In New York City, taxpayer money is being re-directed from public schools to migrants - namely homeless centers, resources, housing - and other newly-designated expenses for illegals streaming into the City. City residents have no voice in changing what is happening.

Mayor Eric Adams wants to please the political woke in New York City. He is turning deaf ears to the needs of the general public.

So sad.

In order to support the absurd COVID Mandate which threw out about 2000 hard-working teachers, administrators, para professionals, artists, musicians and others who could not or would not get vaccinated, Adams is now making other nonsensical decisions for political reasons. For instance, the article in Chalkbeat below about how NYC's fiscal situation has "improved" but still, the Department of Education's budget will be cut $100 million:

Eric Adams cuts $100 million from Education Department, despite partial reprieve
LINK: https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2024/01/17/eric-adams-school-funding-cuts-less-than-expected/
By Michael Elsen-Rooney (melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org) and Alex Zimmerman, Chalkbeat, January 16, 2024

A new round of budget cuts announced Tuesday won’t hit New York City schools as hard as Mayor Eric Adams initially outlined, but will still add up to more than $100 million for next fiscal year, including further cuts to early childhood education.

Adams said last fall that the Education Department, like other city agencies, would have to trim its budget by 5% of the city’s contribution in January, following a previous 5% cut in November.

But during Tuesday’s announcement of the preliminary budget, Adams said the city’s fiscal situation has significantly improved since last fall, thanks to higher-than projected revenues and lower-than-projected spending on supporting the influx of migrants and asylum seekers.

As a result, several city agencies including the Education Department got full or partial reprieves from this month’s 5% cut. New cuts to the Education Department totaled about 0.6%, according to budget officials.

Still, the Education Department will face more than $100 million in new cuts starting next fiscal year, on top of the $600 million in cuts announced in November.

The new cuts include $50 million from the city’s prekindergarten and 3-K programs. Former Mayor Bill de Blasio dramatically expanded the free program for the city’s 3-year-olds using an infusion of one-time federal pandemic aid, but 3-K struggled to fill the new seats. Adams already announced in November a $120 million cut to the early childhood education budget next year, and the new $50 million cut outlined Tuesday could involve eliminating unfilled seats, according to budget documents. Budget officials said Tuesday that about 30% of 3-K seats are unfilled.

Those reductions represent “the biggest cuts to early childhood in more than a generation,” said Gregory Brender, chief of policy and innovation at the Day Care Council of New York, an organization that represents roughly 200 child care centers and other programs. “When you look at the magnitude, it’s hard to not see it having a drastic effect on services for children and families.”

Brender acknowledged that some seats are unfilled, but argues the city should be doing much more to fill them, especially given the high cost of child care and the city’s broader affordability crisis that is driving some families away.

The new cuts also include $51 million in reduced spending on non-staff costs in some central offices, according to budget officials. They didn’t elaborate on what those cuts will entail.

Advocates have raised alarms that a smaller Education Department budget could affect a range of day-to-day services. Hundreds of fewer staff on hand could mean it will “take longer for immigrant students to get a school placement, for students who are homeless to get a bus route, and for students with disabilities to get services,” Kim Sweet, executive director at Advocates for Children, said in a statement.

Additionally, though the city’s Education Department is expecting to chip in $80 million to run Summer Rising — which had largely been funded through federal COVID relief dollars — the popular program will still see a big cut. The Education Department runs the morning instruction while the Department of Youth and Community Development oversees the afternoon enrichment, which is run by community based organizations. The city is calling for a $20 million cut from DYCD’s budget for the program.

Aside from Summer Rising, the preliminary budget offers no other commitments to use city money to replace expiring federal pandemic aid – leaving the fate of hundreds of social workers, staffers supporting homeless students, and other programs up in the air.

“At a time when we have a youth mental health crisis, record-high student homelessness, systemic violations of the rights of students with disabilities, and an increase in newly arrived immigrant students enrolling in our schools, we cannot afford to roll back these important programs,” Sweet said.

Overall cuts to Education Department less than expected

Adams attributed the rosier fiscal picture to “responsible and effective management,” including previous cuts that helped balance the budget as well as the city’s new policy limiting shelter stays for migrant adults and families. That directive, which forces people staying in shelters to either reapply for space in a different shelter or find an alternate housing arrangement, has slowed the pace of migrants entering the shelter system, Adams said.

In the days leading up to Tuesday’s preliminary budget release, Adams had reversed several of the cuts announced in November, including a $10 million cut to community schools, citing the improving fiscal conditions.

But critics have contended that the budget situation was never as bleak as Adams claimed, and have accused the mayor of implementing unnecessarily draconian cuts to ramp up the pressure on the state and federal governments to increase aid to the city.

“Setting your house on fire and then putting it out doesn’t make you a hero,” Ana Maria Archila and Jasmine Gripper, co-directors of the New York Working Families Party, said in a statement.

Adams’ preliminary budget announcement came the same day that Gov. Kathy Hochul released her own budget plan, which includes $2.4 billion in aid to the city to provide housing and other basic services to migrants.

Adams said the city is still reviewing Hochul’s budget. He floated the possibility of canceling another round of budget cuts that’s supposed to come in April if aid from the state is sufficient.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

*******************************
What we see here is a lack of an overall plan on what to do with current realities. Everything the Mayor of NYC does seems to be reactive as opposed to pro-active. Public opinion and voter agreement are not taken into account. Also, in NYC there is no getting rid of an elected official. There is no provision of New York State law that would authorize a city or local government recall.

Efforts have been made, but so far have not been successful.
A Recall Election And The Ramifications In New York
Link: https://nyassembly.gov/Minority/?sec=story&story=103677

That needs to be changed.

I am re-posting below from the New York Post an article on how stand-alone public policy fails to satisfy long-term strategic planning goals, namely high-quality public school education. What do we mean by "high-quality"? We define that word as "setting up education priorities specifically designed to have children of diverse needs and abilities achieve their personal bests." This means supporting Gifted and Talented Honors Programs as well as special classes for children who need more of an individual teaching environment. Class size should be relevant to the diverse capabilities of the student body and not imposed upon all children in a school due to public policy gone woke or subjected to political pandering.

Take politics out of education.

Parents need to be partners in implementing plans for their children, and political dictates need to be put last in the strategic planning mix.

While we agree that lowering class size is a good thing, we believe that all circumstances in the particular school and district should be taken into consideration by bottom-up rather than top-down strategies:

NYC PARENTS WORRY STUDENTS WILL BE TURNED AWAY FROM HIGH-PERFORMING DISTRICT
UNDER CALL TO CUT CLASS SIZES
Link: https://nypost.com/2024/02/18/us-news/nyc-parents-worry-students-will-be-turned-away-from-high-performing-district-under-call-to-cut-class-sizes/
by Carl Campanile, NY POST, February 18, 2024

Parents whose kids are in one of the city’s highest-performing but most overcrowded school districts are rebelling against a controversial state law requiring across-the-board reductions in class sizes.

The group of perturbed parents in District 26 in northern Queens are particularly concerned that a proposed cap on enrollment to comply with the law could prevent their kids from attending their neighborhood school.

“If there are enrollment caps to comply with class-size law, where are the kids going to school? Kids can’t attend their neighborhood school. That’s kind of crazy,” said parent Albert Suhu, president of CEC 26.

He acknowledged that he and some other parents are at loggerheads with their local state senator, John Liu, who championed the seemingly well-intentioned law and has resisted making any major alterations to it.

“We are looking for someone to step up and pass a law to make changes,” said Suhu, who was one of the dissenters on the chancellor’s working group over the law.

CEC 26 has passed a resolution stating, “[The New York City Public School System] has determined District 26 to be the most overcrowded district in New York City, and the state-mandated five-year window for compliance will very likely cause unacceptable harm by displacing District 26 families through artificially imposed enrollment levels of much fewer students in each District 26 school.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state legislature — under intense lobbying from the United Federation of Teachers — approved a law in 2022 requiring schools in New York City to slash classes to a maximum of 20 students in grades K to 3, 23 students in grades 4 to 8 and 25 students in grades 9 to 12 by the 2027–28 school year.

Each year of the plan requires the city Department of Education to phase in an additional 20% of the classrooms in the city school district to abide by the law.

CEC 26 has passed a resolution stating, “[The New York City Public School System] has determined District 26 to be the most overcrowded district in New York City, and the state-mandated five-year window for compliance will very likely cause unacceptable harm by displacing District 26 families through artificially imposed enrollment levels of much fewer students in each District 26 school.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state legislature — under intense lobbying from the United Federation of Teachers — approved a law in 2022 requiring schools in New York City to slash classes to a maximum of 20 students in grades K to 3, 23 students in grades 4 to 8 and 25 students in grades 9 to 12 by the 2027–28 school year.

Each year of the plan requires the city Department of Education to phase in an additional 20% of the classrooms in the city school district to abide by the law.

But the parent group’s resolution said the lack of new funding to implement class-size reduction could force the city to eliminate or slash popular programs and services, such as Summer Rising, 3-K, social workers and bilingual services, for their kids.

The parents advisory group proposed a number of changes:

*Implement class-size reduction in phases starting with elementary schools first, followed by middle schools and finally high schools.

*Focus class-size-reduction efforts first on overcrowded schools with the highest levels of poverty and lowest levels of academic achievement, while planning for construction of buildings in all other overcrowded neighborhoods.

*Bar any policy that prevents families from enrolling their children at their normally zoned neighborhood schools.

*Provide parents with a greater voice in determining exemptions for specialized programs and classes, such as gifted and talented, honors, advanced placement and electives and at specialized high schools such Stuyvesant and Bronx Science.

Liu said parents in his district have legitimate concerns, but shifted the blame to Mayor Eric Adams’s DOE for shoddy planning to comply with the law.

“CEC26 has some of the city’s most overcrowded schools and classrooms and is rightfully concerned since the DOE fails to articulate a coherent plan to build classroom space in northeast Queens to ease the overcrowding,” Liu told The Post on Sunday.

“In these last two years the mayor and chancellor could have crafted a thoughtful plan to ease the problem but instead resorted to implying false choices and fear-mongering. If the administration needs anything, they can speak up, but they should not continue to hope that their responsibility to reduce class sizes will go away.,” said the senator, who chairs the Senate Committee on New York City Education.

Betsy Combier
Editor, Parentadvocates.org

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