DOE absurdly claims that their refusal to report on vaccination rates is due to privacy concerns

UPDATE: the DOE finally released school-wide vaccination rates on Feb. 25, about two months after this data reporting was legally due.  You can download the spreadsheet here, or look up the name of your school here.  

Finally, a media outlet covers the fact that NYC DOE is violating the law when it comes to their refusal to report on student vaccination rates overall and by school.  As Christina Veiga of Chalkbeat writes,

How many New York City public school students are vaccinated?

Education department officials won’t say, even though they use those statistics to determine how many students to test for COVID at each school. The city has not provided school-level vaccination rates despite a City Council law that requires the department to do so. The city also missed its Wednesday deadline in responding to Chalkbeat’s public records request for the data.

That information is particularly relevant now, as Gov. Kathy Hochul weighs whether to end school mask mandates. A decision is expected in early March, and vaccination rates are one of the factors Hochul has said she will consider.

We wrote about the fact that the DOE refuses to release this mandated data according to Local Law 152 last Sunday.

 DOE claims to Chalkbeat that the delay is due to student privacy concerns:

New York City education department officials said they are making sure to comply with any student privacy laws before releasing school-level vaccination information. “This is sensitive data and we are currently working to balance transparency with the privacy of our students prior to the release of this data,” said education department spokesperson Nathaniel Styer.

As a privacy advocate who co-founded the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy seven years ago, I can safely say that this is an absurd excuse, as vaccination rates contain NO personally identifiable student info.  It is especially absurd given how the DOE continues to violate the state student privacy law every day.

 

When will DOE post this year's class size data that was legally due Nov. 15?

UPDATE: the class size data was finally posted late in the afternoon on Friday Dec. 3, 18 days after the legal deadline; see the article in Gothamist.  Accurate data for last year still hasn't been provided and probably never will. Our analysis of this year's data will follow soon. .

According to a Local Law 125 passed in 2005,  the DOE is required to report on class size data by school, district, borough and citywide each year by Nov. 15, and then again on Feb. 15.  

Nov. 15 was two days ago, and yet class size data for this year has not yet been posted.  We have a clock below that started at midnight Nov. 15, to track how late the data is posted -- if it ever will. 

The DOE still hasn't posted accurate data for last year's class sizes, despite a  promise in writing by Deputy Chancellor Karin Goldmark to CM Mark Treyger that they would do so last year, and sworn testimony before the City Council by Chancellor Meisha Porter to CM Dromm about this as well.  

Instead, last February, three months late, they posted the data for (very small) in-person classes only, rather than providing any data on the remote or blended learning class sizes.  This is despite the fact that they were collecting data on the size of these classes separately since the beginning of the school year.

I will be checking regularly, but you can as well on the DOE website here; and if you see any class size data for the 2021- 2022 school year, please email us at info@classsizematters.org.