Corey Johnson MIA when parents, teachers and students gathered at his district office, urging him to bring Int. 2374 to a vote.

Please remember to join us at the rally today at 12:30 PM outside City Hall, on Broadway and Murray St.  This is our last chance to get Int 2374, the class size/social distancing bill, submitted, "aged" and voted on next week - the final City Council session until nearly the whole Council turns over.

Yesterday there was a rally at Speaker Corey Johnson's office - lots of parents, kids and teachers showed up to urge him to bring  the bill, to a vote.  But neither Corey nor any of district staff were  there.  Photos  below.
 

Letter to City Council and Speaker Regarding School Siting Task Force

For more on the School Siting Task Force, including its second and final meeting see our blog here , as well recent articles in the Daily News and Wall Street Journal.  More on the controversy as to whether its meetings should have been open to the public to begin with see our blog here,  an article in City Limits , an advisory letter providing guidance from the NY State Committee on Open Government, and a letter from the City Comptroller Scott Stringer.  

We will update this post when we receive a response from the Speaker and/or the Council.

August 6, 2019

Dear Speaker Johnson and members of the City Council:

We are very disappointed in the process and outcome of the School Siting Task Force, created by Local Law No. 168 in Sept. 2018.  The law mandated the creation of  an “interagency task force” to facilitate the acquisition of publicly and privately-owned sites for schools.  Over 500,000 students are crammed into overcrowded schools,  and in some communities, it has taken over 20 years for the DOE and the School Construction Authority to find suitable sites.  The law also mandated that this task force should provide a report to the City Council no later than July 31, 2019 on their findings.

One of us, Shino Tanikawa, was appointed to the Task Force by the DOE, and the first meeting was held privately on Feb. 26, 2019. Yet according to the expert opinion of the NY State Committee on Open Government, any task force or advisory body created by law to have a specific governmental role is subject to Open Meetings Law.  City Comptroller Scott Stringer also sent a letter to the Chancellor and Lorraine Grillo, President of the SCA, urging them to comply with the law and allow members of the public to attend. In our experience, such a critical issue as facilitating school siting and planning to alleviate overcrowding deserves transparency; and it is our experience that it is parents and members of the community who often have the best and most useful suggestions when it comes to these issues.

On May 2, Chancellor Carranza and SCA President Lorraine Grillo responded to Comptroller Stringer’s letter, saying the public would be allowed to attend future meetings, though they refused to concede that they were legally obligated to do so:

Although we disagree with your position that the Task Force is subject to the OML, we do not object to opening Task Force meetings to the general public, consistent with our commitment to community input and engagement. Accordingly, future meetings of the Task Force will be open to the public.

Yet we heard nothing more about the Task Force until Shino received a message on July 22 that the second and final meeting of the Task Force would be held on Monday, July 29 at City Hall from 3-5 PM, and that this meeting would be open to the public.

Five months had gone by between Feb. 26 and July 29, without the Task Force meeting once.

During that final meeting, Lorraine Grillo and her staff from the SCA projected some spreadsheets, listing thousands of city-owned properties and privately-owned land, the vast majority of which they had ruled out as unsuitable for schools, because they were too small, not in the right areas, or strangely configured. They said they had found only two sites out of more than 7,000 properties owned by the city that might be good sites for schools. In addition, they said, they were continuing to explore and analyze some of the privately-owned properties.

Their presentation only lasted about 15 minutes, and then Liz Hoffman of the First Deputy Mayor’s office, who was running the meeting, opened it up to questions. She was asked if the public could receive a copy of these spreadsheets and she said no. She was asked if the public would receive a copy of the report, and she said no that it would be sent to the City Council on July 31, as specified in the law.

According to Shino and Kaitlyn O’Hagan, the City Council representative to the Task Force, neither one of them had even seen a copy of the task force report or was asked for any input before a draft was provided to the Council on July 31.  Shino requested that the draft report be shared with her and was told the final report would  be shared only after the City Council reviewed it.  It was not until City Council staff stepped in that the report was sent to the entire Task Force. In any case, the report is only one and a half pages long. 

Whether or not the deliberations of this Task Force and this report comply with the intent and/or language of Local Law No. 168, it is hugely regrettable that rather than welcome collaboration with parents and advocates, the city continues to restrict it.

We urge you to re-start the entire process of this Task Force, ensure that it holds regular meetings open  to the public, includes representatives from more stakeholder groups, releases all the relevant data,  and solicits input from parents and community members. 

If the Mayor’s office objects, we urge you to amend the legislation to require these provisions.  We would be happy to work with you to finalize the language of an amended law.  Tackling the problem of school overcrowding is too important an issue to let this Task Force end with a one-and-a-half-page report from the SCA.

Yours sincerely,

Leonie Haimson

Executive Director

Class Size Matters

leonie@classsizematters.org

Shino Tanikawa

Co-Chair

Education Council Consortium*

estuaryqueen@gmail.com

(*Affiliation for ID only)

Naila Rosario

President

NYC Kids PAC

Info@nyckidspac.org

Disappointing budget as far as our public schools and class size are concerned

Some  news links: NY Times, NY Post, NY Daily News, Chalkbeat and Brooklyn Eagle. 

The new NYC budget deal was announced between the Mayor and the City Council on Friday.

In terms of our public schools, it included $41M more to hire about 200 new social workers for schools, especially those with lots of homeless kids and $857,000 for seven additional Title IX Coordinators to handle complaints of gender discrimination and sexual harassment.  The budget will also put $250M into an overall city budget reserve to be used during economic downturns that now totals $6 billion. 

The education budget will  include  another $25 million  for the Mayor’s top education priority: 3K expansion into 14 new districts, bringing the cost to around $100M.  If the pattern of previous years holds, the DOE will continue to draw kids out of existing preK centers run by Community Based Organizations  and pushing them into already overcrowded public schools, which in turn will contribute to higher class sizes for kids in grades K-5.

What the education budget doesn't include: any increase in Fair student funding (with many schools are currently at only 90%), no dedicated funding for class size reduction, and no amount to achieve CBO pay parity for preK teachers -- though the Council says they got a commitment from the Mayor to address this disparity though negotiations by the end of the summer.

The only elementary school initiative that I know of is the 2nd grade literacy coach program in high needs schools, which is  now in its third year, funding 242 coaches in 305 elementary schools, according to the DOE website.  The program is supposed to produce two-thirds of students reading on grade level by the end of second grade by 2022, and 100 percent of all second graders reading at grade level by 2026 (long after de Blasio has left office.)

Yet the first year of the program showed no positive impact and the administration has not yet released data from either its second or third year - which suggests it may have had disappointing results as I predicted. Though the news of the budget deal didn't mention this, it is likely that the initiative will continue to be funded next year at the level in the Mayor's executive budget of about $90 million per year.  (There are job listings for this position here.)

In any case we aren't giving up on our campaign to reduce class sizes.  More counselors are great but there this will do little to improve achievement in grades K-5 where class sizes in many schools are still sky high.