We’ve been having all of these conversations, with superintendents, with principals, all of our stakeholders,” she said. “And right now, the Regents exam is still on schedule.”

The lack of Regents exams helped Clementina Sarpong, who graduated last spring as valedictorian from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. She received an exemption her junior year for her Chemistry Regents and another waiver last year for Spanish, which she needed to earn an Advanced Regents diploma.

Teachers also seemed more flexible. For example, Sarpong’s teacher for Advanced Placement biology would give students more time to complete assignments when needed, she said. However, some of her peers said it was tough to grasp complicated concepts through remote learning. They felt it was harder to ask questions in a Zoom chat room, compared with raising their hand in class.

Clementina Sarpong

The isolation of remote learning took a “mental toll,” Sarpong said. She and her fellow student government board members tried to arrange various student events at the start of last year, but the administration denied most of their proposals out of concerns for COVID safety or lacking the funds to put on events, Sarpong said.

“It was a bunch of continuous ‘no’s,’ where we just gave up and focused on graduating,” said the 18-year-old, who now attends a 7-year program at the CUNY College of Medicine to earn her bachelor’s and medical degrees.

The Board of Regents is continuing long-delayed discussions on how to reconfigure New York graduation requirements and have created a blue ribbon commission to study potential changes, but tweaks wouldn’t be considered until at least 2024.

That discussion had been stalled from March 2020 until last fall as state officials responded to the public health crisis. In October, state officials announced a pilot program for alternate ways of earning a diploma that don’t involve taking a Regents exam.

Search for your school’s graduation rate below.

School	# Total Cohort	% Graduated
A PHILIP RANDOLPH CAMPUS HIGH SCHOOL	338	83.4%
A-TECH HIGH SCHOOL	76	85.5%
ABRAHAM LINCOLN HIGH SCHOOL	399	86.2%
ACADEMY FOR CAREERS IN TELEVISION AND FI	144	100.0%
ACADEMY FOR COLLEGE PREP & CAREER EXPLOR	59	81.4%
ACADEMY FOR CONSERVATION AND THE ENVIRON	65	98.5%
ACADEMY FOR EXCELLENCE IN LEADERSHIP	64	84.4%
ACADEMY FOR HEALTH CAREERS	55	89.1%
ACADEMY FOR LANGUAGE AND TECHNOLOGY	77	100.0%
ACADEMY FOR SCHOLARSHIP AND ENTREPRENEUR	88	79.5%
ACADEMY FOR SOFTWARE ENGINEERING	109	92.7%
ACADEMY FOR YOUNG WRITERS	76	92.1%
ACADEMY OF AMERICAN STUDIES	293	99.0%
ACADEMY OF FINANCE AND ENTERPRISE	190	97.4%
ACADEMY OF HOSPITALITY AND TOURISM	62	80.6%
ACADEMY OF INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGY	107	90.7%
ACADEMY OF MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY - A COLLEG	101	76.2%
ACADEMY OF URBAN PLANNING AND ENGINEERIN	55	100.0%
ACHIEVEMENT FIRST BROWNSVILLE CHARTER SC	77	71.4%
ACHIEVEMENT FIRST CROWN HEIGHTS CHARTER	106	87.7%
ACHIEVEMENT FIRST EAST NEW YORK CHARTER	87	95.4%
ALFRED E SMITH CAREER AND TECHNICAL EDUC	101	94.1%
ALL CITY LEADERSHIP SECONDARY SCHOOL	64	98.4%
AMERICAN DREAM CHARTER SCHOOL	74	85.1%
AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE & ENGLISH SECONDA	31	93.5%
ANTONIA PANTOJA PREPARATORY ACADEMY - A	60	86.7%
ARCHIMEDES ACADEMY FOR MATH SCIENCE AND	79	67.1%
ART AND DESIGN HIGH SCHOOL	328	93.0%
ARTURO A SCHOMBURG SATELLITE ACADEMY BRO	87	23.0%
ASPIRATIONS DIPLOMA PLUS HIGH SCHOOL	56	16.1%
ASTOR COLLEGIATE ACADEMY	113	78.8%
AUGUST MARTIN HIGH SCHOOL	80	95.0%
AVIATION CAREER AND TECHNICAL EDUCATION	459	98.5%
BACCALAUREATE SCHOOL FOR GLOBAL EDUCATIO	116	97.4%
BARD HIGH SCHOOL EARLY COLLEGE	161	95.0%
BARD HIGH SCHOOL EARLY COLLEGE QUEENS	160	98.1%
BARUCH COLLEGE CAMPUS HIGH SCHOOL	127	99.2%
BAYSIDE HIGH SCHOOL	706	99.4%
BEACON HIGH SCHOOL	382	98.2%
BEDFORD ACADEMY HIGH SCHOOL	83	97.6%
BELMONT PREPARATORY HIGH SCHOOL	91	75.8%
BENJAMIN BANNEKER ACADEMY	191	95.8%
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN HIGH SCHOOL FOR FINANC	106	92.5%
BENJAMIN N CARDOZO HIGH SCHOOL	799	93.4%
BOERUM HILL SCHOOL FOR INTERNATIONAL STU	52	92.3%
BOYS AND GIRLS HIGH SCHOOL	76	81.6%
BRONX ACADEMY FOR SOFTWARE ENGINEERING (	81	81.5%
BRONX ACADEMY OF HEALTH CAREERS	83	92.8%
BRONX AEROSPACE HIGH SCHOOL	79	78.5%
BRONX ARENA HIGH SCHOOL	43	23.3%
BRONX BRIDGES HIGH SCHOOL	102	89.2%
BRONX CAREER AND COLLEGE PREPARATORY HIG	65	80.0%
BRONX CENTER FOR SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS	110	94.5%
BRONX COLLABORATIVE HIGH SCHOOL	144	88.2%
BRONX COLLEGIATE ACADEMY	86	94.2%
BRONX COMMUNITY HIGH SCHOOL	56	19.6%
BRONX COMPASS HIGH SCHOOL	102	87.3%
BRONX DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION ACADEMY	84	72.6%
BRONX EARLY COLLEGE ACADEMY FOR TEACHING	66	98.5%
BRONX ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY ACADEMY	81	79.0%
BRONX ENVISION ACADEMY	102	86.3%
BRONX HAVEN HIGH SCHOOL	51	25.5%
BRONX HEALTH SCIENCES HIGH SCHOOL	60	98.3%
BRONX HIGH SCHOOL FOR LAW AND COMMUNITY	84	97.6%
BRONX HIGH SCHOOL FOR MEDICAL SCIENCE	70	81.4%
BRONX HIGH SCHOOL FOR THE VISUAL ARTS	123	81.3%
BRONX HIGH SCHOOL FOR WRITING AND COMMUN	89	73.0%
BRONX HIGH SCHOOL OF BUSINESS	63	81.0%
BRONX HIGH SCHOOL OF SCIENCE (THE)	740	100.0%
BRONX INTERNATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL	98	88.8%
BRONX LAB SCHOOL	88	79.5%
BRONX LATIN SCHOOL	75	93.3%
BRONX LEADERSHIP ACADEMY HIGH SCHOOL	123	80.5%
BRONX LEADERSHIP ACADEMY II HIGH SCHOOL	144	80.6%
BRONX PREPARATORY CHARTER SCHOOL	88	81.8%
BRONX REGIONAL HIGH SCHOOL	53	20.8%
BRONX RIVER HIGH SCHOOL	100	83.0%
BRONX SCHOOL FOR LAW GOVERNMENT AND JUS	115	83.5%
BRONX SCHOOL OF LAW AND FINANCE	100	83.0%
BRONX STUDIO SCHOOL FOR WRITERS AND ARTI	82	81.7%
BRONX THEATRE HIGH SCHOOL	76	88.2%
BRONXDALE HIGH SCHOOL	124	81.5%
BRONXWOOD PREPARATORY ACADEMY (THE)	86	84.9%
BROOKLYN ACADEMY HIGH SCHOOL	53	11.3%
BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF GLOBAL FINANCE (THE)	23	82.6%
BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE AND THE ENVI	92	82.6%
BROOKLYN ASCEND CHARTER SCHOOL	88	72.7%
BROOKLYN BRIDGE ACADEMY	68	20.6%
BROOKLYN COLLABORATIVE STUDIES	94	91.5%
BROOKLYN COLLEGE ACADEMY	153	97.4%
BROOKLYN COLLEGIATE: A COLLEGE BOARD SCH	72	88.9%
BROOKLYN COMMUNITY ARTS AND MEDIA HIGH S	128	86.7%
BROOKLYN COMMUNITY HIGH SCHOOL FOR EXCEL	51	80.4%
BROOKLYN DEMOCRACY ACADEMY	64	28.1%
BROOKLYN EMERGING LEADERS ACADEMY CHARTE	52	96.2%
BROOKLYN FRONTIERS HIGH SCHOOL	77	37.7%
BROOKLYN HIGH SCHOOL FOR LAW AND TECHNOL	109	82.6%
BROOKLYN HIGH SCHOOL FOR LEADERSHIP AND	61	19.7%
BROOKLYN HIGH SCHOOL OF THE ARTS	217	93.5%
BROOKLYN INSTITUTE FOR LIBERAL ARTS	95	91.6%
BROOKLYN INTERNATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL	96	82.3%
BROOKLYN LAB SCHOOL	73	97.3%
BROOKLYN LABORATORY CHARTER SCHOOL	89	85.4%
BROOKLYN LATIN SCHOOL (THE)	162	97.5%
BROOKLYN PREPARATORY HIGH SCHOOL	108	93.5%
BROOKLYN PROSPECT CHARTER SCHOOL-CSD 15	85	98.8%
BROOKLYN SCHOOL FOR MATH AND RESEARCH (T	60	93.3%
BROOKLYN SCHOOL FOR MUSIC & THEATER	68	80.9%
BROOKLYN SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE (THE)	78	84.6%
BROOKLYN STUDIO SECONDARY SCHOOL	159	86.2%
BROOKLYN TECHNICAL HIGH SCHOOL	1476	96.1%
BROOKLYN THEATRE ARTS HIGH SCHOOL	78	78.2%
BROOME STREET ACADEMY CHARTER HIGH SCHOO	87	59.8%
BROWNSVILLE ACADEMY HIGH SCHOOL	34	20.6%
BUSHWICK COMMUNITY HIGH SCHOOL	53	22.6%
BUSHWICK LEADERS HIGH SCHOOL FOR ACADEMI	70	84.3%
BUSINESS OF SPORTS SCHOOL	98	86.7%
BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY EARLY COLLEGE HIGH S	119	99.2%
CAMBRIA HEIGHTS ACADEMY	94	87.2%
CAPITAL PREPARATORY (CP) HARLEM CHARTER	17	70.6%
CAREERS IN SPORTS HIGH SCHOOL	114	77.2%
CASCADES HIGH SCHOOL	64	29.7%
CELIA CRUZ BRONX HIGH SCHOOL OF MUSIC (T	90	100.0%
CENTRAL PARK EAST HIGH SCHOOL	130	99.2%
CHANNEL VIEW SCHOOL FOR RESEARCH	151	98.7%
CHARTER HIGH SCHOOL FOR LAW AND SOCIAL J	122	79.5%
CHELSEA CAREER AND TECHNICAL EDUCATION H	108	88.9%
CINEMA SCHOOL (THE)	78	94.9%
CITY COLLEGE ACADEMY OF THE ARTS	88	100.0%
CITY POLYTECHNIC HIGH SCHOOL OF ENGINEER	80	96.3%
CIVIC LEADERSHIP ACADEMY	143	94.4%
CLARA BARTON HIGH SCHOOL	277	76.2%
CLAREMONT INTERNATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL	83	86.7%
CLINTON SCHOOL (THE)	124	97.6%
COBBLE HILL SCHOOL OF AMERICAN STUDIES	120	83.3%
COLLEGE ACADEMY (THE)	88	90.9%
COLLEGIATE INSTITUTE FOR MATH AND SCIENC	153	86.9%
COLUMBIA SECONDARY SCHOOL	94	96.8%
COMMUNITY HEALTH ACADEMY OF THE HEIGHTS	104	91.3%
COMMUNITY SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE	79	67.1%
COMPREHENSIVE MODEL SCHOOL PROJECT MS 32	107	87.9%
CONCORD HIGH SCHOOL	56	28.6%
CONEY ISLAND PREPARATORY PUBLIC CHARTER	78	85.9%
CROTONA INTERNATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL	91	86.8%
CSI HIGH SCHOOL FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDIE	126	100.0%
CULTURAL ACADEMY FOR THE ARTS AND SCIENC	61	88.5%
CURTIS HIGH SCHOOL	656	75.2%
CYBERARTS STUDIO ACADEMY	50	68.0%
CYPRESS HILLS COLLEGIATE PREPARATORY SCH	92	92.4%
DEMOCRACY PREP ENDURANCE CHARTER SCHOOL	76	68.4%
DEMOCRACY PREP HARLEM CHARTER SCHOOL	82	80.5%
DEMOCRACY PREPARATORY CHARTER SCHOOL	80	72.5%
DEWITT CLINTON HIGH SCHOOL	206	90.8%
DIGITAL ARTS AND CINEMA TECHNOLOGY HIGH	72	97.2%
DISCOVERY HIGH SCHOOL	110	90.0%
DR RICHARD IZQUIERDO HEALTH AND SCIENCE	96	77.1%
DR SUSAN S MCKINNEY SECONDARY SCHOOL OF	54	87.0%
DREAM CHARTER SCHOOL	97	99.0%
DREAMYARD PREPARATORY SCHOOL	50	86.0%
EAGLE ACADEMY FOR YOUNG MEN	71	83.1%
EAGLE ACADEMY FOR YOUNG MEN II	80	95.0%
EAGLE ACADEMY FOR YOUNG MEN III	52	86.5%
EAGLE ACADEMY FOR YOUNG MEN OF HARLEM	47	72.3%
EAGLE ACADEMY FOR YOUNG MEN OF STATEN IS	21	85.7%
EAST BRONX ACADEMY FOR THE FUTURE	106	79.2%
EAST BROOKLYN COMMUNITY HIGH SCHOOL	63	28.6%
EAST NEW YORK ARTS AND CIVICS HIGH SCHOO	62	82.3%
EAST NEW YORK FAMILY ACADEMY	66	100.0%
EAST SIDE COMMUNITY SCHOOL	79	92.4%
EAST WILLIAMSBURG SCHOLARS ACADEMY	51	76.5%
EAST-WEST SCHOOL OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIE	86	96.5%
EBC HIGH SCHOOL FOR PUBLIC SERVICE-BUSHW	116	93.1%
EDWARD A REYNOLDS WEST SIDE HIGH SCHOOL	85	11.8%
EDWARD R MURROW HIGH SCHOOL	867	85.9%
EL PUENTE ACADEMY FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE	47	76.6%
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT HIGH SCHOOL	133	100.0%
EMMA LAZARUS HIGH SCHOOL	95	48.4%
ENERGY TECH HIGH SCHOOL	110	94.5%
ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND INTERNATIO	79	46.8%
EPIC HIGH SCHOOL - NORTH	111	92.8%
EPIC HIGH SCHOOL-SOUTH	97	91.8%
EQUALITY CHARTER SCHOOL	93	87.1%
ESPERANZA PREPARATORY ACADEMY	85	84.7%
ESSEX STREET ACADEMY	95	97.9%
EXCELLENCE GIRLS CHARTER SCHOOL	72	91.7%
EXCELSIOR PREPARATORTY HIGH SCHOOL	96	84.4%
EXIMIUS COLLEGE PREPARATORY ACADEMY: A	105	88.6%
EXPLORATIONS ACADEMY HIGH SCHOOL	57	78.9%
FACING HISTORY SCHOOL (THE)	66	81.8%
FANNIE LOU HAMER FREEDOM HIGH SCHOOL	113	81.4%
FDNY-CAPTAIN VERNON A RICHARDS HIGH SCHO	53	75.5%
FIORELLO H LAGUARDIA HIGH SCHOOL OF MUSI	768	98.6%
FLUSHING HIGH SCHOOL	320	83.4%
FLUSHING INTERNATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL	103	83.5%
FOOD AND FINANCE HIGH SCHOOL	81	81.5%
FORDHAM HIGH SCHOOL FOR THE ARTS	83	96.4%
FORDHAM LEADERSHIP ACADEMY	65	100.0%
FOREST HILLS HIGH SCHOOL	891	91.6%
FORSYTHE SATELLITE ACADEMY	55	36.4%
FORT HAMILTON HIGH SCHOOL	1168	81.9%
FRANCIS LEWIS HIGH SCHOOL	1114	94.3%
FRANK MCCOURT HIGH SCHOOL	103	97.1%
FRANK SINATRA SCHOOL OF THE ARTS HIGH SC	208	98.6%
FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT HIGH SCHOOL	760	74.5%
FREDERICK DOUGLASS ACADEMY	187	83.4%
FREDERICK DOUGLASS ACADEMY II SECONDARY	64	90.6%
FREDERICK DOUGLASS ACADEMY III SECONDARY	98	74.5%
FREDERICK DOUGLASS ACADEMY VI HIGH SCHOO	86	48.8%
FREDERICK DOUGLASS ACADEMY VII HIGH SCHO	26	100.0%
GAYNOR MCCOWN EXPEDITIONARY LEARNING SCH	105	95.2%
GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER HIGH SCHOOL FOR	99	84.8%
GEORGE WESTINGHOUSE CAREER AND TECHNICAL	181	90.6%
GLOBAL LEARNING COLLABORATIVE (THE)	113	89.4%
GOTHAM COLLABORATIVE HIGH SCHOOL	143	67.8%
GOTHAM PROFESSIONAL ARTS ACADEMY	31	96.8%
GRAMERCY ARTS HIGH SCHOOL	86	95.3%
GREGORIO LUPERON HIGH SCHOOL FOR SCIENCE	156	96.2%
GROVER CLEVELAND HIGH SCHOOL	407	77.1%
HARLEM CHILDREN'S ZONE PROMISE ACADEMY C	59	98.3%
HARLEM CHILDREN'S ZONE PROMISE ACADEMY I	50	100.0%
HARLEM PREP CHARTER SCHOOL	75	66.7%
HARLEM RENAISSANCE HIGH SCHOOL	87	17.2%
HARLEM VILLAGE ACADEMY EAST CHARTER SCHO	33	97.0%
HARLEM VILLAGE ACADEMY WEST CHARTER SCHO	35	94.3%
HARRY S TRUMAN HIGH SCHOOL	523	80.3%
HARVEST COLLEGIATE HIGH SCHOOL	108	90.7%
HARVEY MILK HIGH SCHOOL	29	62.1%
HEALTH OPPORTUNITIES HIGH SCHOOL	110	75.5%
HERBERT H LEHMAN HIGH SCHOOL	172	80.2%
HERITAGE SCHOOL (THE)	68	75.0%
HERO (HEALTH EDUCATION AND RESEARCH OCC	91	92.3%
HIGH SCHOOL 560 CITY-AS-SCHOOL	196	55.6%
HIGH SCHOOL FOR ARTS AND BUSINESS	172	97.7%
HIGH SCHOOL FOR CIVIL RIGHTS	61	73.8%
HIGH SCHOOL FOR CLIMATE JUSTICE (THE)	134	83.6%
HIGH SCHOOL FOR COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP	126	96.0%
HIGH SCHOOL FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS	109	78.9%
HIGH SCHOOL FOR DUAL LANGUAGE AND ASIAN	99	99.0%
HIGH SCHOOL FOR ENERGY AND TECHNOLOGY	81	93.8%
HIGH SCHOOL FOR ENTERPRISE BUSINESS & T	203	85.2%
HIGH SCHOOL FOR ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES	286	93.0%
HIGH SCHOOL FOR EXCELLENCE AND INNOVATIO	56	69.6%
HIGH SCHOOL FOR GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP (THE)	46	87.0%
HIGH SCHOOL FOR HEALTH CAREERS & SCIENCE	112	72.3%
HIGH SCHOOL FOR HEALTH PROFESSIONS & HUM	449	96.4%
HIGH SCHOOL FOR INNOVATION IN ADVERTISIN	55	78.2%
HIGH SCHOOL FOR LANGUAGE AND DIPLOMACY (	44	81.8%
HIGH SCHOOL FOR LANGUAGE AND INNOVATION	109	95.4%
HIGH SCHOOL FOR LAW ADVOCACY AND COMMUN	83	75.9%
HIGH SCHOOL FOR LAW & PUBLIC SERVICE	108	63.9%
HIGH SCHOOL FOR MEDIA & COMMUNICATIONS	89	86.5%
HIGH SCHOOL FOR MEDICAL PROFESSIONS	117	89.7%
HIGH SCHOOL FOR PUBLIC SERVICE-HEROES OF	107	92.5%
HIGH SCHOOL FOR SERVICE AND LEARNING AT	70	82.9%
HIGH SCHOOL FOR TEACHING AND THE PROFESS	102	78.4%
HIGH SCHOOL FOR VIOLIN AND DANCE	64	78.1%
HIGH SCHOOL FOR YOUTH AND COMMUNITY DEVE	131	85.5%
HIGH SCHOOL MATHEMATICS SCIENCE AND ENG	139	100.0%
HIGH SCHOOL OF AMERICAN STUDIES AT LEHMA	93	98.9%
HIGH SCHOOL OF APPLIED COMMUNICATIONS	83	98.8%
HIGH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND TECHNOLOGY	99	82.8%
HIGH SCHOOL OF COMPUTERS AND TECHNOLOGY	116	82.8%
HIGH SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS & FINANCE	174	92.0%
HIGH SCHOOL OF FASHION INDUSTRIES (THE)	334	95.2%
HIGH SCHOOL OF HOSPITALITY MANAGEMENT	88	79.5%
HIGH SCHOOL OF SPORTS MANAGEMENT	74	73.0%
HIGH SCHOOL OF TELECOMMUNICATION ARTS AN	303	97.0%
HIGH SCHOOL OF WORLD CULTURES	131	91.6%
HIGH SCHOOL-CONSTRUCTION TRADES ENGINE	257	98.8%
HILLCREST HIGH SCHOOL	786	80.8%
HILLSIDE ARTS & LETTERS ACADEMY	105	96.2%
HOSTOS-LINCOLN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE	98	79.6%
HS FOR LAW ENFORCEMENT AND PUBLIC SAFETY	90	87.8%
HUDSON HIGH SCHOOL OF LEARNING TECHNOLOG	111	85.6%
HUMANITIES AND ARTS MAGNET HIGH SCHOOL	91	91.2%
HUMANITIES PREPARATORY ACADEMY	69	94.2%
HYDE LEADERSHIP CHARTER SCHOOL	19	68.4%
IN-TECH ACADEMY (MS/HS 368)	150	82.7%
INDEPENDENCE HIGH SCHOOL	124	26.6%
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY HIGH SCHOOL	243	88.5%
INNOVATION CHARTER HIGH SCHOOL	101	82.2%
INNOVATION DIPLOMA PLUS	51	21.6%
INSTITUTE FOR COLLABORATIVE EDUCATION	71	98.6%
INSTITUTE FOR HEALTH PROFESSIONS AT CAMB	110	86.4%
INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY HIGH SCHOOL	103	71.8%
INTERNATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL AT LAFAYETTE	89	73.0%
INTERNATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL AT LAGUARDIA C	106	90.6%
INTERNATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL AT PROSPECT HE	83	80.7%
INTERNATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL AT UNION SQUAR	94	88.3%
INTERNATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL FOR HEALTH SCI	70	80.0%
INTERNATIONAL LEADERSHIP CHARTER HIGH S	67	89.6%
INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL FOR LIBERAL ARTS	93	79.6%
INWOOD ACADEMY FOR LEADERSHIP CHARTER SC	121	96.7%
INWOOD EARLY COLLEGE FOR HEALTH AND INFO	102	88.2%
IT TAKES A VILLAGE ACADEMY	165	81.8%
JACQUELINE KENNEDY-ONASSIS HIGH SCHOOL	65	83.1%
JAMAICA GATEWAY TO THE SCIENCES	122	93.4%
JAMES BALDWIN SCHOOL-A SCHOOL FOR EXPEDI	86	54.7%
JAMES MADISON HIGH SCHOOL	994	91.5%
JHS 74 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE	1
JILL CHAIFETZ TRANSFER HIGH SCHOOL	78	23.1%
JOHN ADAMS HIGH SCHOOL	659	83.8%
JOHN BOWNE HIGH SCHOOL	859	79.2%
JOHN DEWEY HIGH SCHOOL	558	82.6%
JOHN JAY SCHOOL FOR LAW	111	84.7%
JOHN V LINDSAY WILDCAT ACADEMY CHARTER S	97	15.5%
JOHN W LAVELLE PREPARATORY CHARTER SCHOO	48	95.8%
JUAN MOREL CAMPOS SECONDARY SCHOOL	64	54.7%
JUDITH S KAYE SCHOOL (THE)	64	34.4%
KHALIL GIBRAN INTERNATIONAL ACADEMY	53	81.1%
KINGS COLLEGIATE CHARTER SCHOOL	81	92.6%
KINGSBOROUGH EARLY COLLEGE SCHOOL	91	100.0%
KINGSBRIDGE INTERNATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL	119	58.8%
KIPP ACADEMY CHARTER SCHOOL	69	85.5%
KIPP INFINITY CHARTER SCHOOL	237	89.0%
KNOWLEDGE AND POWER PREP ACADEMY INTERNA	110	100.0%
KURT HAHN EXPEDITIONARY LEARNING SCHOOL	74	67.6%
LABORATORY SCHOOL OF FINANCE AND TECHNOL	88	95.5%
LANDMARK HIGH SCHOOL	73	84.9%
LEADERS HIGH SCHOOL	88	93.2%
LEADERSHIP & PUBLIC SERVICE HIGH SCHOOL	93	87.1%
LEADERSHIP PREPARATORY BEDFORD STUYVESAN	55	94.5%
LEADERSHIP PREPARATORY OCEAN HILL CHARTE	92	90.2%
LEON M GOLDSTEIN HIGH SCHOOL FOR THE SCI	240	95.4%
LIBERATION DIPLOMA PLUS	76	25.0%
LIBERTY HIGH SCHOOL ACADEMY FOR NEWCOMER	155	36.8%
LIFE ACADEMY HIGH SCHOOL FOR FILM AND MU	59	96.6%
LONG ISLAND CITY HIGH SCHOOL	499	84.6%
LONGWOOD PREPARATORY ACADEMY	85	82.4%
LOWER EAST SIDE PREPARATORY HIGH SCHOOL	158	39.2%
LOWER MANHATTAN ARTS ACADEMY	76	80.3%
LYONS COMMUNITY SCHOOL	68	80.9%
MANHATTAN ACADEMY FOR ARTS AND LANGUAGES	62	66.1%
MANHATTAN BRIDGES HIGH SCHOOL	144	95.1%
MANHATTAN BUSINESS ACADEMY	103	93.2%
MANHATTAN CENTER FOR SCIENCE & MATHEMATI	429	97.2%
MANHATTAN COMPREHENSIVE NIGHT AND DAY HI	242	24.0%
MANHATTAN EARLY COLLEGE SCHOOL FOR ADVER	101	92.1%
MANHATTAN INTERNATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL	72	69.4%
MANHATTAN VILLAGE ACADEMY	119	100.0%
MANHATTAN/HUNTER SCIENCE HIGH SCHOOL	110	97.3%
MARBLE HILL HIGH SCHOOL OF INTERNATIONAL	106	99.1%
MARIE CURIE HIGH SCH-NURSING MEDICINE &	93	82.8%
MARTIN VAN BUREN HIGH SCHOOL	301	87.4%
MASPETH HIGH SCHOOL	400	99.3%
MATH ENGINEERING AND SCIENCE ACADEMY CH	125	94.4%
MATHEMATICS SCIENCE RESEARCH AND TECHNO	109	73.4%
MAXINE GREENE HIGH SCHOOL FOR IMAGINATIV	91	78.0%
MEDGAR EVERS COLLEGE PREPARATORY SCHOOL	234	96.2%
METROPOLITAN DIPLOMA PLUS HIGH SCHOOL	112	19.6%
METROPOLITAN EXPEDITIONARY LEARNING SCHO	102	100.0%
METROPOLITAN HIGH SCHOOL (THE)	82	73.2%
METROPOLITAN SOUNDVIEW HIGH SCHOOL (THE)	101	76.2%
MICHAEL J PETRIDES SCHOOL (THE)	111	96.4%
MIDDLE COLLEGE HIGH SCHOOL AT LAGUARDIA	109	89.0%
MIDWOOD HIGH SCHOOL	994	95.7%
MILLENIUM ART ACADEMY	100	79.0%
MILLENNIUM BROOKLYN HIGH SCHOOL	173	99.4%
MILLENNIUM HIGH SCHOOL	158	99.4%
MORRIS ACADEMY FOR COLLABORATIVE STUDIES	117	91.5%
MOTT HALL BRONX HIGH SCHOOL	86	84.9%
MOTT HALL HIGH SCHOOL	46	80.4%
MOTT HALL V	93	95.7%
MOTT HAVEN COMMUNITY HIGH SCHOOL	111	52.3%
MOTT HAVEN VILLAGE PREPARATORY HIGH SCHO	70	61.4%
MULTICULTURAL HIGH SCHOOL	72	87.5%
MURRAY HILL ACADEMY	75	84.0%
MURRY BERGTRAUM HIGH SCHOOL FOR BUSINESS	21	81.0%
NELSON MANDELA HIGH SCHOOL	45	88.9%
NEW DAWN CHARTER HIGH SCHOOL	99	29.3%
NEW DAWN CHARTER HIGH SCHOOL II	79	0.0%
NEW DESIGN HIGH SCHOOL	100	87.0%
NEW DIRECTIONS SECONDARY SCHOOL	60	36.7%
NEW DORP HIGH SCHOOL	755	88.9%
NEW EXPLORATIONS INTO SCIENCE TECH AND M	131	99.2%
NEW HEIGHTS ACADEMY CHARTER SCHOOL	81	88.9%
NEW UTRECHT HIGH SCHOOL	814	73.8%
NEW VENTURES CHARTER SCHOOL	67	34.3%
NEW VISIONS AIM CHARTER HIGH SCHOOL I	59	27.1%
NEW VISIONS AIM CHARTER HIGH SCHOOL II	110	12.7%
NEW VISIONS CHARTER HIGH SCHOOL FOR ADVA	125	98.4%
NEW VISIONS CHARTER HIGH SCHOOL FOR ADVA	118	95.8%
NEW VISIONS CHARTER HIGH SCHOOL FOR ADVA	83	97.6%
NEW VISIONS CHARTER HIGH SCHOOL FOR ADVA	124	96.0%
NEW VISIONS CHARTER HIGH SCHOOL FOR THE	101	84.2%
NEW VISIONS CHARTER HIGH SCHOOL FOR THE	114	100.0%
NEW VISIONS CHARTER HIGH SCHOOL FOR THE	46	95.7%
NEW VISIONS CHARTER HIGH SCHOOL FOR THE	68	94.1%
NEW WORLD HIGH SCHOOL	73	83.6%
NEW YORK CITY CHARTER HIGH SCHOOL FOR AR	106	94.3%
NEWCOMERS HIGH SCHOOL	217	74.7%
NEWTOWN HIGH SCHOOL	463	74.5%
NORTH QUEENS COMMUNITY HIGH SCHOOL	41	2.4%
NORTHSIDE CHARTER HIGH SCHOOL	82	93.9%
NUASIN NEXT GENERATION CHARTER SCHOOL	50	92.0%
NYC AUTISM CHARTER SCHOOL EAST HARLEM	8	0.0%
NYC ISCHOOL	116	100.0%
NYC LAB HIGH SCHOOL FOR COLLABORATIVE ST	109	96.3%
NYC MUSEUM SCHOOL	105	98.1%
OLYMPUS ACADEMY	61	27.9%
OPPORTUNITY CHARTER SCHOOL	52	90.4%
ORCHARD COLLEGIATE ACADEMY	65	93.8%
ORIGINS HIGH SCHOOL	83	92.8%
PACE HIGH SCHOOL	141	75.2%
PAN AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL	102	93.1%
PAN AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL A	84	89.3%
PARK EAST HIGH SCHOOL	92	100.0%
PARK SLOPE COLLEGIATE	82	79.3%
PATHWAYS COLLEGE PREPARATORY SCHOOL: A	73	95.9%
PATHWAYS IN TECHNOLOGY EARLY COLLEGE HIG	106	81.1%
PELHAM LAB HIGH SCHOOL	119	75.6%
PELHAM PREPARATORY ACADEMY	123	92.7%
PERFORMING ARTS AND TECHNOLOGY HIGH SCHO	75	86.7%
PHAROS ACADEMY CHARTER SCHOOL	51	64.7%
PORT RICHMOND HIGH SCHOOL	403	82.9%
PREPARATORY ACADEMY FOR WRITERS: A COLL	92	87.0%
PROFESSIONAL PATHWAYS HIGH SCHOOL	90	24.4%
PROFESSIONAL PERFORMING ARTS HIGH SCHOOL	96	99.0%
PROGRESS HIGH SCHOOL FOR PROFESSIONAL CA	166	71.7%
PROVIDING URBAN LEARNERS SUCCESS IN EDUC	67	10.4%
PS 116 MARY LINDLEY MURRAY	1
PS 24 SPUYTEN DUYVIL	1
PS 43	1
QUEENS ACADEMY HIGH SCHOOL	132	15.2%
QUEENS COLLEGIATE - A COLLEGE BOARD SCHO	112	91.1%
QUEENS GATEWAY TO HEALTH SCIENCES SECOND	92	97.8%
QUEENS HIGH SCHOOL FOR INFORMATION RESE	110	89.1%
QUEENS HIGH SCHOOL FOR LANGUAGE STUDIES	105	91.4%
QUEENS HIGH SCHOOL FOR THE SCIENCES AT Y	129	100.0%
QUEENS HIGH SCHOOL OF TEACHING LIBERAL	211	94.8%
QUEENS METROPOLITAN HIGH SCHOOL	250	85.6%
QUEENS PREPARATORY ACADEMY	76	85.5%
QUEENS SATELLITE HIGH SCHOOL FOR OPPORTU	57	10.5%
QUEENS SCHOOL OF INQUIRY (THE)	81	95.1%
QUEENS TECHNICAL HIGH SCHOOL	371	83.8%
QUEST TO LEARN	82	84.1%
RACHEL CARSON HIGH SCHOOL FOR COASTAL ST	151	88.7%
RALPH R MCKEE CAREER AND TECHNICAL EDUCA	198	79.3%
RENAISSANCE CHARTER SCHOOL	53	86.8%
RENAISSANCE HIGH SCHOOL FOR MUSICAL THEA	115	85.2%
REPERTORY COMPANY HIGH SCHOOL FOR THEATR	57	96.5%
RESEARCH AND SERVICE HIGH SCHOOL	68	27.9%
RICHARD R GREEN HIGH SCHOOL OF TEACHING	86	88.4%
RICHMOND HILL HIGH SCHOOL	447	74.0%
RIVERDALE/KINGSBRIDGE ACADEMY (MS/HS 141	188	91.5%
ROBERT F KENNEDY COMMUNITY HIGH SCHOOL	158	88.0%
ROBERT F WAGNER JR SECONDARY SCHOOL FOR	114	96.5%
ROBERT H GODDARD HIGH SCHOOL FOR COMMUNI	159	98.7%
ROCKAWAY COLLEGIATE HIGH SCHOOL	81	79.0%
ROCKAWAY PARK HIGH SCHOOL FOR ENVIRONMEN	64	82.8%
SATELLITE ACADEMY HIGH SCHOOL	80	12.5%
SCHOLARS' ACADEMY	179	100.0%
SCHOOL FOR CLASSICS HIGH SCHOOL	51	78.4%
SCHOOL FOR EXCELLENCE	85	60.0%
SCHOOL FOR HUMAN RIGHTS (THE)	78	88.5%
SCHOOL FOR TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY	41	51.2%
SCHOOL OF THE FUTURE HIGH SCHOOL	101	97.0%
SCHUYLERVILLE PREPARATORY HIGH SCHOOL	101	85.1%
SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY & RESEARCH EARLY COL	85	100.0%
SCIENCE SKILLS CENTER HIGH SCHOOL FOR SC	154	99.4%
SOUTH BRONX COMMUNITY CHARTER HIGH SCHOO	85	75.3%
SOUTH BRONX PREPARATORY - A COLLEGE BOAR	81	97.5%
SOUTH BROOKLYN COMMUNITY HIGH SCHOOL	92	30.4%
SPECIAL MUSIC SCHOOL	45	100.0%
SPRING CREEK COMMUNITY SCHOOL	62	83.9%
STATEN ISLAND TECHNICAL HIGH SCHOOL	332	99.7%
STEPHEN T MATHER BUILDING ARTS AND CRAFT	104	88.5%
STUYVESANT HIGH SCHOOL	809	99.5%
SUCCESS ACADEMY CHARTER SCHOOL-HARLEM 1	70	81.4%
SUCCESS ACADEMY CHARTER SCHOOL-HARLEM 3	64	82.8%
SUMMIT ACADEMY CHARTER SCHOOL	38	73.7%
SUNSET PARK HIGH SCHOOL	269	88.5%
SUSAN E WAGNER HIGH SCHOOL	808	89.1%
TALENT UNLIMITED HIGH SCHOOL	110	98.2%
TEACHERS PREPARATORY HIGH SCHOOL	41	75.6%
THEATRE ARTS PRODUCTION COMPANY SCHOOL	71	81.7%
THOMAS A EDISON CAREER AND TECHNICAL EDU	558	94.1%
THURGOOD MARSHALL ACADEMY FOR LEARNING &	79	82.3%
TOTTENVILLE HIGH SCHOOL	953	95.9%
TOWNSEND HARRIS HIGH SCHOOL	292	100.0%
TRANSIT TECH CAREER AND TECHNICAL EDUCAT	132	86.4%
UNION SQUARE ACADEMY FOR HEALTH SCIENCES	89	87.6%
UNITY CENTER FOR URBAN TECHNOLOGIES	58	96.6%
UNITY PREPARATORY CHARTER SCHOOL OF BROO	77	88.3%
UNIVERSITY HEIGHTS SECONDARY SCHOOL-BRON	154	98.7%
UNIVERSITY NEIGHBORHOOD HIGH SCHOOL	134	98.5%
UNIVERSITY PREP CHARTER HIGH SCHOOL	106	95.3%
URBAN ACADEMY LABORATORY HIGH SCHOOL	44	56.8%
URBAN ACTION ACADEMY	48	66.7%
URBAN ASSEMBLY ACADEMY OF GOVERNMENT AND	60	88.3%
URBAN ASSEMBLY BRONX ACADEMY OF LETTERS	79	83.5%
URBAN ASSEMBLY CHARTER SCHOOL FOR COMPUT	2
URBAN ASSEMBLY GATEWAY SCHOOL FOR TECHNO	105	99.0%
URBAN ASSEMBLY INSTITUTE OF MATH AND SCI	61	96.7%
URBAN ASSEMBLY MAKER ACADEMY	104	95.2%
URBAN ASSEMBLY NEW YORK HARBOR SCHOOL	126	89.7%
URBAN ASSEMBLY SCHOOL FOR APPLIED MATH A	86	89.5%
URBAN ASSEMBLY SCHOOL FOR COLLABORATIVE	88	90.9%
URBAN ASSEMBLY SCHOOL FOR EMERGENCY MANA	55	92.7%
URBAN ASSEMBLY SCHOOL FOR GLOBAL COMMERC	59	78.0%
URBAN ASSEMBLY SCHOOL FOR GREEN CAREERS	75	94.7%
URBAN ASSEMBLY SCHOOL FOR LAW AND JUSTIC	108	92.6%
URBAN ASSEMBLY SCHOOL FOR LEADERSHIP AND	87	92.0%
URBAN ASSEMBLY SCHOOL FOR MEDIA STUDIES	98	88.8%
URBAN ASSEMBLY SCHOOL FOR MUSIC AND ART	23	82.6%
URBAN ASSEMBLY SCHOOL FOR THE PERFORMING	97	81.4%
URBAN ASSEMBLY SCHOOL OF BUSINESS FOR YO	35	74.3%
URBAN ASSEMBLY SCHOOL OF DESIGN AND CONS	57	84.2%
URBAN DOVE TEAM CHARTER SCHOOL	76	13.2%
URBAN DOVE TEAM CHARTER SCHOOL II	102	26.5%
VALIDUS PREPARATORY ACADEMY	90	71.1%
VANGUARD HIGH SCHOOL	102	67.6%
VERITAS ACADEMY	158	84.8%
VICTORY COLLEGIATE HIGH SCHOOL	68	86.8%
VOYAGES PREP-SOUTH QUEENS	117	42.7%
VOYAGES PREPARATORY	84	10.7%
W H MAXWELL CAREER AND TECHNICAL EDUCATI	92	82.6%
WADLEIGH SECONDARY SCHOOL FOR THE PERFOR	46	100.0%
WASHINGTON HEIGHTS EXPEDITIONARY LEARNIN	100	93.0%
WEST BRONX ACADEMY FOR THE FUTURE	61	100.0%
WEST BROOKLYN COMMUNITY HIGH SCHOOL	62	19.4%
WESTCHESTER SQUARE ACADEMY	112	87.5%
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT HIGH SCHOOL	567	86.8%
WILLIAM E GRADY CAREER AND TECHNICAL EDU	91	73.6%
WILLIAMSBURG CHARTER HIGH SCHOOL	249	83.9%
WILLIAMSBURG HIGH SCHOOL FOR ARCHITECTUR	147	98.0%
WILLIAMSBURG HIGH SCHOOL OF ART AND TECH	76	94.7%
WILLIAMSBURG PREPARATORY SCHOOL	171	98.8%
WINGS ACADEMY	87	71.3%
WOMEN'S ACADEMY OF EXCELLENCE	58	72.4%
WORLD ACADEMY FOR TOTAL COMMUNITY HEALTH	55	70.9%
WORLD JOURNALISM PREPARATORY: A COLLEGE	84	100.0%
WORLD VIEW HIGH SCHOOL	132	100.0%
YORK EARLY COLLEGE ACADEMY	92	98.9%
YOUNG WOMEN'S LEADERSHIP SCHOOL	79	100.0%
YOUNG WOMEN'S LEADERSHIP SCHOOL OF BROOK	57	96.5%
YOUNG WOMEN'S LEADERSHIP SCHOOL OF THE B	62	93.5%
YOUNG WOMEN'S LEADERSHIP SCHOOL-QUEENS	66	92.4%
YOUNG WOMENS LEADERSHIP SCHOOL - ASTORIA	77	100.0%

School-by-school graduation rates

Kae Petrin

NYC to open new school for students with dyslexia, Banks says

2022-01-26T22:51:21+00:00

New York City officials are planning to open a new school focused on serving students with dyslexia, Chancellor David Banks said Wednesday.

Banks made the announcement during a virtual, education-focused state budget hearing, after Bronx Assemblyman Michael Benedetto asked for Banks’ thoughts on screening young children for learning disabilities.

“I’ve met with many other advocates around the city. We’ve worked very closely around the creation of a school, specifically a public school that will be dedicated specifically for kids with dyslexia — be the first time that we’ve had it in New York City,” Banks said. “And so you’ll hear in the coming weeks more about that new school.”

Banks added that Mayor Eric Adams wants such a school “in every borough.”

An education department spokesperson declined to offer more details, including where the school would be located, what grades it would serve, and how students would be admitted. If the new school comes to fruition, it would be the first district-operated school and the second public school in New York City to focus specifically on students with dyslexia. The first, Bridge Preparatory Charter School, opened in 2019.

The chancellor’s comments suggest that addressing gaps in the city’s approach to reading instruction may be one of the administration’s early priorities. Advocates and experts have argued for years that the city has no systematic approach to reading instruction, leading to scattershot approaches at individual schools that often fail to properly serve students who struggle to master the relationships between sounds and letters, one of the hallmarks of dyslexia.

At the same time, an increasing number of students with disabilities, including those with dyslexia, have left the public school system entirely, winning hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tuition reimbursements from the city. That process tends to favor families with time and resources. (In 2019, 16% of the city’s students with disabilities were proficient in reading in grades 3 to 8, compared with 56% of general education students, according to state tests.)

Frustrated with the city’s approach, some parents have been working to launch a public school specifically designed to adopt best practices in teaching students with dyslexia. A group of parents applied to launch such a school in 2019 as part of a flashy effort to open 20 new schools, though that program appears to have stalled during the pandemic and none of those schools have been publicly announced.

Parents Jeannine Kiely, Ruth Genn, Emily Hellstrom, Akeela Azcuy (left to right) submitted an application to open a school dedicated to serving students with dyslexia.

Naomi Peña, the parent council president in Manhattan’s District 1 and part of the parent group working to launch a school geared toward students with dyslexia, said the parents met with Banks in October, before Adams officially won election. “We presented our model, we presented our idea, and he liked it and even had some more feedback,” she said. It was not immediately clear if the new school Banks mentioned on Wednesday is the same as the one outlined in the parent group’s proposal; a department spokesperson declined to comment.

“If they do tap us, we are ready,” said Emily Hellstrom, another parent involved in the project. The group has been in continuous talks with the education department and has been working to line up partners to help provide teacher training, even though the city has not formally greenlit their proposal. “It is so refreshing and exciting to hear the chancellor speak in these terms.”

On the campaign trail, Adams repeatedly mentioned struggling with a learning disability of his own and said he supported universal screening for dyslexia. Some state and city lawmakers have long pushed for more screening, including during Wednesday’s hearing.

Under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, officials set plans to screen about 200,000 students in kindergarten to second grade to see if they were struggling readers. While the screens don’t test for dyslexia, literacy experts said they can identify gaps that are associated with dyslexia, Chalkbeat previously reported. That plan was part of the city’s $635 million plan for pandemic-related academic recovery, almost entirely funded by a portion of the $7 billion federal COVID relief dollars for New York City’s school system.

Banks previously indicated that opening new schools will be a component of his administration’s approach as a way to replicate models that are doing good work. The chancellor recently visited The Windward School, a private program that specializes in reaching children with reading challenges, as part of a tour with Brooklyn Assemblyman Robert Carroll, who has advocated for universal dyslexia screening.

“I’m looking in as many places as I can for innovative and dynamic solutions to the pressing issues facing our children and school system,” he said in a statement at the time.

Pre-K for all? NYC’s universal preschool push leaves behind students with disabilities, report finds

2022-01-20T10:00:00+00:00

This is part of an ongoing collaborative series between Chalkbeat and THE CITY investigating learning differences, special education and other education challenges in city schools.

The crowning achievement of former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration is uncontested: universal pre-K.

The program guarantees free pre-K for 4-year-olds and has grown to include 3-year-olds in a dozen districts with plans to expand citywide.

But the city’s preschool programming has poorly served many students with disabilities, according to an analysis of 2019-2020 city data released Thursday by the nonprofit Advocates for Children.

The analysis is based on a first-of-its-kind trove of city data that is now required to be released annually under city law. It offers one of the most comprehensive windows yet into how well the city’s more than 30,000 preschool students with disabilities are being served, including patterns that correlate strongly with race and geography.

Among the findings: Black and Asian preschool students were less likely to be identified for services than their white peers. When Black and Latino students were identified for services, they were more likely to be funneled to segregated classrooms that only serve students with disabilities.

And roughly a third of preschool students weren’t receiving all of their legally mandated services. (Some of the figures may have been impacted by the pandemic, but because this is the first time the city has released much of this data, historical comparisons are not yet possible.)

“Children are missing out on special education services at a time when you can really have the most impact on their development and education,” said Betty Baez Melo, an early childhood education expert at Advocates for Children.

Department of Education officials pointed to a $22 million investment in special education allocated by the prior administration for preschool special education as a means to add seats, bolster services, and expand inclusive classroom settings.

“We know more needs to be done, and will work with Advocates for Children and families to ensure all students have access to a strong start and the services they need,” said DOE spokesperson Sarah Casasnovas.

Here are four takeaways from the new report:

1: Black and Asian students were less likely to be identified for preschool special education services compared with white students.

White students represented fewer than 20% of all pre-K students but more than 37% of those receiving special education services. Asian and Black students were both underrepresented compared with their share of the population, while the share of Latino students was nearly proportionate.

Those patterns are consistent with Early Intervention services for children from birth to age 3, but the reverse of trends in the city’s K-12 classrooms, where Black and Latino students tend to be overrepresented in special education. (Asian students are underrepresented in both special education preschool and school-age classrooms.)

There is significant debate about whether students of color are over- or under-identified as needing special education services. The Advocates for Children report does not definitively explain the racial differences at the preschool level, but experts and advocates point to several possibilities.

Getting special education services in preschool can be a time-consuming process that could disadvantage families who don’t have lots of time or resources. And unlike K-12 students, who may be identified for services by their teachers, preschoolers are not yet required to attend school, meaning more of the onus to seek special education services falls on parents.

Flatbush dad David Harrington said his family advocated for their son, August, at every step of the special education process, which was often confusing and beset by delays.

David Harrington with his son, August.

It took roughly five months after requesting an evaluation in December 2020 to hash out an Individualized Education Program that addressed August’s sensory needs, growing dislike of school, and habit of hitting himself when upset.

Even after August’s IEP was created, the family was told that the occupational therapy and one-on-one special education teacher promised on the learning plan weren’t available. August’s parents, who both work in education-related fields, ended up finding service providers themselves, likening the process to a “part-time job.”

Harrington, who is white, wasn’t surprised that white families were overrepresented in obtaining services.

“If the system requires that families carry the burden of the entire referral and enrollment process, then it is biased towards those with more flexible work schedules, experience making bureaucracies work in their favor, social networks that help them access specialized knowledge and relationships, and enough income to pay for expensive assistance,” Harrington wrote in a message.

“In Brooklyn and throughout NYC, those privileges are more likely to accrue inequitably to white families.”

2: Black and Latino students were more likely to be referred to segregated preschool classrooms that serve only special education students.

A majority of Black and Latino students with IEPs were referred to special education-only classrooms, while nearly half of Asian students with disabilities were as well. This compares to about 30% of white students with IEPs who were recommended for classes segregated from general education students.

Advocates for Children staffers said the trend of putting students of color in more segregated classrooms mirrors what’s happening in the older grades.

At the preschool level, though a lower number of Black and Asian students are identified for special education services, the children who are referred for services may have higher needs, requiring more intensive support.

For preschoolers with disabilities, it’s considered less restrictive to have them work with a traveling instructor known as a SEIT (special education itinerant teacher) in a general education classroom. Barely one in 10 Latino students with IEPs were referred for such services, while the rate for white students with disabilities was more than one in three.

Part of this may be because of geographical variations, including a longstanding shortage of SEIT providers in the Bronx, which may mean students are being placed based on availability of services rather than on the students’ needs.

When it comes to segregated classrooms, about 60% of preschoolers with disabilities in the Bronx were recommended for classes that serve only students with disabilities compared to nearly 31% in Brooklyn.

On the flip side, only 4% of Bronx preschool students were recommended for SEIT services compared to 37% in Brooklyn. Those differences were even starker across certain districts, the report found. Less than 3% of preschoolers with IEPs were recommended for SEIT services in District 9, spanning the South Bronx, whereas about 54% of preschoolers in South Brooklyn’s District 21 were referred for such support.

“Unfortunately, we do see trends where providers are unwilling or hesitant to travel to specific neighborhoods,” said Baez Melo. “The DOE needs to ensure that there are enough providers to work with all students to provide the services that are mandated.”

3: One in three preschool students with disabilities didn’t get all of their mandated services.

About 34% of preschool students with disabilities did not receive the services listed on their IEPs by the end of the 2019-2020 school year — meaning over 10,300 students were not in the appropriate special education classroom setting or weren’t provided with other services, such as speech or occupational therapy.

As New York City has struggled to provide enough preschool special education seats to families who are legally entitled to them, more than 1,500 students were not offered a seat in the correct classroom setting by the end of the school year, a situation that leads to many families simply keeping their children at home.

Four-year-old Devyn Maiga, of the Bronx, was among those who remained home for months last school year.

His mom, Dilia Tejeda, said that Devyn was eligible to start preschool in December 2020, but because of a shortage of special education seats, he wasn’t assigned to a classroom at the Children’s Learning Center in Harlem until March 2021.

“I did his IEP meeting early, so there was no reason why my son couldn’t go to school early if I did everything on time,” said Tejeda, 23. “The problem is they didn’t have a seat, and there was a lot of negligence.”

Tejeda said she couldn’t get DOE officials to return her calls for months about placing Devyn in a class with 12 students, as was outlined on his Individualized Education Program.

Devyn Maiga, 4, with mom Dilia Tejeda.

Through Advocates for Children, she filed a complaint with the DOE that prompted the education department to find a spot for Devyn within a few weeks.

Tejeda said her son was placed in a more restrictive setting than his IEP calls for with just six children in the class — few of them with verbal skills that could serve as a model for his delayed speech.

“When he’s around other children that speak, he challenges himself. He wants to do what they’re doing,” she said.

Among the service shortages in 2019-2020, roughly 39% of preschoolers who were recommended for SEIT services — or 2,661 children — never got the services, the report says.

And while fewer Black and Latino students were recommended to be paired with SEITs, those referred to work with those teachers ended up receiving the service at lower rates than white students, the report shows.

4: The share of NYC preschool students with disabilities recommended for segregated classrooms is high.

Roughly 43% of New York City preschoolers with disabilities were recommended for classrooms that exclusively serve students with disabilities during the 2019-2020 school year, the report found. That figure has long drawn concern from state education officials but has not dropped dramatically in recent years.

The state’s target is for only 18% of preschool students to be sent to settings that exclusively serve students with disabilities; the state average in 2019 was about 30%, officials said.

“These children are really being shortchanged,” state Board of Regents member Judith Chin said during the board’s Jan. 10 meeting. Chin, who represents Queens, urged state special education officials to immediately press Mayor Eric Adams on the issue.

“I want to make sure you don’t wait for the honeymoon period to be over,” she said.

Reema Amin contributed to this story.

Hochul proposes $2.1 billion increase for NY schools, extension of NYC mayoral control

2022-01-18T23:09:30+00:00

Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed a $2.1 billion increase for the state’s public schools and called for a four-year extension of New York City’s mayoral control of schools in her first budget address Tuesday.

Hochul’s proposal builds on her State of the State address earlier this month, which outlined plans to recruit and retain more teachers, boost mental health resources for schools, and get more New Yorkers to college.

Her plan to increase school aid was no surprise, as it solidifies commitments made last year to fully fund Foundation Aid — the formula that sends more dollars to higher-need districts and is the base for New York’s school budget.

Her proposal to extend mayoral control is yet another sign that she and Mayor Eric Adams are, so far, seeing eye to eye. While the system is expected to stay intact, lawmakers may attempt to tweak the city’s school governance structure.

Here are highlights of Hochul’s budget presentation:

School aid

Hochul wants to spend $31.3 billion on school districts next fiscal year — about $2.1 billion more than what they currently receive from the state. That’s largely driven by a $1.6 billion increase in Foundation Aid, which districts can use most flexibly, including to hire more teachers or create new student programs. That increase is what New York’s Board of Regents sought in December.

New York City would receive $12.3 billion, which is $531 million more than they currently get, representing a 4.5% increase in funding per pupil, according to figures released Tuesday night. Charter schools in New York City would receive a 4.7% increase in per-pupil funding under Hochul’s proposal.

Hochul’s funding proposal has been long expected. It stems from a commitment by state lawmakers and the Hochul administration to Foundation Aid and to increase spending by $4 billion by 2023, thanks to an increase in tax revenue and federal COVID stimulus dollars last year.

Her administration’s plan is a departure from the Cuomo era, which resisted fully funding Foundation Aid until last year. Cuomo had, however, increased school spending during his tenure, solidifying New York’s status as the highest spender per pupil in the country.

Mayoral control

New York City’s mayor controls the nation’s largest school district with a board that includes a majority of mayoral appointees instead of an elected school board. The state law that created the structure expires once again this June, nearly six months into Adams’ tenure; an extension requires approval from state lawmakers. It was last extended in 2019 under former Mayor Bill de Blasio.

In a statement, Chancellor David Banks applauded Hochul’s proposal and said mayoral control allows schools to “reach their highest potential.” The proposal, if passed, would cover Adams’ first term in office.

The system was created under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg to replace a fractured and often corrupt collection of school boards across the city. But parents and advocates have long criticized the system for not including their voices in major decisions that have shaped the district in the past two decades — a feeling that appeared to grow during the coronavirus pandemic and the disruption of in-person learning.

In a statement, city teachers union president Michael Mulgrew said the current system “does not work for students and parents.” He said the union has recommended modifications “that would help restore checks and balances to the system,” but did not elaborate on what those were.

Lawmakers, who will likely hold hearings on mayoral control this spring, are expected to renew mayoral control. However, Queens Democratic State Sen. John Liu, who oversees the state senate’s New York City education committee, previously told Chalkbeat that he’s considering proposing tweaks to the system, but declined to elaborate.

Special education programs

Hochul wants an 11% increase in tuition rates for state-approved, privately run special education programs that serve thousands of children with more intensive needs, according to the budget proposal. That mounts to an annual increase of more than $240 million. The state would continue to reimburse 60% of those costs, which are fronted by districts such as New York City.

Stagnant state funding has contributed to the closure of such programs and a shortage of seats for 3- and 4-year-olds with disabilities. More than 22,000 New York City children are enrolled in these programs. Rate increases for the preschool special education programs temporarily stalled after the 2008 recession. Since 2015-16, the state has approved a 2% annual rate increase, which trails what public schools and programs for older children have received.

Hochul vetoed a bill in December that would have provided preschool special education programs with the same annual rate increase that school districts receive.

Teacher pipeline, tuition assistance, and mental health

In her State of the State address, Hochul described multiple proposals to recruit more teachers to combat a shortage, including speeding up the certification process, creating a new teacher residency program, and temporarily increasing how much retired educators can make while still earning their pensions.

Her budget briefing, however, did not detail exactly how much would go toward those proposals. State Budget Director Robert Mujica said it would involve an unspecified portion of $350 million that’s dedicated toward boosting various workforces across the state.

One of Hochul’s goals is to get more New Yorkers through college. She’s proposed spending $150 million toward the state’s Tuition Assistance Program, or TAP, to offer financial assistance to part-time students. That investment is expected to reach 75,000 more students, according to the governor’s proposal.

Hochul also has proposed spending $100 million over two years for a new program that would match funds that high-need school districts spend on expanding programs for summer, afterschool, extended-day, and extended-year learning, as well as for hiring mental health professionals and creating school-based mental health services. The fund would match federal COVID relief dollars that districts spend on those specific types of programs and services.

The state will hold virtual hearings over the budget, including one focused on K-12 education on Jan. 26 at 9:30 a.m.

Special education tuition hearings shift to NYC trials agency to address backlog

2021-12-23T02:21:46+00:00

This story was originally published on Dec. 22 by THE CITY.

The de Blasio administration is transferring oversight of a backlogged special education complaint system — where filings typically take months or years to resolve — from the education department to a city entity that operates administrative trials.

The shift was codified earlier this month in a memorandum of understanding between the city and state education departments and the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings (OATH) that gives the city office two years to clear the case backlog.

OATH’s court-like system holds trials on alleged violations in a range of areas, including conflicts of interest rules, campaign finance regulations and local laws, such as the right to paid sick leave from work.

The move signals the apparent end of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s more than seven-year bid to reform the complaint system for families of special education students, just as he’s about to leave City Hall.

The filings are typically complaints by parents that their students aren’t getting required services, or requests by parents to make the city pay for private school tuition when the public schools can’t adequately serve their children.

The system saw about 5,000 due process filings annually when de Blasio first announced attempts at reform in June 2014. It now records more than twice that number per year — and is currently overrun with a backlog of more than 16,000 open cases, education officials confirmed earlier this month.

Family advocates said too many unanswered questions linger to let them gauge whether the move will bring improvements, even as they acknowledged that the current complaint system is broken.

”While rapid change without input from various stakeholders makes us a little uneasy, no action at all doesn’t make you feel good either,” said Matthew Lenaghan, deputy director of litigation at Advocates for Children.

City education officials said the shift marked a collective effort to help families of special education students who remain wary after past improvement plans failed to bring substantial change.

“This transition will allow us to significantly reduce wait times, ensure there are dozens of full-time dedicated hearing officers, and expand our tech capabilities to streamline the entire process,” said Sarah Casasnovas, a Department of Education spokesperson.

‘Adversarial process’

Dolores Swirin-Yao, of East Flatbush, Brooklyn, filed a complaint Sept. 25 seeking tuition reimbursement for her son, Jeremy, who’s 17.

Three months later, she’s still waiting for the case to be assigned to a hearing officer.

She’s been going through this process every year so that her son, who was diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD, can continue studying at the private Aaron School in Manhattan.

Some years, education officials have offered Jeremy a spot in a public school, a placement Swirin-Yao and hearing officers haven’t considered appropriate. Some years, they haven’t.

But every year to date, the Department of Education has eventually settled and paid for the tuition.

“It would be great if his needs would be met in a public school,” said Swirin-Yao. “If they can’t be, then the whole adversarial process should get eliminated.”

A two-year clearance plan

The Dec. 1 agreement says OATH will initially hire as many as 50 full-time hearing officers to staff a newly created special education unit.

Once those hires are made, OATH and the current impartial hearing office at DOE will operate simultaneously for six months, at which point the system will fully transfer to the administrative trials office.

OATH will then be able to hire attorneys to serve as additional hearing officers. The memo directs OATH to clear the backlog in two years.

The state Education Department will retain responsibility for training hearing officers and, when necessary, decertifying them.

The document lays out an order of priority for scheduling hearings based on six types of complaints — with students entitled to but not receiving any special education services placed at the top.

Students missing some of the services mandated on their Individualized Education Programs come next, followed by students whose parents believe they’re entitled to more help than they’re getting.

The lowest priority is for parents who unilaterally place their children in private schools — as they’re allowed to do — on the belief that the public schools aren’t able to appropriately serve their kids’ needs.

‘Family-friendly approach’

The impartial hearing system has long been viewed by parents and advocates as needlessly combative — including under the prior administration of Mayor Mike Bloomberg.

Cases that are fought and won by parents one year are often relitigated by the DOE the next year — even when the circumstances underlying the claims haven’t changed.

The system has also been riddled with delays, which mean students go months without required special education services or parents wait months for reimbursement of significant amounts of money they spend on services or tuition.

De Blasio sought to address both issues shortly after arriving at City Hall when he announced changes to the handling of tuition reimbursements for parents who placed their children in private schools when public schools couldn’t appropriately serve them.

His solution included an expedited review of cases that could be settled within 15 days, along with faster payment of tuition.

“We believe in a parent-friendly, family-friendly approach, that we’re going to be able to come to a resolution quickly in the vast majority of cases, and help parents get what they need,” de Blasio vowed at the time.

Advocates say the idea was sound but it wasn’t fully implemented, and some critics even argued that its leniency encouraged more tuition reimbursement cases to be filed.

Between the 2014-15 and 2018-19 school years, complaint cases more than doubled to 9,695 a year, according to state education department data.

Additionally, the city’s spending on private school tuition for special education students has more than tripled under de Blasio — from under $200 million in fiscal 2013 to more than $650 million in fiscal 2021, according to the city’s Independent Budget Office.

No easy fixes

In February 2019, a state review of the city’s impartial hearing process for special education complaints found a system in “crisis” that was teetering on “collapse.”

Many of the problems identified were administrative in nature, including too few hearing officers, not enough hearing rooms and almost no mediation attempts by the Department of Education.

The city’s pay scale for the hearing officers was also criticized as too low, and not enough of them took on full caseloads — something the state eventually attempted to address by certifying more officers.

DOE officials at the time promised to invest $3.4 million to make physical improvements to the downtown Brooklyn hearing office, while reiterating their commitment to improving the complaint process for families.

In February 2020, parents mired in the complaints system filed a class action lawsuit over the city’s violation of a 75-day deadline for resolving cases. The average closure timeline at the time was 259 days.

Since then, state and city education officials have tried to introduce a number of solutions.

Last year, state officials required the city to mediate more cases. This year, they expanded the pool of attorneys eligible to serve as hearing officers, and allowed for some hearings by video to make hearings more accessible.

None of the measures made a dent, leading to this month’s agreement.

NYC expands translation of special education plans, but onus still on parents with limited English to request it

2021-12-01T22:38:55+00:00

Parents of students with disabilities who don’t speak English have long struggled to get their children’s learning plans translated into their native language, a crucial barrier to advocating for extra help or ensuring they are receiving the correct services.

Officials are now taking more significant steps to address the issue. Last school year, the education department quietly launched a citywide effort to centrally translate students’ individualized education programs (or IEPs) instead of leaving the process up to individual schools that didn’t always have the capacity to conduct the translations or find an outside vendor to provide it.

The citywide program, which scaled up a small pilot program announced two years ago, will be permanent, officials recently said.

IEPs are essential documents that spell out a student’s individual goals and the services they’re entitled to receive, such as speech or occupational therapy or a smaller class size with specialized instruction. Without translated versions, families may struggle to know whether their children are getting the services they’re entitled to and effectively advocate on their behalf.

But even as advocates said the centralized process is a step in the right direction, the burden is still on families to request that the documents be translated, and families may not know they can request a translation. For now, there is a large gap between the number of families who may need translated IEPs and the requests.

About 78,000 students with disabilities live in homes where English is not the primary language, according to city officials. Last school year, 7,078 IEPs were translated, the first year the centralized translation process was available citywide.

About 1,100 IEPs have been translated so far this school year, a 70% uptick compared with the same period last year, officials said.

It is unclear to what extent the pandemic may have curtailed families’ requests for translated IEPs or how those figures stack up historically, since the education department did not track how many IEPs were translated by individual schools before the process was centralized.

Nevertheless, advocates said the new translation process represents progress.

“It’s way overdue,” said Lori Podvesker, a policy expert at INCLUDEnyc, an advocacy group that focuses on special education. “If special ed documents are not translated that prevents families from being a part of the decision-making, and that equates to inferior outcomes.”

Relying on schools to translate IEPs resulted in a patchwork system. Individual schools may not have anyone on hand to translate the documents or may struggle to find a translator who can provide high-quality translation of documents that often include jargon and other technical language.

Department officials have argued that centralizing the process would create a more streamlined process and lead to better translations, since the city could use translators with more practice reviewing the highly technical documents and reuse boilerplate language for certain parts, freeing them up to focus on sections that are unique to each student. (The city is using an outside company, Lingualinx, to conduct the translations.)

Paola Jordan, who co-directs Sinergia, an organization that helps Spanish-speaking families navigate special education services, said many families — and even schools themselves — may not know they can request translations.

“I am still seeing Spanish-speaking parents who have [IEPs] in English,” Jordan wrote in an email. “The burden still is on the parent to request the service.” She also raised concerns that families may have to wait several weeks for the documents to be translated.

Education department officials did not immediately indicate how long translations typically take, saying only that they are completed as soon as possible. Nor did they respond to a question about why the city won’t automatically translate IEPs for families who primarily speak other languages.

They did, however, say they are working to get the word out through letters, text messages, and advertisements to “promote the availability of language access services.”

Families who want to request an IEP translation can contact their school, call 718-935-2013, or visit the department’s website.

NYC special education referrals plunge 57% from pre-pandemic levels

2021-11-18T18:11:14+00:00

Significantly fewer students were referred for special education evaluations last year, dropping 57% since the year before the pandemic started, raising concerns that thousands of students have not been identified for services they may need.

During the 2020-2021 school year, 9,457 students were referred for evaluations to determine if they need more intensive support, such as smaller classes with a special education instructor or other services such as speech or occupational therapy. That’s down from roughly 16,000 the previous school year, and nearly 22,000 in 2018-19, the school year before the pandemic hit, according to an annual report delivered to City Council by the education department late Wednesday.

The report, which was released more than two weeks after the legal deadline and just hours before a City Council hearing on special education, does not reveal exactly why so many fewer students were flagged for services.

Pandemic disruptions last school year — when the vast majority of students were learning remotely — likely played a significant role.

It’s possible that families were overwhelmed and less likely to seek out evaluations or that educators were not able to pick up on typical cues that a student might need additional services in virtual classrooms.

Shrinking enrollment may have also played a role, as a significant chunk of referrals for special education are made in the early grades, which saw the biggest year-over-year drop in enrollment. (The decline in referrals for special education services, however, far outpaced the enrollment drop.)

“The drop in referrals likely means that there are students with disabilities that went all year without getting the help they needed and maybe continuing into this year without getting needed support,” said Randi Levine, a special education policy expert at Advocates for Children, a nonprofit that helps low-income families navigate the city’s special education system.

Black students saw a disproportionately large decrease in referrals for services, falling by more than half last school year and nearly 66% since the year before the pandemic. (Black students opted for remote learning at higher rates.)

At a City Council hearing on Thursday, department officials said the overall referral rate for special education evaluations had ticked up this school year and is closer to pre-pandemic levels.

The city’s statistics paint a more encouraging trendline for the roughly 192,000 students with disabilities who already had Individualized Education Programs, or IEPs, legally binding documents mapping out services tailored to each student’s needs.

Nearly 88% of students with disabilities received the correct “program” services by the end of the school year, such as a small class exclusively for students with disabilities, or a larger one with a mix of special education and general education students typically staffed by two teachers. That’s up nearly four percentage points from the 2019-2020 school year and about two points higher the school year before the pandemic hit.

Still, that left nearly 24,000 students who did not receive some or all of the specialized instruction they were entitled to. Because these figures are tabulated at the end of the school year, a student who is not receiving appropriate services for months could still be counted as getting the right services as long as they are in place by the last day of school. A significantly higher share of students were not receiving all of their services in the middle of last school year, city figures showed.

“We have prioritized our most vulnerable populations every step of the way during this crisis, and this report reflects the critical progress we’ve made in support of our students with disabilities,” Chancellor Meisha Porter said in a statement.

City officials said they have been working to improve the delivery of special education services, including closer reviews of school data to identify and help close gaps in services, according to Sarah Casasnovas, a department spokesperson.

The report doesn’t necessarily reveal some of the most common ways students with disabilities were impacted by the pandemic, however. Some students waited for weeks or months before receiving an iPad from the city to complete schoolwork and others simply struggled to engage with special education services remotely.

To help catch students up, the city is spending nearly a quarter billion dollars on extra support, requiring every school to provide additional small group instruction and therapies after school or on Saturdays. But the program’s rollout has been delayed until Dec. 6, and the first wave will only serve the highest need students. It’s unclear when most students with disabilities will have access to it.

About 500 schools have launched after-school or Saturday programming so far, or less than one third of schools citywide, said Christina Foti, a deputy chief academic officer who oversees special education.

“The vast majority of our schools have indicated that they are going to begin the services by the end of the month,” Foti said. “We are in the process of developing plans for every one of our students with IEPs.”

Foti indicated that most schools are planning to offer the program through a mix of in-person and virtual offerings. The decision to allow schools to offer the program virtually has drawn criticism from some advocates who argue it undermines the program’s purpose of helping students who may have struggled with remote instruction during the pandemic.

As special education complaints soar in NYC, the state wants hearing officers to take more cases

2021-11-15T23:16:10+00:00

No one has been assigned to help resolve roughly 9,400 special education complaints in New York City — even as nearly 30% of available hearing officers have no cases on their plates, according to the state education department.

In response, state officials want to require these officers to take on a minimum number of cases or otherwise risk losing their certifications. It’s one of several state proposals over nearly two years aimed at easing New York City’s special education complaint backlog.

Families file complaints with the city’s impartial hearing office when their children with disabilities aren’t receiving mandated services, such as physical therapy or counseling, or when they believe their child is in the wrong class or even the wrong school, hoping to get the city to pay private school tuition. The backlog means children with disabilities go without therapeutic services, the right class placement, or appropriate school setting.

Despite efforts from the state or the city to ease the backlog, the number of cases in New York City have continued to rise. More than 16,300 cases were open as of Nov. 9, a 34% increase from the number of cases in the 2019-2020 school year, according to state officials. As of last month, 9,399 of these cases have not yet been assigned to an officer, with more than a quarter of them having gone unassigned for six months or more.

As most children learned remotely in the year and a half after the pandemic hit, many students with disabilities missed out on the services they’re legally owed. The city has promised to launch a sprawling program to help students with disabilities catch up on services they may have missed, but the program’s rollout has been delayed.

“The New York City Department of Education continues to remain overwhelmed with an unprecedented number of due process complaints, and data indicates that these numbers continue to increase,” Chris Suriano, the state’s assistant commissioner of special education policy, said on Monday during the New York State Board of Regents monthly meeting.

Recruiting new hearing officers

Though there are 162 officers who are certified to adjudicate these cases in New York City, 46 of them had not been assigned any cases as of last month. Thirty of those officers had been trained recently, according to the state. Asked why so many officers have no cases, a state spokesperson said they’re contractors who may “have other responsibilities,” adding that the number of cases per officer varies widely.

Currently, officers are required to take just one case every two years, according to a spokesperson for the state education department.

Under the new state proposal, impartial hearing officers in New York City would be required to take at least 35 of the cases they’re offered in a single year but no more than 500. If officers don’t meet the minimum requirement, the state education department could consider rescinding their certification, the proposal says.

One exception to the rule: newly certified officers would have one year before being required to take at least 35 cases, according to the proposal.

The proposal highlights that the state is “investing significant fiscal and staffing resources into recruiting, interviewing, and training” new impartial hearing officers. That investment, however, has “little or no benefit” if these officers are not picking up enough cases to reduce the backlog.

John Farago, who has been a hearing officer in New York City for decades, said the state has done a good job of hiring and training roughly 100 new officers and supports the minimum caseload requirement. Still, he said the effects of hiring new officers may still take over a year to begin making a dent.

“The expectation that it would fix things overnight was not realistic,” said Farago, who noted that he typically has about 350 active cases at any given time.

Other possible fixes

At the same time, the state is also calling to allow officers to extend a case, from 30 to 60 days, a move that was temporarily allowed in response to the pandemic.

State officials believe such a change will make officers more willing to accept cases, especially if they’re required to take at least 35 cases a year. The move would also free up hours of hearing officers’ time that is spent going through the motions to issue regular extensions.

State officials claim that parents and some officers prefer such an extension because “it improved [the officer’s] ability to concentrate on the substantive issues of their cases rather than ministerial procedural issues.”

Finally, the state is also calling for the city to create an electronic filing system for these complaints. The city currently manually enters data about impartial hearings, “causing weeks or months of delays” before complaints, pleadings and final determinations are entered. That has made it “nearly impossible” for the state education department to monitor the progression of these cases, state officials said.

Earlier this year, the state tweaked requirements for becoming an impartial hearing officer in order to increase the pool of people who can resolve complaints. They also allowed hearings to happen over video conference.

But advocates have pushed for more changes, including pressing the city to resolve more of these cases through mediation and settlements.

Waiting ‘months or a year or longer’

Even though federal law requires these cases to be resolved within 75 days, it took triple that amount of time in New York City during the 2018-2019 school year — a rate that has grown since at least the 2014-2015 school year. (Officials did not immediately provide more up-to-date data.)

Randi Levine, a policy director at Advocates For Children New York, said her organization is still reviewing the proposal. But she noted that parents wait “months or a year or longer” to reach a resolution with the city.

“We’re continuing to see cases to go to hearing even when the DOE is not disputing the parent’s requested remedy,” Levine said.

The city has failed to comply with federal special education laws for more than 13 years, while the state’s compliance plan for the city has failed to substantially improve the system. State officials have acknowledged that other fixes are necessary.

“Part of the [compliance plan] we’re working on is using the resolution sessions as well as alternate ways to resolve complaints, such as settlements, use of mediation,” Suriano said. “The settlement process takes a long time in New York City, and there is very little use of mediation at all.”

Sarah Casasnovas, a spokesperson for the education department, said the city supports the state’s proposal of creating minimum caseloads. She added that the education department has made “significant reforms to reduce wait times, hire more staff and streamline the entire process,” but did not answer questions about why the number of cases have soared or how many cases in recent years have exceeded the legal time limit to be resolved.

State officials will collect feedback on these proposals during the next two months, and are expected to vote on them in March 2022. If passed, the new requirements would go into effect March 30, 2022.

Alex Zimmerman contributed.

NYC delays its massive academic recovery program for students with disabilities

2021-11-09T23:00:00+00:00

This is part of an ongoing collaborative series between Chalkbeat and THE CITY investigating learning differences, special education and other education challenges in city schools.

The city Department of Education promised an ambitious program to help nearly 200,000 students with disabilities, setting aside nearly a quarter billion dollars for after-school and Saturday sessions to help them catch up in the wake of pandemic disruptions.

But the city’s plan, financed with federal relief funding, is once again facing a delayed start date at many schools, and it’s unclear when the program will reach most students, Chalkbeat and THE CITY have learned.

The special education academic recovery program is now scheduled to begin as late as Dec. 6 for the highest-need students in all city-run schools, city officials confirmed. That’s less than three weeks before winter break starts on Dec. 24, and nearly three months into the school year. The program was originally slated to begin in October or early November and then pushed back to Nov. 15.

“It’s November and nothing — what a shame!” said Bronx mom Jeannine Timpone, who’s been eager for her 13-year-old daughter Victoria to participate in the academic recovery program.

Department officials have split students with Individualized Education Programs, also known as IEPs, into three priority groups with staggered timelines for launching the additional services. Department officials were unable to say when the other students eligible for special education recovery services, who have less acute needs than the first group, will begin the program or how many students are in each of the three priority groups.

The plan to offer additional small group instruction and services such as speech and occupational therapy outside the school day has won some praise from advocates, and appeared to be a more aggressive plan than what some other large school districts have launched.

But families and advocates are frustrated that the program’s rollout has been scattershot, with little communication about what specific services will be provided and key details about transportation still up in the air.

Scaling up a new program for students with disabilities is a massive undertaking, and the city often struggles to provide mandated special education services during the regular school day. The education department is tasking each school with the responsibility for spinning up its own program, though some school leaders still have questions about how they will be able to provide the services students need.

‘Making every effort’

There are signs that education officials are worried about finding enough staff who are willing to work overtime for it. Schools are now allowed to hire educators who are not certified in special education for the program, a break from the city’s original plan, according to guidance sent to principals obtained by Chalkbeat and THE CITY.

In another last-minute change, despite the requirement that students attend school in-person this year, city officials are allowing schools to offer the recovery program virtually.

Department of Education officials said they pushed back the start time to give schools “flexibility” in launching the services, which will be offered in cycles of 10 or 13 weeks. Students will be offered additional cycles if they don’t make up enough ground, according to department guidance. Schools are expected to receive funding for the program in their budgets this week, officials said.

“We’re making every effort to support our students with disabilities as they recover from the impacts of the pandemic, and all students with IEPs will have access to after-school and Saturday programs as part of our Academic Recovery Plan,” said education department spokesperson Sarah Casasnovas.

“Many of our schools have already begun reviewing student progress and planning their programs, and our students with the greatest needs will begin receiving services in the coming weeks.” Casasnovas added that “the vast majority of schools will begin providing services this month.”

Education department officials said a small number of schools have already started offering the services, though they did not say how many.

The department is also opening two sites in each borough for students with disabilities who have significant sensory issues that affect their learning or behavior. The SEED program, which will also operate after school and on Saturdays, is expected to reach roughly 3,500 students through June.

Officials said schools will reach out to families who have “the greatest need.”

“Where is all the promised and talked about help and recovery for these kids? They mentioned after school and weekends? Lots of talking up top, but no action.” — Bronx mom Jeannine Timpone

Parents in the dark

Timpone said she’s been unable to get any information about the academic recovery program from her daughter’s school, the Van Nest Academy.

She said she blames disorganization at the DOE for why she hasn’t yet been told if the school will be offering the program, whether her daughter was placed in the first or second group, and when the makeup sessions will be held.

“Where is all the promised and talked about help and recovery for these kids?” said Timpone. “They mentioned after school and weekends? Lots of talking up top, but no action.”

Other parents said they’ve been given the wrong information about program eligibility.

Jessica Colon, whose son missed out on many of his services during pre-kindergarten because of the pandemic, said she was told her school, the Vida Bogart School in The Bronx, isn’t considering him for the recovery program because he’s in kindergarten.

But education officials confirmed that all students in grades K to 12 who have IEPs are eligible.

“I don’t think the schools have gotten any guidance,” said Colon, whose son is supposed to receive speech, occupational and physical therapy.

“If they’re not going to have him participate in that program, I still feel like I’m entitled to those compensatory services,” she added. “We tried teletherapy, but my son does not respond to that.”

Even at schools that have been communicating about the program, some parents say the options they’ve been offered won’t necessarily work for their kids.

“I don’t want to say no to anything, especially if it’s going to benefit my kids. But three extra hours is probably not going to work for them — it’s just too long.” — Brooklyn parent Sandra Pelligrini

Sandra Pelligrini has twin sons in second grade at PS 164 in Borough Park, Brooklyn, who are eligible for the recovery services.

She said a staffer called her Oct. 26 to ask if she wanted her sons to participate, and whether three extra hours on each Tuesday, Wednesday and possibly Thursday afternoon would work.

“Obviously, I would be interested, but my kids are 7 years old. It’s a 9-hour day,” said Pelligrini. “I don’t want to say no to anything, especially if it’s going to benefit my kids,” she added. “But three extra hours is probably not going to work for them — it’s just too long.”

Pelligrini said she hasn’t heard back from the school since the initial phone call gauging her interest.

A bumpy rollout

Even in a typical year, many schools struggle to staff special education positions. But with three consecutive school years disrupted by the pandemic, and with many educators experiencing burnout, it is an extra challenge to entice educators to work overtime.

Education department guidance says that the program’s small-group instruction should include a maximum of six students, meaning schools that serve many students with disabilities may need a significant amount of staff for the program.

“Principals have been finding out who wants to do this program, and it’s been a hard sell,” said Mark Cannizzaro, head of the union that represents principals and other administrators. “There are not enough teachers, especially special education teachers, to staff these positions.”

At the Metropolitan Expeditionary Learning School in Queens, co-principal Pat Finley said the school has been able to find nearly enough staff for group instruction. But he noted the education department has not laid out clear plans for providing services such as speech, occupational, and physical therapy, which are also supposed to be provided during the after-school and Saturday sessions.

The school, for instance, does not have an occupational therapist on staff this year and is relying on a voucher program to provide that service to families. “I have no idea who is going to provide that service, when it’s going to happen, or how it’s going to happen for families,” Finley said.

The city has hired or is in the process of hiring 300 occupational, physical and speech therapists since July, department officials said last month. In areas with shortages, schools can assign service providers from other schools or the city will “assign contracted providers.”

It’s also unclear what kind of transportation students will receive. Department officials have promised that students who typically receive busing as part of their special education learning plans will be eligible for transportation, but they indicated that could involve being reimbursed for car services rather than a yellow school bus.

They’ve asked schools to program after-school recovery services first for the students who require busing, in order to give the Office of Pupil Transportation at least 30 days to schedule the after-school routes. Students attending programs on Saturdays will receive MetroCards, according to a webinar conducted by education officials last month.

Officials did not say if students who don’t have busing listed on their IEP but still take the bus to school, such as students in temporary housing, would be guaranteed transportation.

Finley said he’s frustrated that the city hasn’t communicated more clearly with schools or given them more leeway to design their own programs.

“I’m certainly not against the idea of special ed recovery services,” Finley said. “The implementation seems scattershot, not thought out and not thoughtful of the challenges schools already face on the ground.”

Long waits bring harm

City officials believe that the afternoon and Saturday programs will help students with disabilities catch up.

But for those who need more individual help, or are unable to attend after-school and Saturday sessions, families should still be eligible for what are known under federal law as “compensatory services.” The city is required to provide such make-up services if a student did not receive an “appropriate” education, advocates say.

In November 2020, the Department of Education revealed that 46% of special education students had received only some or none of the services they were entitled to in the prior school year — largely because schools shuttered and went to all-remote learning when COVID struck in March of that year, according to a recent report by state comptroller Tom DiNapoli.

As of January of this year, about 25% of students with IEPs — roughly 54,000 — weren’t receiving all of their mandated services, the report said.

To get access to those services, families would typically have to individually file complaints through an “impartial hearing” process, which is overseen by an administrative judge and has been logjammed for years.

The non-profit organization Advocates for Children filed a lawsuit against the city last fall seeking to force the education department to create a more streamlined process without requiring parents to file complaints that often take many months to resolve.

So far, the case is still winding its way through the courts and has not resulted in a new process for requesting those services.

“These are students who did not receive an appropriate education from March 2020 through at least the end of the 2021 school year and possibly continuing now,” said Rebecca Shore, the litigation director at Advocates for Children. “The longer they have to wait to get those compensatory services they need, the greater the harm will be to the students.”

NYC panel approves $43 million to replace troubled special education data system

2021-10-08T19:28:48+00:00

A citywide panel cleared the way this week for New York City to begin overhauling its special education data system, approving nearly $43 million to replace the costly and glitchy database more than two years after officials first announced plans to scrap it.

The city’s Special Education Student Information System, known as SESIS, is responsible for tracking the services students with disabilities are supposed to receive, their evaluations, and progress toward meeting their goals. But the system, which cost $130 million to develop, has been plagued with problems since it launched in 2011. The new system should be ready by fall 2023, city officials said.

The city’s Panel for Educational Policy on Wednesday approved nearly $43 million over five years for the education department to contract with a Milwaukee-based company called Experis to help replace the system, the result of a competitive bidding process.

City officials have been pushing for a custom-built alternative to SESIS that can be tailored to New York’s complex special education system rather than an off-the-shelf replacement. The new system will integrate data on preschool students with disabilities, which is currently housed in a separate system.

Advocates hope replacing SESIS will have tangible benefits for the city’s more than 200,000 students with disabilities. Because SESIS is incompatible with other city databases, including those that track what classrooms students are actually enrolled in, it is difficult to obtain up-to-date information about whether students are in classrooms with the correct ratios of students and educators, advocates said. City officials have previously been forced to cross reference data from different systems manually.

SESIS has also impeded the city’s ability to release accurate data on whether students are receiving the legally mandated special education services to which they’re entitled.

“I’m very excited that the city has finally allocated the resources to change [SESIS] and create a better system, which can only mean that more kids can get what they’re entitled to in a timely way,” said Lori Podvesker, a special education policy expert at INCLUDEnyc and a member of the education policy panel who voted to approve the city’s proposal.

Still, her vote to approve the funding came with some reservations. She worries the city prioritized cost-effectiveness over the best possible platform and wondered whether Experis had sufficient experience building special education data systems. “Do I trust that it’s going to be great? Absolutely not,” Podvesker said. “But I believe it will be better than what we have.”

Experis officials emphasized that the new system will be created to the education department’s specifications and owned by the city, which will not have to pay ongoing licensing fees. The city will also be able to change the system as needed. Michael Corley, the company’s managing director said in a prepared statement that Experis “has subject matter experts that are proficient in Special Education services, practices, and program implementation.”

Crucially, Experis will also provide a parent-facing portal for families to communicate about their child’s learning plan, monitor what services are being delivered, and give parents direct access to their child’s individualized education program, said education department spokesperson Sarah Casasnovas.

“This will help families get real-time information and allow for seamless reporting and oversight to make sure our students get the support they’re entitled to,” Casasnovas said in a statement.

Advocates have long called for more real-time information about whether students are receiving services and allow parents to access it, giving families a powerful tool to advocate on behalf of their children and city officials a clearer sense of where resources are needed. It’s unclear exactly what information parents will be able to access in the new system.

“Sometimes it feels like they’re relying on our escalations to figure out where they need to send support,” said Maggie Moroff, who works on special education policy issues for Advocates for Children. She hopes a new system will help city officials respond faster in situations where students aren’t getting required therapies — or are even in the wrong type of classroom setting.

Moroff noted that city officials have recently given parents direct access to some special education data, including whether the teachers in their courses have a special education certification, and the most recent dates of services such as speech or occupational therapy.

For its decade-long run, SESIS has caused headaches for teachers, families, and city officials.

Educators have long complained that SESIS is difficult and time consuming to use, and the system at times malfunctioned more than 800,000 times a day.

Special education teachers often spent hours navigating a maze of drop-down menus — inputting data such as whether they met with a student and for how long — only to experience error messages that erased their answers. (An arbitrator eventually ordered the city to pay more than $38 million in teacher overtime.)

In addition, former Public Advocate Letitia James filed a lawsuit claiming that SESIS was to blame for some children not receiving services as well as lost Medicaid payments. Between 2012 and 2015, according to the IBO, the city collected $373 million less in Medicaid reimbursements than officials projected.

Megan Moskop-Toler, a special education teacher who once experienced 41 error messages in the span of two hours, said she hopes a new data system isn’t so time consuming so she can spend more time focused on her students rather than on data entry tasks that are sometimes redundant.

Special education teacher Megan Moskop at a forum in 2016 where she described problems with the data-tracking system, SESIS.

She also pointed to more systematic issues with special education staffing, saying that knowing where students aren’t getting services is only one part of the issue.

“The heart of the problem is understaffing and under-resources,” she said. “No one is like, ‘Oh I don’t want to give their children physical therapy.’”

Other educators said they are nervous about whether such a massive undertaking will involve unforeseen glitches and delays that could impact the timeliness of special education evaluations or other services.

“I just worry about what the transfer will look like,” said Annie Tan, a Brooklyn special education teacher. “I’ve been using [SESIS] for about six years now and I think it was like the second or third year where I finally understood all the places to put things.”

1 hour of instruction a day: NYC parents grapple with limited learning for medically fragile students

2021-10-01T19:41:33+00:00

Rodney Lee began looking for alternatives to in-person instruction for his daughter as soon as it became clear that New York City would not offer a remote option for families this year. Ten-year-old Priya suffers from a seizure disorder that could be exacerbated if she contracts the coronavirus.

Lee learned that his daughter would be an excellent candidate for “medically necessary instruction,” a revamped education department-run program that allows students to learn from home if they have health needs, including seizure disorders, that prevent them from safely returning to classrooms this school year.

But the Manhattan family soon learned that the program would only offer an hour a day of instruction, far less than what Priya received last school year when she opted for fully remote learning.

It left the family with a difficult choice: accept the possibility that she would slip behind her peers academically or risk the resurgence of a seizure disorder that has not flared up in three years but can leave her struggling to breathe.

The family decided the academic risks were too great.

“We had to make a really difficult decision to send her to school,” said Lee, noting that Priya’s school reported a positive COVID case just a couple days into the year, though his daughter was not a close contact. “Every day we pray, and we hope that she stays healthy.”

Rodney Lee with his daughter Priya.

Families across the five boroughs are grappling with the same dilemma about whether the potential safety benefits outweigh the possible academic costs of the city’s program for medically necessary instruction that allows students to learn from home.

The program only guarantees five hours a week of instruction for elementary school students and 10 hours a week for middle and high schoolers, minimums that are set by state regulations. And while hundreds of families have applied for the program despite the limited hours, some are still waiting for instruction to begin weeks after the school year started as their applications are processed.

New York City Schools Chancellor Meisha Porter said in August that she expected between 3,000 and 5,000 students to participate this year. But so far, fewer than 500 families have applied, about 40 have been rejected, and roughly 300 are currently enrolled in the program, according to education department officials. With rolling admissions, enrollment is expected to grow throughout the fall.

“I think there’s a lot of interest and a lot of suspicion at the same time,” said Maggie Moroff, a special education policy expert at Advocates for Children, referring to the limited hours of instruction.

Revamping home instruction

City officials expanded access to home instruction by explicitly defining 20 different conditions that can quickly qualify students for the program with instruction expected to start within a day or two. The move aimed to cut through some red tape and has won some praise from advocates, who said that in previous years the program’s admission criteria were not always clear, and there were sometimes delays getting instruction started.

In a decision made just weeks before the school year started, the city changed the program’s pre-pandemic model of sending educators to meet with students in-person, to also allow for virtual instruction.

“Medically Necessary Instruction provides our immunocompromised students with high-quality education and support, and keeps them connected to their school communities,” education department spokesperson Sarah Casasnovas said in a statement. “Families may apply at any time, and students receive learning materials from their home school while their application is reviewed.”

Brooklyn mom Jennifer Goddard applied to the program on behalf of her 10-year-old son, August Huete, who she said has asthma and an overactive immune system. For the first several days of school, she used the workbooks provided by his school, P.S. 216, though it was a disorienting experience for her son to miss out on a more traditional start to the school year.

A schedule Jennifer Goddard made with her son, August, while they waited to hear about the possibility of home instruction.

Now, August is receiving virtual instruction at home one-on-one for an hour a day, which has focused heavily on reading with only a couple sessions devoted to math so far. A recent math session introduced powers of 10, though some of the reading lessons have been less engaging, focusing on assessing August’s skill level, or devoting big chunks of the hour to reading a text.

“I think the teacher is doing the best he can,” she said. And despite the limited hours, she said home instruction wasn’t a hard choice. “I can find other ways to make up a loss of education,” she said, “I don’t have other ways to make up a loss of health.”

The family is filling in some of the gaps by providing supplemental social studies, art, science and physical education activities. Goddard is also paying out-of-pocket for online math classes through the website Outschool three times a week, which she expects will cost $500 through December. By then, she’s hoping August will have been vaccinated and can return to his classroom.

Jennifer Goddard with her son August.

In the meantime, Goddard said she is hopeful the city considers moving more students like her son into online group sessions that are offered for more than one hour a day.

State officials said schools should consider providing more hours of instruction than the minimums established in state regulations.

Casasnovas, the city education department spokesperson, said the city plans to offer additional hours “in the coming weeks” to students who receive remote group instruction.

‘It’s medical home instruction or withdrawing entirely’

Other families are still waiting for their home instruction applications to be processed.

Erin Alexander said her efforts to apply to the program were delayed because her pediatrician’s office was slow to provide the application’s required letter explaining why her son needs to stay home. She formally applied Sept. 22, but has not yet heard whether her application will be approved.

Alexander, who lives in Brooklyn, acknowledged that her 6-year-old son’s case falls in a gray area. He doesn’t have a condition listed on the education department’s list of pre-approved illnesses, though officials have said that students with other medical issues may still be accepted. The 6-year-old boy was born 14 weeks early, and his lungs were underdeveloped, so he was immediately intubated and put on a ventilator, spending the first three months of his life in intensive care.

Her son has also struggled with other infections, becoming hospitalized after contracting RSV and pneumonia simultaneously just after beginning day care when he was 2 years old. The family worries a coronavirus infection, or even a regular cold, could have severe consequences. On top of that, she’s worried that her autistic son, who also has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and struggles with transitions, will not do well in school if classes are disrupted by quarantines.

“It’s medical home instruction or withdrawing entirely,” she said, noting that he looked forward to his classes when they were remote last year. “That’s where our level of concern is.”

For now, Alexander remains in limbo. Even as they hope her son’s application to learn from home is approved, Alexander is not thrilled with the prospect of an hour or two a day of instruction.

If she’s denied a spot in the program, she said she’d likely homeschool him. (City officials said that it can take 7 to 10 days to process applications, which are reviewed by health department doctors or education department psychiatrists to determine if the medical need meets the city’s standards.)

So far, Alexander’s son hasn’t been receiving the constellation of therapies on his special education learning plan, and the school has not yet provided assignments for him while they wait for a decision from the city, though his teacher said she plans to provide workbooks and some digital materials soon.

The teacher offered to allow Alexander’s son to stop by for recess outside to connect with his classmates, a gesture Alexander said she deeply appreciates after more than a year of social isolation.

But whatever happens with her son’s application, she hopes it will be temporary. Asked when he would likely return to a classroom, she said it would be two weeks after his second shot. Children ages 5-11 could begin receiving shots later this fall, though the exact timeline is not clear.

“We’re not terrified of it,” she said of the vaccine. “Give it to him now.”

De Blasio insists substitutes will fill staff gaps caused by vaccine refusal. Some schools have doubts.

2021-09-30T20:34:19+00:00

On a typical day, principals can log into an education department system to request a substitute teacher when needed.

But this coming Monday will not be business as usual. It’s the first day the city’s vaccine mandate takes effect for all adults working in school buildings, and some schools are worried about staffing shortages.

Mayor Bill de Blasio has insisted that “thousands and thousands” of vaccinated substitutes will be ready to fill in for unvaccinated teachers and other staffers. But some schools have already struggled for weeks to find substitutes. Educators at those schools said they may end up reshuffling current classes or staff to cover vacancies if they’re still unable to get substitutes.

To cover current teacher absences, school leaders at one Brooklyn elementary school have been pulling educators from Integrated Co-Teaching classes, or ICT, which require one special education and one general education teacher.

At another elementary school in the Bronx with two vacancies, only one substitute has been available to cover, a teacher said. Additionally, the school is expecting between three to five paraprofessionals, or classroom aides, to be out on Monday because they won’t get vaccinated, which accounts for at least one quarter of their paraprofessional staff.

This school had a challenge to find substitutes pre-pandemic, in part because of its Bronx location, the teacher said. He doesn’t expect that to change by next week.

“There has been no contingency plan,” said the teacher, who, like others in this article, asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal. “It’s just something mentally I’m preparing myself for — who knows what’s going to happen on Monday?”

Vaccine mandate challenges

New York City’s vaccine mandate was originally set to go into effect on Sept. 27, two weeks after the first day of school. Legal disputes unsuccessfully challenged the mandate, including from the city and state unions. A federal judge ordered a delay for implementing the mandate, but this week that court cleared the way.

The ruling came in time for schools to implement the mandate on Sept. 27, as originally scheduled. De Blasio instead chose to delay until end of day Friday, meaning educators will have to show proof of at least one dose of vaccine by then. City officials wanted schools to have the weekend to staff up with necessary substitutes, de Blasio told reporters earlier this week.

On Monday morning, unvaccinated staff will not be allowed to work and must take unpaid leave.

Mark Cannizzaro, president of the union for principals and administrators, which had joined a legal fight opposing the vaccine mandate, had previously called for a delay, along with the city teachers union.

“The fact that the mandate was delayed for this week, I think, has been helpful in many people being able to secure some staff,” Cannizzaro said. “However, there are still many schools that are having difficulty finding people.”

In anticipation of staffing shortages, education department officials told schools last week that they would receive extra funding to hire substitutes, who are paid $199.27 without benefits, though long-term hires may qualify for sick leave. Katie O’Hanlon, a spokesperson for the education department, said superintendents and borough offices are working with schools that need extra support.

Over the past week, the percentage of teachers and school leaders who have submitted proof of at least one dose has steadily climbed. Roughly 89% of all education department employees complied with the vaccine mandate, including 92% of whom were teachers, according to city officials. 98% of city principals and 95% of assistant principals had been jabbed, according to Thursday data from the principals union.

That leaves just over 16,200 education department staff, including about 6,200 teachers, unvaccinated. Schools are also bracing for shortages of cafeteria workers and school safety agents.

There are 9,000 vaccinated substitute teachers, plus another 5,000 substitute paraprofessionals who can work, O’Hanlon said. She said these numbers “rise every day,” and far exceed the number of unvaccinated staffers, but she declined to say what share of paraprofessionals have been vaccinated.

In the event a principal cannot report to work Monday, a superintendent would either make an assistant principal or another type of administrator the interim acting principal, according to Craig DiFalco, a spokesperson for the principals union.

In addition to substitutes, the city has promised to send central education department staffers into schools if necessary.

Uneven effects of mandate

Some schools appear more ready than others. A Bronx elementary school principal said the only two holdouts at her school are expected to get their first dose on Friday. Many of her teachers are “politically active” and believe it’s their responsibility to get vaccinated, but others simply need the money and must stay employed, she said.

“Most people don’t have the financial ability to [quit],” she said. “Everyone I know, they need this job to survive.”

But staff shortages could particularly be a problem in specific pockets of the city. Staten Island schools seem to have higher numbers of unvaccinated staffers, said Cannizzaro, based on feedback he’s heard from school leaders there. With 66% of all residents receiving at least one dose, Staten Island ranks third for its vaccination rate, ahead of Brooklyn and the Bronx, respectively, city data show.

Schools already experiencing shortages could be for a few different reasons. Sometimes schools want someone who is qualified or has experience teaching a particular subject area, such as a foreign language, Cannizzaro said. Other times, it’s hard to find a substitute who wants to stay long-term, which is what many schools may be looking for once the mandate kicks in. For example, teacher retirees who now work as substitutes are usually only looking to work a couple days of the week, he said.

Students with disabilities caught in middle

School leaders are especially worried about vaccination rates among paraprofessionals. While vaccination uptake is “creeping up,” rates among paraprofessionals appear to be lower than other groups based on what school leaders have reported to Cannizzaro.

At the Bronx elementary school, losing even three paraprofessionals could mean a cut in services for several students with disabilities who are mandated to receive one-on-one help from such staffers.

Students with disabilities might also lose out at the Brooklyn elementary school pulling a teacher out of ICT, which mandates two teachers, one of whom must be trained in special education to teach a mix of students with disabilities and general education students.

Though a chunk of unvaccinated staffers from that school got their first dose last week, the school dealt with nearly a dozen staff absences this week, potentially from those dealing with temporary after-effects of the vaccines, a teacher said. School leaders mostly reassigned one of two teachers from ICT, even though those classes are required to have both under state education regulations.

The teacher expects that could happen next week when the mandate kicks in. The school often does not hire substitutes to fill absences because they either cannot find long-term substitutes or people who they feel are qualified, according to a teacher there.

It wouldn’t be surprising if, come Monday, the school combines entire classes to deal with staffing shortages, which can have a “destabilizing” effect on kids, the teacher said.

“Especially this early in the year, they need to settle in and feel centered on what’s going on and feel comfortable enough to begin learning,” she said. “But if there is a different teacher in your room every day, or they’re gone, and no one explains it to you, kids have trouble relaxing or focusing on the work.”

A teacher at a Brooklyn high school recounted struggles to find reliable substitutes in the past. One time, a sub walked out in the middle of the day. Sometimes subs haven’t shown up, and some of the temporary hires weren’t “great with the kids,” he said. For those reasons, the school is wary about who it brings in.

He believes the school will lose at least one teacher once the mandate goes into effect and potentially two to three others. As of Wednesday, the school had two potential leads for subs, but he’s unsure what’s going to happen next week.

“I am assuming one of the possible scenarios is that us as teachers will have a little bit more workload,” he said. “Some teachers might be asked to teach an extra period.”

No-show school buses leave some NYC students stranded on the first day

2021-09-14T15:14:17+00:00

Shahnaz Habib’s 10-year-old daughter was ready for a momentous day back at school. After learning online for more than a year, she told her fifth grader that, years from now, she would want to remember what it was like to return to the classroom for the first time amid a pandemic.

“She got so excited about taking notes about this day and writing it down,” Habib said. “She got her backpack ready last night with her notebook and an extra mask, hand sanitizer. She was ready for her historic day in school.”

With a lunchbox full of her favorite food — pasta — her daughter headed to the bus stop Monday morning with her father and waited. For an hour.

The bus never came, and she did not make it to school.

Busing is a perennial issue in New York City, especially in the first weeks of school while contracted companies smooth out routes. The city spends more than $1 billion on buses that can run hours late — if they show up at all. It’s especially a problem for students who have disabilities and rely on buses to travel to programs tailored to their needs.

On Monday, the first day of school for almost 1 million students, parents reported long wait times to lodge complaints with the Office of Pupil Transportation. There’s no publicly available data yet on how extensive problems were this year as schools opened at full capacity for the first time in more than a year.

“We apologize that these families experienced these issues on the first day of school and are following up with them to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” said department spokeswoman Katie O’Hanlon.

She said parents can reach out to the Office of Pupil Transportation to escalate their case if they are having trouble reaching the bus vendor by calling 718-392-8855.

Busing complaints have grown in recent years. In 2019, there were an average of 500 delays a day during the first weeks of school, which was up 5% from a year before, according to an analysis by Chalkbeat in partnership with The CITY.

NeQuan McLean, a parent leader in Brooklyn’s District 16, said his son’s bus was two hours late on Monday morning — and then took the second grader to the wrong school.

His wife called around 11:30 a.m. saying that the school informed her their son was absent. For an agonizing half hour, they didn’t know where he was. It wasn’t until they got in touch with the bus driver, who relayed the address where the boy had been dropped off, that they realized he had been taken to his old school. He transferred this year to a school that specializes in teaching students with dyslexia.

The experience was harrowing for McLean’s son.

“Everything is supposed to be fixed. I got a new route and everything. But he doesn’t want to get on a bus,” McLean said. “He don’t want to end up at the wrong place.”

The bus never showed up for Elena Romero’s daughter either. The fourth grader is supposed to be bused from Sunset Park in Brooklyn to P.S. 133. Pick up time is 7:05 a.m. They waited until 7:45 a.m.

“We went into crisis management mode,” Romero said.

A single mom with two other children to get to middle and high school, she left her elementary schooler with a babysitter at the bus stop, and hopped in a car to drive her older children. Eventually, another parent stranded at the same bus stop offered to bring her daughter to school.

School administrators tell Romero to keep calling the bus company, but it feels hopeless.

“As if somehow the phone call is going to make the bus miraculously appear,” she said.

She felt the mishaps acutely because, with health concerns over COVID, she’d rather be able to keep her children home. But there was no option to learn remotely this year.

“No one cared whether or not we wanted remote. So you’re forcing us to have no choice, our back is against the wall, and then you’re not going to have bus service?” she said.

On Monday, the Habib family considered booking an Uber, but the ride would have cost $45 from Prospect Lefferts Gardens, where they live, to P.S. 770 in Crown Heights. They tried taking a public bus, but after just a few stops, a fight broke out in front of them when a passenger refused to wear a mask.

“Passengers were screaming and swearing at each other. We got off after a couple blocks and she just started bawling and said, ‘I just want to go home.’ So we just went home,” said Rollo Romig, the girl’s dad. “We just literally couldn’t get to school.”

Luckily, her parents were both working from home on Monday, so the girl spent the day reading library books and playing computer games. It’s probably better that she stayed home, her parents figured, because they weren’t convinced a school bus would have shown up for the return trip from school. They were right to be skeptical — multiple parents at the school reported that buses did not show up in the afternoon.

Busing has been so unreliable that, in the past, the Habib family and parents in the neighborhood paid for a private van to school.

“We really don’t know what we’re going to do tomorrow,” Habib said.

NYC is promising expanded special education services after school and on Saturdays. Here’s what we know.

2021-07-28T13:00:00+00:00

For thousands of students with disabilities in New York City, the pandemic upended crucial services, from physical and occupational therapies that were difficult to deliver remotely, to special education classes that were suddenly virtual and staffed by one teacher instead of two.

In an acknowledgment that these disruptions have knocked many children off track, city officials announced earlier this month that every student with an individualized education program — or roughly 200,000 children with disabilities — will be eligible for extra special education programming after school and on Saturdays in addition to whatever services they normally receive.

The program is the widest-reaching effort so far to address learning gaps for students with disabilities caused by the pandemic. And it has won praise from some advocates who see the move as a proactive step to provide extra help rather than relying on families to file legal complaints through a backlogged administrative process that can impose financial costs and take many months to resolve.

“We’re cautiously optimistic and excited,” said Amy Leipziger, an attorney at Queens Legal Services, an organization that provides legal help for low-income families.

But she and others have lots of unanswered questions about which services will be provided, how families can access them, and whether they will be sufficiently tailored to each student’s needs.

Here’s what we know — and don’t know — about the city’s plan to provide afternoon and Saturday services to students with disabilities.

The city plans to focus on therapies and literacy support

When the pandemic hit, many services became difficult or impossible to deliver, including counseling, speech, physical, and occupational therapies. Some parents tried to become de facto therapists, helping their children through virtual sessions and buying their own materials to help with motor skills, though that wasn’t tenable for all families and some students simply couldn’t engage with remote therapy.

These services will be available to students during the after-school and Saturday sessions, officials said. In addition, students will receive small group instruction that will focus on literacy interventions, said Nathaniel Styer, an education department spokesperson.

Every school will provide expanded services

The “vast majority” of the city’s $251 million in additional spending on special education this year will flow to school budgets to provide services outside the traditional school day, officials said, with principals scheduling times that work well for their families. (Department officials did not say exactly what share of the $251 million will be devoted to after-school and Saturday sessions.)

Some programming will be provided outside of schools, too. “Additional funds will be used for centrally managed sites to support students with sensory needs,” a department spokesperson wrote.

The program won’t launch on the first day of school

The school year is slated to begin Sept. 13, but the after-school and Saturday services for students with disabilities will begin in October or early November, Styer said.

Families won’t have to sign up, but it’s unclear how schools will identify students for extra support

Any student with an individualized education program is eligible and families won’t need to sign up. Schools will contact families and notify them about available programming, officials said.

That approach means that families won’t be required to get in touch with their school to access services, but it also raises questions about how schools will make decisions about which students need extra help and what specific services to provide. Advocates also raised concerns about whether the city would communicate effectively with families who don’t speak English and whether services would be provided in a student’s native language.

“This is one of those examples where the idea is really sound but the implementation raises a lot of logistical questions,” Leipziger said.

How often will services be provided and how will they be staffed?

Other than promising a slew of therapies and small group instruction focused on literacy, the department hasn’t offered concrete examples about what that will look like in practice, including how many sessions a week students can attend and what the hours will be — important details for families who may want to participate in after-school programs or need to arrange childcare.

Education officials indicated that the programming will be provided by teachers at each student’s school. Still, some advocates said there are often shortages of therapists and principals said it might be difficult to recruit educators to work overtime after more than a year of pandemic teaching that has burned many teachers out.

“Do people have enough bandwidth staffing wise to sustain this?” asked one Manhattan principal who spoke on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to speak publicly. She added that she has received few details about how the expanded special education programming would operate. “We can’t really plan if we don’t know who we’re planning for.”

How individualized will the programming be?

Multiple advocates said they are concerned that schools will offer a fixed menu of special education services rather than figuring out what each student missed last year in consultation with parents and offering services tailored to those gaps.

“What is most important for us is that there’s an individualized determination of what the students’ needs are and likewise an individualized determination of the assignment of services,” said Rebecca Shore, the litigation director for the nonprofit group Advocates for Children.

The organization filed a class action lawsuit last year demanding the city come up with a streamlined system for providing compensatory services rather than relying on the formal legal complaint process. Education department officials did not respond to a question about whether they considered the after-school and Saturday sessions to be “compensatory” in nature, a distinction that has legal implications.

Officials said the afternoon and Saturday programming offered to students will be “based on consideration of their individual needs,” including their experiences during the pandemic.

Will students get transportation?

City officials did not respond to questions about whether they would provide transportation after school or on Saturdays for students who need it. The education department did not initially offer round-trip transportation options for summer school among students who typically require it during the school year but eventually promised to reimburse taxi services.

A Bronx principal turned congressman unveils ambitious Green New Deal for nation’s schools

2021-07-15T21:19:12+00:00

New York City Democratic Congressman and former principal Jamaal Bowman returned to his public school roots in the Bronx on Thursday to unveil a pricey federal proposal that would help construct energy-efficient schools, hire more staff and create more culturally responsive curricula.

The $1.43 trillion package would create hundreds of billions of dollars in grants over 10 years that districts could use to do “green retrofits” of buildings — such as installing solar panels and getting rid of toxic substances — for the nation’s top third of highest-need schools, as measured by socioeconomic indicators. Other schools could also qualify for partial grants and low- or no-interest loans, according to a news release about the bill.

“Schools, as the heartbeat of our communities, can be the epicenter of clean, green, renewable sustainable energy, not only for themselves but for the extended, larger community,” Bowman, who aligns with a group of the most progressive federal Democratic lawmakers, told reporters outside of Sousa Junior High School in the Bronx.

Bowman’s package is meant to address “environmental justice, economic justice, and racial justice” by sending more resources to the highest needs schools, as well as teaching children about systemic problems. He said he wants students to understand the history of redlining, which blocked people of color from getting loans to buy property in certain neighborhoods, and why school buildings in low-income communities tend to be in more disrepair than those in more affluent neighborhoods.

Improving school buildings is a perennial issue, but it gained renewed attention during the pandemic when many districts scrambled to repair their ventilation systems as a way to protect against coronavirus transmission. In New York City, officials raced to fix faulty ventilation systems at buildings before they reopened for students this past year.

Recent research has found that upgrading school facilities results in better student performance.

Bowman is hoping that his proposal, dubbed the Green New Deal for Public Schools, will be included in a broader infrastructure plan as the White House negotiates a new budget. With 22 co-sponsors and a price tag exceeding $1 trillion, it is an ambitious measure introduced by the freshman congressman. Bowman, who was the founding principal of Cornerstone Academy for Social Action in the Bronx before he ran for public office, gave a shout out to his Bronx and Queens colleague, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who co-penned two years ago the Green New Deal, a resolution that maps out a larger plan to combat climate change.

Bowman noted long-standing building issues he experienced in his two decades as an educator and has heard about across the country, such as schools with non-operable or lead-laced drinking fountains and faulty ventilation or HVAC systems, as well as rodent-infested schools. He blamed those problems on “the historic neglect of resources that have not come from our federal government.”

New York City, which is home to the nation’s largest school system, has taken some steps to build greener school infrastructure, including a recent commitment toward a fully electric bus fleet by 2035. In February, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the city would install solar panels on top of 47 public schools. The city’s roughly 1,600 schools that house nearly 1 million students contribute to one-third of the carbon emissions released by all city buildings, officials have said.

Bowman’s bill would allocate federal funds that would help the city do much more, according to Chancellor Meisha Porter.

“There’s no doubt that the new Green Deal for Public Schools will help New York City and districts across the country and will continue to ensure that New York City and New York City public schools chart the path forward for this nation to strengthen academics, build greener schools and combat climate change,” Porter said.

Major sections of the bill go beyond energy efficiency. Another $250 billion in block grants would go toward hiring more staff at high-need schools, which districts could use to hire and train more teachers, paraprofessionals, school psychologists, and counselors. This pot of money could also be used to design curriculum that’s “trauma-informed, culturally responsive, and restorative justice practices,” as well as to partner with community organizations who can offer more services to schools, such as after-school programming, according to a news release.

The city has taken some steps in this regard, as well. Officials recently announced a $200 million plan to bring culturally responsive English and math curriculum to all schools by the fall of 2023. (Schools would be required to use the curriculum unless they get a waiver to use existing courses of study.)

The largest chunk of Bowman’s bill — nearly $700 billion — would go toward boosting Title 1 funding, which goes toward schools with high shares of students in poverty, and toward services for students with disabilities.

The bill’s impact on saving energy could be significant for New York City, if passed, said Jeff Vockrodt, executive Director of Climate Jobs New York, a coalition of city labor unions advocating for more climate-friendly infrastructure. The city could save $70 million in energy costs annually if energy efficiency was improved by just 25% across all schools, according to a campaign the group launched to push for clean-energy schools. The organization recently wrote a letter highlighting their findings to New York’s federal leaders, urging them to build greener schools.

“Just here in New York City, we can have the impact of the equivalent of planting 400,000 trees — that impact on emissions,” Vockrodt said during Bowman’s press conference. “We can create thousands of good union jobs [and] we can address a lot of long-standing facilities issues in schools.”

NYC’s budget deal pilots smaller class sizes, dedicates millions to COVID learning loss

2021-06-30T21:59:37+00:00

New York City lawmakers approved Wednesday a record-high budget that will send billions more to schools, including for testing and tutoring students next fall, and a pilot program to reduce class sizes, a longtime goal of many local education advocates.

The $98.7 billion spending plan marks the largest and final budget under Mayor Bill de Blasio’s tenure. It is also, arguably, his most consequential, paving a path for the city’s economic and social recovery after the coronavirus pandemic upended two school years for nearly 1 million students.

Many budget figures weren’t immediately available. However, officials confirmed that the education department’s spending would increase by $2.4 billion year-over-year. That would put the total budget for the nation’s largest school system at $31.6 billion.

When starting the budget process in January, de Blasio initially shared a pessimistic outlook for schools if the federal government and state didn’t send more money to New York City. But now, the city is flush with nearly $7 billion in federal coronavirus relief dollars for schools and another $1.3 billion in state aid.

Even with the influx of cash, it’s still a big question whether the extra funding will provide enough support for students and teachers as they return to buildings — many for the first time since March 2020 — after 16 months marked by death, isolation, and the challenges of remote learning. Budget watchdogs also raised concerns about how sustainable some of these new efforts will be after federal relief runs out in 2024. The de Blasio administration has insisted that tax revenues will grow now that the city has reopened and will support these programs in the future.

Additionally, officials have not shared a full accounting of how the city plans to spend federal coronavirus relief dollars. State law requires the city to post their plan for the money online by Thursday.

The budget agreement covers fiscal year 2022, which runs from July 1 through June 30, 2022.

Here are some of the preliminary highlights for schools.

More money for school budgets

The bulk of money schools get to run their day-to-day operations, such as teacher salaries and services for students with disabilities, comes from a formula known as fair student funding. This year, for the first time, every school will get 100% of the dollars they’re entitled to receive under the city’s fair student funding formula. About three-quarters of schools previously did not get their full allotment and will now see boosts.

“Now, they will have money to hire new teachers, art, music, gym, you name it,” said Brooklyn Councilman Mark Treyger, chair of the City Council’s education committee, during the budget press conference Wednesday.

It will cost the city a total $605 million next fiscal year, plus another $140 million to cover fringe benefits and pension costs, according to the Independent Budget Office.

That formula determines how much funding goes to each school and generally is designed to send more money to high-needs schools.

For years, city officials blamed the gap in fair student funding on a lack of money from the state through its own funding formula. But Albany’s budget grew this year after an increase in federal funding and increases to income taxes on millionaires and corporations, resulting in more money for schools.

‘Academic recovery’ — with few details

The final budget will include an “academic recovery” plan after children lost out on instructional time in the classroom: all students spent about a third of the 2019-2020 school year fully remote, and more than 60% finished out the following school year learning exclusively from home.

The mayor had proposed spending $500 million on helping students catch up by giving students diagnostic tests when they return this fall to measure their English and math skills. Students will then get extra support, such as high-dosage tutoring, to catch up on those subjects where they are below grade level.

But many questions remain unanswered, including what the diagnostic tests will be, what sort of extra support will be available for students, and who will provide tutoring. Aside from some details revealed during a City Council budget hearing in May, city officials have declined to offer more specifics. In response to questions from Chalkbeat, an education department spokesperson said more information would be shared “in the coming days.”

Smaller class sizes and literacy

The City Council proposed a $250 million investment to reduce class size. Instead, the city is planning an $18 million pilot program for smaller classes, though officials declined to share details about what it would involve. A department spokesperson said more details would be shared “in the coming days.”

Reducing class size has been a perennial issue. This year, as social distancing required small classes, many families and educators saw benefits of having fewer children in a classroom, and many believe that small classes are critical again next year since children will likely have a range of needs and could be at widely different levels academically. Advocates were hopeful that the billions in federal and state dollars could support such an initiative.

This final investment is a “piddling amount of money,” said Leonie Haimson, executive director of the advocacy organization Class Size Matters.

“I think this is a very sad end to a mediocre mayoral record when it comes to our schools,” Haimson said. “He could have easily funded that out of the $8 billion [in federal and state money].”

Separately, the city will spend $27 million on a literacy curriculum focused on helping students read at grade level and “address learning loss,” according to a press release from Speaker Corey Johnson’s office. City officials declined to share more details Wednesday, saying that more will be shared in the “coming days.”

Kim Sweet, executive director of Advocates For Children New York, said the investment is just over half of what City Council and advocates had asked for and falls short of the need.

“In addition, the budget does not include any additional funding for evidence-based literacy interventions for students who need additional support in reading,” Sweet wrote in a statement. “Every year, AFC hears from hundreds of families concerned that their students are not learning to read within NYC public schools, and the data show that less than half of 3rd through 8th graders are reading proficiently with alarming disparities based on race, disability, and housing status.”

Special education seats for preschoolers — with a catch

Universal pre-kindergarten for all 4-year-olds has been de Blasio’s signature education accomplishment. Thanks to an influx of federal dollars, the city had proposed spending $377 million next fiscal year to ramp up programming for 3-year-olds, with the goal to make “3-K” universally available by September 2023, according to figures shared in April.

But the rapidly expanding program will still leave out many students with disabilities who are entitled to smaller classes with specialized instruction, in part because they are often served by nonprofit organizations that have been struggling to stay afloat amid years of nearly flat funding from the state. At the end of the 2019-2020 school year, 1,215 preschool students with disabilities were still waiting for classroom seats, according to an analysis of city data conducted by Advocates for Children.

De Blasio and the City Council have agreed to spend $22 million on a slew of initiatives for preschool students with disabilities, including opening dozens of classrooms that integrate students with disabilities and their peers without disabilities. But the city is not directing additional funding to eliminate the gap in seats for students who need more specialized classrooms until the fiscal year beginning in July 2022. That means many preschool students with disabilities could be forced to sit at home without access to instruction next school year.

“Preschoolers with intensive needs should not have to wait for the City to uphold their legal rights,” wrote Randi Levine, policy director at Advocates for Children. Levine also noted that the city has not committed to eliminating the yawning pay disparity between preschool special education teachers at city-run programs and those at nonprofit community organizations, which often amounts to a $30,000 difference. The discrepancy can make it difficult for community organizations to attract teachers and keep classrooms running.

More social workers and mental health support

The budget will set aside money to make sure every school has a full-time social worker or access to an in-house mental health clinic, which employ psychologists and other types of clinicians.

In all, the mayor proposed spending $91 million in federal COVID relief dollars to pay for 500 additional social workers as well as a short mental health assessment for every student when they return in the fall. (Families can opt their children out of getting screened, officials have said.)

The budget will also include another $5 million to support schools in connecting with “health experts rather than police” when children are experiencing a mental health crisis, Treyger said.

“We don’t need the police to respond to 5-year-olds and 7-year-olds having a bad day in school,” he said.

During the 2019-20 school year, Black students received nearly half of all suspensions or removals from school that also involved contact with the police, and six police-involved incidents involved 6-year-old children.

A Council spokesperson did not immediately share more details about which schools would receive this funding or how the program would work.

Sweet, with Advocates for Children, praised the investment, adding that this type of model is based on schools partnering with hospital-based mental health clinics for advice and care.

Expanding community schools

The mayor had proposed spending $51 million on expanding the community schools program, which provides high-needs school communities with wraparound services, such as mental health support and extra academic help. His plan was to open 140 more such schools by the fall of 2022.

Separately, an additional $9 million will go toward restoring funding cuts for community organizations that partner with 52 community schools, which resulted from a new funding model the city has begun to implement.

Alex Zimmerman and Christina Veiga contributed.

NYC to pay for summer school taxis for homeless students and those with disabilities after facing criticism from advocates

2021-06-30T01:17:15+00:00

The city will pick up the tab for taxis to ferry homeless students and those with disabilities back from its summer school program after facing criticism from advocates who said the education department’s transportation plans violated the law.

The announcement, which was made in a Tuesday evening Twitter post, comes one week before the summer program is set to launch for most students and after advocates urged the city to offer a car service at the end of the day if bus transportation is not available.

“We will offer reimbursement for travel expenses (such as car service, taxi) for families of students with disabilities and students in shelter who receive busing during the school year and would like to stay at their Summer Rising program until 6 p.m.,” wrote Sarah Casasnovas, an education department spokesperson.

Randi Levine, policy director at Advocates for Children, which has raised concerns about the busing policies in recent weeks, said the transportation plan could still impose logistical burdens on families.

“While reimbursement may help some families, many families who are homeless or have low incomes cannot afford to lay out money for daily car service and wait for the DOE to reimburse them,” Levine wrote in an email.

Levine said the education department should pay upfront for families to take taxis to Summer Rising sites and accompany their children home.

Casasnovas did not say how the reimbursement process will work or how families who couldn’t front the cost would be accommodated. She said more information would be provided to families soon.

The city’s summer school program, which is open to all city students for the first time, includes an academic portion for the first part of the day followed by afternoon enrichment, such as field trips and other camp-like activities. The afternoon enrichment wraps up at 4 p.m. for middle school students and 6 p.m. for elementary students. (The structure of the high school program varies.) Until today, city officials had offered to provide MetroCards as transportation back for students who wanted to stay beyond the academic portion.

For weeks, Advocates for Children demanded that city officials provide round-trip yellow bus service at the day’s end to students who typically receive it during the school year. Without it, they said, some of the city’s most vulnerable students, including those who use wheelchairs and homeless students who live far from public transportation, would be shut out of a significant chunk of the summer enrichment program.

City officials initially declined to provide any yellow bus service to many homeless students and those with disabilities who typically receive it during the school year. And even for eligible students, officials said they would only provide round-trip service for the academic part of the day.

After pressure from advocates, the education department recently agreed to expand bus transportation — but again, only for the academic portion during the first chunk of the day. Now, officials said they will cover the cost of a taxi or car service back for homeless students and those with disabilities at the end of the full day, so long as they also received busing during the school year.

About 50,000 students with disabilities and 5,000 homeless students typically receive busing during the school year; it’s unclear how many of them will participate in the summer program. Officials previously indicated that they could not provide bus service at the end of the school day due to “operational constraints and safety considerations” but have not elaborated on what that meant.

Busing isn’t the only possible barrier for students to attend summer school. Some families and advocates have raised concerns about whether there will be enough specialized staff on hand to meet the needs of some students with disabilities. And the enrollment process for the summer program has also sparked confusion, as some families have been turned away from specific summer school sites or placed on waitlists.

Summer school busing gap could exclude homeless students and children with disabilities, advocates fear

2021-06-08T02:27:17+00:00

Homeless students and those with disabilities who receive round trip busing during the school year could be excluded from a significant chunk of the city’s summer school program due to lack of transportation, a move that advocates argue violates the law.

“The [education department] claims that ‘All New York City students will have an opportunity to participate in the program,’” Rebecca Shore, the litigation director at Advocates for Children, wrote in a Friday letter to a top education department lawyer. “In practice, however, the DOE’s refusal to provide bus service to those students with disabilities or students in temporary housing who require it results in the exclusion of students.”

Shore’s letter argues that the city’s transportation plans this summer run afoul of federal laws that require “equal access” for students with disabilities in programs that are available to all students and a state law that requires transportation for students in temporary housing if needed.

The city’s “Summer Rising” program, which launches next month, aims to revamp traditional summer school to include field trips and outdoor activities. Mornings will focus on academics, while afternoons will be filled with enrichment and largely staffed by community-based nonprofit organizations. While there will be busing home for some students after the academic portion of the day wraps up, no students will be bused home after the second part of the day, which ends at 4 p.m. for middle school students and 6 p.m. for elementary students. (The structure of the high school program varies.)

The lack of bus service at the end of the full day could exclude some students from the enrichment program if their families are unable to make other travel arrangements, advocates said.

For the first time, the summer program is open to any student who wants to participate, rather than focusing on students who are behind, and officials anticipate up to 190,000 students could enroll. But parents of students with disabilities have already raised concerns about whether the city will provide the special education services and staff their children need to participate. The transportation issue is one more potential barrier.

About 50,000 students with disabilities are entitled to receive bus service during the school year, including some students with physical disabilities who use wheelchairs. Among those students, only those who are in year-round special education classrooms or are required to attend summer school due to their academic performance will receive busing — again, only for the morning instructional part of it.

Similarly, students who live in temporary housing will only be eligible for bus service to and from the morning instructional program — and only if they are also required to attend summer school. Roughly 5,000 students in temporary housing receive transportation during the school year, including those who live far from public transit.

City officials did not respond to questions about why they are not providing bus service at the end of the day for students who may need it nor did they respond directly to the Advocates for Children letter claiming the summer program’s bus service violates federal and state law.

“With twice as many locations across the City than prior summer programs, Summer Rising was designed to provide families with programs that are close to home, and we will work closely with individual schools and families to ensure our students’ needs are supported for their return trip home,” Sarah Casasnovas, an education department spokesperson, wrote in a statement. She noted that students who attend summer school would be eligible for MetroCards.

Still, some legal experts said the city is obligated to provide bus transportation if students with disabilities need it to effectively participate, even if the second portion of the day is largely focused on enrichment and outdoor activities rather than academics.

“They have to provide the same kind of accommodation they do during the school year,” said Ron Hager, a managing attorney at the National Disability Rights Network. “It would be very hard for [the city] to make an argument that they don’t need it.”