Articles about this issue have now been published in Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the Daily News.
For immediate release: March 20, 2019
For immediate release: March 20, 2019
Community-based
PreK directors urge the Mayor and Chancellor to change course or their centers
will be forced to close
Fifty-eight
directors of community-based preschool programs from all five boroughs have now
written letters to Mayor
de Blasio and Chancellor Carranza, warning them that the expansion of PreK and
now 3K has put their centers on the brink of financial collapse.
They
explain how despite having worked for decades with DOE to provide early
education, they have lost thousands of students as DOE built too many of their
own free-standing PreK centers close to existing CBO-run programs. These free-standing DOE PreK centers cost
taxpayers $811 million, and many themselves now stand half-empty.
.In
addition, the DOE insists on placing excessive numbers of PreK children in public
elementary schools – even in schools that are already overcrowded and have waiting
lists for Kindergarten. As documented in
a recent report by Class Size Matters entitled The
Impact of PreK on School Overcrowding in NYC: Lack of Planning, Lack of Space, the DOE’s inserted PreK classes in 352
public schools that were at 100% utilization or more, thus contributing to
worse overcrowding for about 236,000 elementary school students.
The letters
from the CBO directors describe how many of them shared their concerns with Deputy
Chancellor Josh Wallack and his staff at a meeting in November 2018. Though Wallack admitted that mistakes had
been made by the city in building too many PreK centers, he refused to change
course or correct the DOE’s practice of overfilling elementary schools to the
detriment of the community-based programs that are suffering severe economic distress
as a result.
Though the
CBO directors suggested to Wallack that the DOE assign more students to their
centers to help ensure their financial viability and to use their own PreK
centers for Kindergarten classes, which would relieve some of the overcrowding
at nearby elementary schools and offer these children smaller classes, he
refused.
During a subsequent
phone conference with the DOE, CBO directors were informed that there was no
plan to limit further expansion of PreK or 3K in district elementary schools. The
new proposed five-year capital plan allocates another $95 million to build 3K
centers and $85 million for PreK centers. Thus, this initiative will continue
to come at the expense of the city’s long-time CBO partners, city taxpayers,
and hundreds of thousands of elementary school students, who will experience
even worse overcrowding in NYC public schools as a result.
The letters
from the PreK directors conclude with this heartfelt plea:
“Community-based
organizations like ours have been the backbone of early childhood education in
our city for generations. When the DOE needed us as their partner, we
provided. When the Mayor needed us to help reach his goal of serving
70,000 children, we provided. Again and again, the DOE has come to us
when they needed us and now we are being dismissed and ignored. Why must our
centers, dedicated to helping families and improving early education
opportunity for NYC children be the collateral damage of the Mayor’s signature
initiative? “
The fifty-eight letters, 25 of them from Pre-K directors in
Brooklyn, 17 in Queens, seven in the
Bronx, five in Manhattan and four in Staten Island, are posted here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ja02hEMkExJfFr193eg-F_vJxRHrjbI-/view?usp=sharing
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