Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Staten Island Rallies Against Bloomberg Budget Cuts

Parents and their elected representatives were out in force last night to protest the mayor's cuts to the education budget.

One lawmaker with a child headed to public school criticized the mayor for failing to keep his word. From the Staten Island Advance:

"Everybody understands a promise as a promise, and even if you don't like it, you've got to live with it," Councilman Vincent Ignizio (R-South Shore) said last night. "When my baby girl attends PS 36, she's only going to get one chance at kindergarten, one chance at first grade."

Educators warned that the cut in the 2008-2009 school year budget would mean that schools all over the Island would have to scale back dramatically in music and arts programs; ax academic intervention services that help the students most at risk, and further swell class sizes.

See the full story in SI Advance here and great video footage from NY1 here.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Not one cent should be allocated to any school that has not cleaned up its discipline act.
We have schools out there that are totally out of control. Blame much of this on rookie principals who are dumped on by other principals when the latter throw their discipline problems into their schools.
When will we have a march for discipline in our public schools? Why aren't our so called activists outraged by the fact that schools are failing because of the severe discipline problems that go unchecked?

Anonymous said...

Discipline problems should be sent to Chancellor Klein. Let him deal with them. Why do you think that he ran from the system after a 6 month teaching stint in a Queens Junior High School teaching 6th grade math. He couldn't stand it. Now, he supervises the N.Y.C. school system. What a joke!