Ongoing budget cuts to schools causing additional loss of teachers as the number of highly paid educrats grows -- please take our survey now!

Please take our new five-minute survey below on the impact of budget cuts on your school!

Even as the Mayor and the Chancellor ruthlessly cut the budget for schools this year, the impact of those cuts are still being felt in a new wave of teachers being excessed from our schools.  According to Chalkbeat, many principals are letting go of teachers and other staff now, told by DOE educrats that they must cut their budgets as enrollment at their schools has been even lower than projected.  Some principals have been told to cut their budgets by as much as $750,000 or face having to return the funds next year.

That would mean excessing seven to eight teachers who he just hired this summer after a wave of departures. He’s planning to shift the debt to next year, even though district officials have urged him against it.

“It would literally destroy the school’s programs, not to mention excess all the new teachers we brought in who have brought fresh energy, fresh blood and new life to the school,” said the principal, who runs one of the city’s community schools, which serve larger shares of high-needs students.

Meanwhile, the NY Post reports that the DOE overspent its last year's budget for Central and District offices by over $100 million:

Most of that excess spending went to personnel.  Fatter salaries mean at least 80 DOE executives now make more than $200,000 a year, up from 63 or so in the prior fiscal year, according to officials and the Empire Center for Public Policy.

Apparently one of those high-priced executives is Mayor Adams' partner, Tracey Collins, who was recently promoted to “senior advisor to the deputy chancellor of school leadership,” receiving a 23% raise to $221,597 a year.

As I was quoted in the NY Post, the fact that DOE has exceeded its budget target for administration by such a large amount while slashing school budgets by somewhere between $475 million and over $1 billion shows that "Either their priorities or their management skills are severely flawed."

Even larger budget cuts are threatened for the future.  The Mayor's office and the Office of Management and Budget have ordered all city agencies including the DOE to cut an additional 3% this year and 4.75% next year. This literally could put the DOE into a death spiral and make it impossible for them to comply with the new state class size reduction law. 

Please take our five-minute survey on the impact of the budget cuts on your school if you haven't already!

Do you know where your child's personal data is? Please fill out our survey on your school's use of digital apps -

Class Size Matters, NY Allies for Public Education, and the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy would like to know which online apps or programs are being employed by schools throughout New York state, and whether they are sufficiently protective of children's privacy. We are asking parents and teachers to take our survey here, to let us know what apps or programs your schools are using.

Since the pandemic hit, districts across New York State have purchased many commercially-produced online apps and digital programs to implement remote learning. Even before last spring, schools had been using a large number of programs, many of which collect and use personal student information. In NYC alone, more than 75 commercially available online programs have been acquired for teachers to assign to their students, and "The DOE has informed schools that for SY 2020-21, they must have a shared, inclusive and digital curriculum in all core subject areas," according to the UFT.

Many of these digital apps collect and use personal student data in ways we do not understand. In some cases, the publicly available privacy policies of these vendors are NOT sufficiently protective and do not comply with the NY state student privacy law, Education Law 2D, which was passed in 2014.  

Among other things, this law and its regulations adopted in Jan. 2020 require that every contract with a vendor with access to personal student data must have a separate Parent Bill of Rights [PBOR], which specifies how the data will be protected and how parents can access the data and challenge it if necessary.

Each of these separate Parent Bill of Rights are supposed to be posted on the district website, along with other important information, including your district’s overall data privacy protection policy, and how you can contact the district data privacy officer in charge of ensuring these protections. Links to the Education Law 2D, the regulations, and a summary of some of the other most important provisions are here.

Please take a few minutes to fill out our online survey to let us know what online apps and/or digital programs are being used in your schools, and whether the district has provided the necessary information about the ways in which that data is being protected from breach and abuse.

Thanks!

Leonie Haimson, Class Size Matters and Parent Coalition for Student Privacy

Lisa Rudley and Jeanette Deutermann, NY State Allies for Public Education

Outrageous class sizes !

Check out Lindsey Christ's great reporting on 2nd grade classes at 36 children at PS 236 in Brooklyn -- which is more than the room can hold and violates the building code.  The kids say they have to go into the hallway to work because it is quieter!  In this case, pictures are really worth 1000 words.
Today I heard of a 3rd grade class at 36 in D6 in Manhattan. 

Please send me your info at www.bit.ly/class-size-survey  today!

Join us on Wed. to protest the budget cuts and class sizes at your school!

Join us at rally this Wednesday, to protest the severe budget cuts to our schools, the increases class sizes, and the loss of valuable programs. 

Come and fight for your child's right  to receive a quality education!

Class sizes in many schools are far worse than I have ever heard– despite the city’s legal obligation to reduce them – and are now above 30 in many schools, even in the early grades.   It is really outrageous how the state and the city have failed our kids. 

When: Wednesday, Sept. 21st @ 12:00 P.M

Where: DOE headquarters, Tweed Courthouse, 52 Chambers St.

(take the 4, 5, 6, N & R to City Hall- BK Bridge, or 1, A/C to Chambers St.)

Who: parents and outraged citizens. Co-sponsored by: Class Size Matters, Alliance for Quality Education, NYC Coalition for Educational Justice, NYC Parents Union, African American Clergy and Elected Officials, Charity B.C. of Christ,  Cody Cares, Churches United to Save and Heal, Greater New York Labor-Religion Coalition, New York Divinity School, and Mirabal Sisters.

A flyer is to the right that you can post or distribute in your school.

Let me know if you have a story to tell at the rally about how the cuts have affected your child’s school by emailing me at leonie@att.net

Please also complete our survey if you haven’t already at www.bit.ly/class-size-survey

AQE also has a survey you can ask your principal to fill out at www.surveymonkey.com/s/nycschools 

Please fill out our brief survey on class size and budget cuts now!

Welcome back to a new school year.

I hope your children had a good first day of school.

I have posted a VERY BRIEF survey for you to fill out about class sizes and or other effects of budget cuts at your schools.  

Whether you are a parent, teacher, administrator or student, please fill out this survey and forward it to others; it will take only 5 minutes or less.  Your name and participation will remain completely confidential unless you choose otherwise, but we need this info badly to see how much and where class sizes have increased this year.

 Meanwhile, the mayor’s ratings have slipped sharply, with only 34% approving of his handling of our schools, and 52% disapproving, according to a new NYT poll .  The Mayor discounted the poll, saying “In the end, polls don’t matter — it’s what mayors do.”

The top concern of parents in this new poll is class size and overcrowding, just as it is in the DOE’s own surveys.  Yet Walcott in an interview discounted the importance of increasing class sizes, saying he expected an average rise of only 1.5 students per class, which he claimed would have little impact on our schools. 

Yet this ignores the fact that our class sizes are already above optimal levels, have increased sharply for the last three years in a row, and the research shows that every single student added to a class diminishes learning for the whole. 

Walcott also seems unaware or unconcerned with how in individual schools, class size is a discontinuous phenomenon, and likely to increase much more than 1.5 students each time a teaching position is eliminated.  This year we believe about 5,000 teaching positions have been lost through attrition, retirement and excessing, while enrollment continues to grow.   DOE  also plans to lay off over 700 school aides this year; see video from our press conference yesterday.

Instead of helping our kids succeed, Walcott said his top priority this year would be improving public relations and getting his staff on TV.

Above are the UFT contractual caps in each grades, compared to the goals in the city’s C4E plan.