From 2011 to 2014, Slentz served as New York’s deputy commissioner for PK-12 Education, making him the point person for controversial Gates-funded work around the Common Core standards, teacher evaluation, and a data-sharing program that shut down following criticism that it was disconnected from teachers’ realities and parents’ concerns.

Now, as some advocacy organizations said they were by Cuomo’s announcement, Slentz said he is “hoping against hope” that educators will be patient and not “come out of the gate opposed.”

Like almost everything these days, there are more questions than answers about the partnership. The scope and duration are unclear, as is the extent of involvement from the Gates Foundation. In the absence of details, some people are looking to the foundation’s past work in New York state for clues, and — between a in 2003 to develop small high schools to a in 2020 to support students with disabilities during distance learning and in other contributions in between — there are many.

The Cuomo administration, the Gates Foundation, and Jim Malatras, a former Cuomo aide who is chairing the governor-appointed committee leading the effort, declined to comment for this story. But multiple interviews, including with a member of the committee, suggest that the alliance between the tech titan and the governor whose star has risen during the pandemic might be less grand than the reimagining-education pronouncement first indicated.

In the original release, Cuomo outlined about “what education should look like in the future” that the partnership will focus on. Each question mentions “technology” and differs only by which group it refers to leveraging technology for: teachers, students with disabilities, English learners, higher education students, and so on. In a , Cuomo said the Gates Foundation will work with the committee to “develop a blueprint to reimagine education in the new normal.”

“I think we now have a moment in history where we can actually incorporate and advance those ideas,” Cuomo said during his May 5 daily briefing about rethinking how classrooms work and technology’s role. “You get moments in history where people say, ‘I’m ready for change.’ I think this is one of those moments.”

But according to Stephanie Conklin, a high school math teacher who is one of two teachers on the 19-member advisory council, the group’s focus so far has been more immediate, more traditional and — with the fresh surge in COVID-19 cases across the country — more urgent.

“Our real task is how do we open safely in the fall, with face-to-face [instruction] as much as possible,” she said.

Conklin, who teaches in Colonie, a suburb of Albany, said she has spent hours talking with groups of teachers from throughout New York state as part of the committee’s work to develop guidance that will support districts with managing back-to-school efforts. The committee meets weekly, Conklin said, but as of late June she had not interacted with any officials from the Gates Foundation, and work on any “blueprint” appeared to be on hold until the reopening plans were released.

The plans’ rollout became enmeshed in bureaucracy. On , Cuomo said safety guidance for school reopening would be released in early June. June passed, and on Cuomo said the state Department of Health, which he oversees, was working on guidance with the Reimagine Education Advisory Council and “others.” On July 13, Cuomo shared the 23-page That same day, the State Education Department, which Cuomo does not control, released a 145-page guidance document created by its Reopening Schools Task Force.

For its part, the Gates Foundation said in that its role was limited to “recommending education experts who can help advise and inform this work” and “contributing our own insights from years of working with partners in New York state and across the country.”

The foundation’s history in New York is extensive, and much of its giving does not draw headlines. In 2013, for instance, it to the Literacy Design Collaborative, a nonprofit that makes rigorous writing assignments available to low-income students. Some of its giving has also had a significantly positive effect. The small-high-school movement, for example, which started in 2002 in New York City and which the Gates Foundation , “markedly increased high school graduation rates for large numbers of disadvantaged students of color,” according to .

But the Gates Foundation is better known in the state for its , which Cuomo backed before he amid public backlash in 2014, and linking test scores to teacher evaluation, which Cuomo also supported before making a amid public backlash in 2015. And then there’s inBloom, a $100 million initiative “primarily funded” by the Gates Foundation to create a centralized, open platform for student data and other educational resources, according to a from the Data & Society Research Institute.

inBloom launched in 2013 with a commitment from nine states, including New York, before shutting down in 2014 amid, yes, public backlash, this time largely about data privacy. inBloom’s demise was primarily caused by its “failure to communicate the benefits of its platform and achieve buy-in from key stakeholders,” the report found.

Monica Bulger, a research affiliate at Data & Society and a co-author of the 2017 report, said the new partnership does not suggest that the Gates Foundation or the state is applying lessons learned from the inBloom debacle and, in her opinion, now is not the time for a new technology-driven initiative.

“We are in an emergency situation, not an opportunity for ed-tech or tech philanthropists to experiment with our kids,” she said. “It might seem like this moment requires moving fast, but actually this is a time where teachers and schools are already rethinking pedagogy to meet student needs. In terms of reimagining, it’s already happening.”

Slentz, the former New York state education official, is skeptical about the mid-pandemic announcement of the new partnership and what it might ultimately lead to, but he’s adopting a more wait-and-see attitude.

“I’m hoping, but also I understand that people will revert to history and have that understandable but unfortunate sentiment, that ‘Here we go again, we’re trying to do that top-down education reform, that they tried that before and that didn’t work’ kind of thing,” he said. “I worry that we’ll be at that point again.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support for ����Ӱ��.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio Sunday that the city’s public schools will shutter on Monday and remain closed through at least April 20 — though he acknowledged that schools could remain closed for longer. The mayor’s announcement came shortly after Gov. Andrew Cuomo in NYC and Westchester, Suffolk and Nassau counties.

In the meantime, students can pick up “grab-and-go” meals from their schools starting Monday. Teachers will receive professional development training on remote learning this week, with remote learning scheduled to begin March 23. Enrichment centers will also be up and running on March 23 for the children of first responders, healthcare workers and the city’s most vulnerable populations. More scheduling and information .

“It is quite clear that this crisis is growing intensely,” de Blasio said Sunday, adding that the decision was “something not in a million years I could have imagined” having to do. As of Sunday, there were 329 confirmed cases of the virus in the city.

Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, said Sunday that the administration had made the right decision. The union leader, who had called on the mayor to shut down the schools, said, “Public school parents and teachers, along with local and state elected officials — and in particular the leadership of Governor Cuomo during this health care crisis– helped bring this decision about.”

As NYC officials weather increasing calls to shut down the country’s largest school system amid the coronavirus crisis, a smaller experiment that was launched this week — virtual or by-phone parent-teacher conferences — gives some idea of the difficulties that could lie ahead with parent and online communication, particularly in underserved communities.

While Mayor Bill de Blasio this week to enact widespread closures in the 1.1 million-student district, he acknowledged at a news conference this week that “the DOE is preparing options for online learning.”

The number of reported coronavirus cases in NYC on Friday, with the district temporarily and a District 75 special education program between Thursday and Friday after learning of self-reported positive cases and one confirmed case of coronavirus.

As of Friday, both the United Federation of Teachers president and the New York City Council speaker were openly calling on de Blasio to change his mind and close schools.

Meanwhile, in one of the largest school-related developments meant to mitigate the spread of the virus, the NYC Department of Education and UFT earlier in the week that middle and high school parent-teacher conferences this month would be held virtually or over the phone. The middle school conferences were slated for Thursday and Friday this week, and high school conferences for Thursday and Friday next week.

The measure could provide insight on how such rapid and drastic school-related changes are being communicated and carried out with families, including those who might not have ready internet access, who may require translators or who have children with disabilities.

“It’s a test, but it’s also an opportunity … [to] be more innovative” in connecting with families, said Aracelis Lucero, executive director of Masa, an organization that works with Latino and Mexican families in the South Bronx.

Lucero says she supports the decision to cancel in-person conferences. But in the past few days, at least, she has had more questions than answers.

“How is this working for parents that don’t speak English and that don’t have access to internet at home? Are they going to input a language line?” she asked. “There’s reason for concern.”

Twenty-nine percent of NYC households lack broadband digital access, . More than 12 percent of the city’s students are considered English learners, and students speak different languages.

A lot of parents have told Masa anecdotally that connecting with teachers outside of parent-teacher conferences “is not that successful,” Lucero said, especially given language barriers. “So when there’s that dedicated time, it’s a big opportunity for them.”

Parents unable to connect virtually or by phone during scheduled conference times can work with their child’s school to “reschedule for a time that would be convenient” during this month, the . A DOE spokeswoman added in an email Friday that schools “will follow up with parents who were not able to access parent-teacher conferences online or by phone for whatever reason to reschedule,” and that interpretation services for parent-teacher conferences “continues to be available.”

For Lori Podvesker, whose teenage son is nonverbal and attends a District 75 school, the logistics were similarly unclear. Rescheduling the teacher conference means tweaking plans with a caretaker who was going to watch her son. She wasn’t sure if parents would get the same amount of time to speak with the teacher as they would in person. And there had been “no mention” to her early on as to whether the service providers who usually work with her son, such as his speech therapist, would be on the call as well.

“The quality of meetings when they’re on the phone — I think there’s a strong possibility that they could be inferior to the quality of the meeting in person,” said Podvesker, who is also the director of disability and education policy at the advocacy group INCLUDEnyc. And while she too appreciates the city’s actions to “reduce the number of adults going into each school building,” she emphasized how detrimental this change is for parents of students with special needs.

“My guy is 17 and he’s nonverbal, so it’s not always easy to feel connected to his day-to-day experiences at school,” she said. The parent-teacher conference is a chance “to see [his] work in person, to see what the classroom physically looks like, to observe the teacher’s tone and how she communicates, and her body language.”

For traditional high school parent Alina Adams, one of the ����Ӱ��’s contributors, there didn’t seem to be much clarity soon after the announcement was made.

“In high school, it’s three minutes with each teacher,” she wrote in an email. “Usually, you sign up and then run from floor to floor and wait. … It’s a nightmare in real life — how will it work by phone?”

Parents “should have the same amount of time to speak with their child’s teacher” as they would for in-person conferences, the DOE spokeswoman said. She did not respond directly to a question about service providers in D75 schools.

Developments with the coronavirus and news cycle are progressing with dizzying pace. And for many parents, the most pressing priority right now seems to be whether to send their child to school or what to do with them if they are not in school.

Attendance in NYC schools on Friday plummeted to 68 percent, compared with 85 percent the day before, . About 230,000 people had signed a demanding the closure of “all NYC schools” as of early Friday afternoon, and the hashtag #CLOSENYCPUBLICSCHOOLS was trending on Twitter.

Teachers union president Michael Mulgrew in a statement Friday said the city had “reached the point where continuing to keep our classrooms open poses a greater lasting threat than the disruption that will result from school closings.” New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson also Friday, “It is time to close our public schools.”

The mayor and the DOE have been en masse, with hundreds of thousands of low-income or homeless students relying on them for hot meals and medical care, among other social services, and for parents, who do not have the option of working from home if schools shut down. Children so far have also been , according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“A lot of kids who are less advantaged really depend on the school,” de Blasio said Friday on Good Day New York. “The schools are where kids are safe. A lot of parents, if the school’s not there, the parent can’t go to work, especially in a single-parent household.”

The timing and length of the closure also matters, with released Friday suggesting that schools that close prematurely and for shorter periods of time — say, about two weeks — “will be unlikely to stem the spread of disease or prevent impact on the health care system, while causing significant disruption for families, schools…”

Many districts across the country, and in some cases entire states, have already announced closures, , the nation’s second-largest district, on Friday, and Houston Independent School District. Chicago Public Schools, like NYC, has not announced widespread closures. (For all closures, ).

Current policy in NY state is to close a school for at least 24 hours if a student or a staffer tests positive for the coronavirus. City officials are required to then deep clean those schools.

Officials announced Thursday that even as schools remained open, assemblies, plays, afterschool sports and other activities would be canceled.

“We’ll make any individual school closure decisions on a case-by-case basis. We’ll give as much notice to parents and staff as we can, and work to reopen as soon as possible,” de Blasio Thursday. “Keeping people safe and informed will be our top priority.”

To get regular updates on the coronavirus in NYC, call 3-1-1, go online to , or text the word COVID – C-O-V-I-D – to 692-692.

By the time they graduate high school, they’ll have learned 2.5 years’ worth of English and 1.5 years of math — entirely outside of the city’s public schools. Not to leverage an advantage, but to have a viable chance at college and career success.

“SEO [Scholars] is not an extra level. SEO has always been a bridge,” senior Sokhnadiarra Ndiaye said of the nonprofit program, whose earliest iterations date back to the 1970s. Since 2006, it’s seen more than 95 percent of its students matriculate to college. “It takes the kids who are often forgotten by the school system and makes up for the education that our school system never gave us.”

New York City is the largest and one of the school districts in the country, a reality that recently fueled almost-weekly student protests and widespread calls for reform. School resources can hinge on zip codes; a wealthy Upper West Side school saw in PTA funding last year, for example, compared with some schools in higher poverty areas reporting less than $5. And while there are selective admissions high schools in the city that send students to the country’s top universities, fewer than half of students systemwide in math and English,��mirroring .

of 2018 graduates were college bound — a city record — but only met the local CUNY system’s English and math standards.

Recognizing that there are “too many students who are losing out,” SEO Scholars has transformed over time into a robust, eight-year program resolute on getting students both to and through college, the program’s leaders say. In New York City, about 275 freshmen from a pool of more than 1,000 applicants are accepted each year — 80 percent of whom are black and Latino. Eighty-five percent would be first-generation college students.

“Every day [students] are being undereducated, and we can’t wait,” said Millie Hau, SEO Scholars’ vice president for high school programming.

SEO becomes these scholars’ “advocate and ally” through high school, providing free services such as “rigorous” academic curriculum, SAT prep and guidance on college and financial aid applications, thanks to about $11 million annually from private donors and foundations. It then sticks with these scholars through college, acting as a personal adviser and helping them hone career skills, such as networking, résumé building and interviewing.

There are about 1,000 high schoolers and 800 college students in the NYC program.

Hau noted that the nonprofit doesn’t place blame on public schools for being unable to provide all of those supports. “We recognize that schools, they have a lot of different needs in their building, and sometimes they are unable to serve all of them in the way that they want,” she said.

When freshmen join SEO Scholars, achievement gaps are recognized immediately: Students score an average of 60 percent on an in-house diagnostic test based on middle school math and elementary and middle school English. Flash-forward, and of the 86 percent who stay with the program through high school, 100 percent are accepted to four-year universities. And typically, get a diploma within six years, eclipsing the roughly national average for all students and light years beyond the 11 percent college success rate for low-income, mostly first-generation students.

For all the students interviewed, the program’s existence is bittersweet — a life-changing opportunity born from systemic failures in the education system. It’s opened their eyes, they said, to what they deserve and what they’re capable of achieving.

“We experience the inequities that we’ve experienced in our public education, and we kind of become complacent to them,” said Alexander Rodriguez, a senior. “We don’t really say, ‘Oh, this is a problem,’ because this is how it’s always been. But SEO has really just called it out for what it is. ‘No, this is an inequity, this is injustice, and that’s why we’re here.'”

Kendall Acheampong, 16, Brooklyn College Academy

Kendall Acheampong makes the 35-minute commute from his school near Prospect Park to SEO in lower Manhattan on the B35 bus and 2 train on Wednesday nights. There, especially in math class, he is in his element.

During a class in December, the 16-year-old breezed through his algebra worksheet, migrating to other peers’ desks and walking them through the material — to the point of delaying discussion of the answers. “Kendall, we’re starting,” the teacher pressed.

It hasn’t always been like that. “When I came into SEO, I wouldn’t say I was bad at math, but I wasn’t as good as I am now,” Acheampong said. “Now, I just look at math and I’m like, ‘This is kind of easy.’ It clicks with me.”

SEO Scholar’s Saturday classes focus on math, critical reading and writing, and grammar, with weekday instruction reviewing and reinforcing those concepts. For juniors like Acheampong, math lessons also act as SAT prep. Each week comes with an average of two to three hours of homework assignments across subjects.

A large part of his improvement in math, Acheampong says, is the individualized attention. “There’s less kids [in SEO classes], so the teacher has time to come to me if I’m needing help or come to me if I’m struggling,” he said. The student-teacher ratio on weekdays is about 12:1, replicating a seminar-style atmosphere. Saturday and during the summer is 21:1. The in New York City public high schools, comparatively, is nearly 27:1.

Like many peers in the program, Acheampong will be a first-generation college student. His parents moved from Ghana to the U.S. when he was 4 years old “to provide me and my brother with a better life,” he said. Now, he’s an aspiring petroleum engineer — or dentist — and is in friendly competition with his older brother, who attends Brooklyn College.

“He never got a chance to go to SEO, so I have to be better than him,” Acheampong said, grinning. He added that he wants to be a role model for his 3-year-old brother. “I’m trying to make something of myself.”

Not everyone who applies to SEO Scholars gets in. The program receives about 1,200 complete applications a year, which include a student’s report card, a few short essays and income verification. About 23 percent secure a spot, at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Vassar College.

One of students’ critiques of the Scholars program is this selectivity — that the bar is set too high and risks overlooking other students in need. Program heads acknowledged that given the academic rigor and time commitment SEO demands, “we’re looking for kids who are motivated and have the aptitude to succeed.” That means at least a 70 GPA, which SEO’s Hau points out “is still quite low in the New York City school system.”

Prospective students “might not have been identified in ninth grade for certain advanced classes, [but] they’re not in danger of dropping out, so they’re just in the middle, being undereducated,” she said. “That’s really our target population.”

Alexander Rodriguez, 17, Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice

For Alexander Rodriguez, the program’s value extends well outside of the classroom.

Rodriguez knew early in high school that he wanted to pursue a medical career. But his downtown Brooklyn school didn’t offer physics, chemistry or biology, and he worried that he’d start off college in remedial courses.

In response, SEO connected Rodriguez to Weill Cornell Medicine’s Initiative, allowing him to explore different medical career paths from surgery to osteopathic medicine his junior year.

“It was such an intensive introduction-to-medicine course that I just fell in love with,” Rodriguez said. “I got to do a lot of things that a lot of people can’t say they did, like do practice surgery on the machine.”

As part of its , SEO Scholars also sent Rodriguez to India and Nepal for five weeks to learn about public health disparities — an opportunity he called “the most life-changing, mind-changing experience of my entire life.”

Like Acheampong, Rodriguez plans on becoming a first-generation college student. His mother grew up poor in the Dominican Republic, helping on the family farm after middle school. His father cared for his mother, who was ailing with cancer, working to help pay her medication bills.

Rodriguez’s own journey has sometimes been grueling. For two months junior year, he barely had a day off. SEO ran for eight hours on Saturdays, and from 1 to 4 p.m. on Sundays he would be at the medical program on the Upper East Side.

“Mental health days — I miss those,” Rodriguez said. “I think everyone wants to quit at some point because it’s just so hard, and it’s one of those things where you don’t see outcomes right away. … Everyone says, ‘Trust the process.’”

College junior Ivy Allotey has trusted the process for seven years. A psychology major at Columbia University with an interest in public service work, Allotey continues to lean on SEO for networking for internship opportunities, biweekly calls with her adviser, who is there to “talk about anything, from personal things to academics,” and résumé tinkering.

“I won’t go to [my college’s career center] as much for résumés or cover letters, because I don’t think they’d give me the same personalized support SEO does,” she said.

Allotey is considering moving to Ghana, where her family is from, to promote youth engagement in civil service. Knowing that she has a “solid network” behind her post-graduation makes the sunsetting of her time in SEO Scholars less “nerve-racking.” “It’s actually more reassuring for me,” she said.

While it’s “all love” for SEO, Rodriguez said it’s “devastating” to consider the reality that there are students outside of the program being left behind. He and other students interviewed all said they have friends who weren’t accepted — or who learned about the program too late to apply.

SEO officials say the organization conducts extensive outreach, visiting about 150 of the district’s more than 400 high schools a year and hosting a few meet-and-greets with students and parents. It also launches social media campaigns on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat and enlists alumni to spread the word. Applications are typically due mid-December of each school year.

For students who don’t get in, SEO provides a referral list for alternate options, which include , , and .

Sokhnadiarra Ndiaye, 18, Brooklyn College Academy��

Sokhnadiarra Ndiaye heard about SEO Scholars when program managers visited her school freshman year. She remembers taking a flier and mulling it over on the bus ride home to her Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood that day, realizing that this could be her chance.

On track to become the first person in her family to finish high school, she’d told herself, “I have no type of guidance [from my family], so for me to not take this opportunity is me telling myself, ‘I don’t want to graduate.'”

It hasn’t come without sacrifice. Ndiaye hasn’t visited her extended family in Senegal since 2008 — a trip she was hoping to make every summer of high school before SEO came into the picture. “I’ve forgotten a lot of my family members because I haven’t seen them in a long time,” she said.

Nevertheless, she’s fully embraced the program, largely because of its inclusive atmosphere and diverse teaching workforce. About 57 percent are teachers of color, compared with citywide and about statewide.

Students in SEO can call teachers by their first names. Class is always conducted in a circle, because there’s “no back row in SEO,” Ndiaye explained. A teacher will “compliment” a student’s do-rag instead of making him or her take it off. The literature also reflects the students themselves, who are majority black and Hispanic. The city’s DOE has expressly backed culturally responsive education, though equity advocates point out that of books commonly used in the city’s public schools are still written by white authors.

“We have the representation that we need, and we have teachers that genuinely care for us and are motivated,” she said. “We have one-on-one check-ins as often as we want where we just sit with whoever and just talk to them about ourselves and our lives and what we’re going through, and they’ll talk to us about their lives too.”

“It’s like a family.”

All in this together

Sometimes, students get their greatest inspiration and support from each other.

Sixteen-year-old Mashiha Chowdhury feels she can “relate” more to her peers at SEO than those at Beacon High School, a selective college-preparatory school in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen where . Chowdhury’s family is from Bangladesh.

“It wasn’t easy to connect [with Beacon kids], but in SEO it was an automatic connection,” said Chowdhury, who commutes more than an hour each way to SEO Scholars from her home in the Bronx. While SEO operates independently of the school system, the DOE’s Office of Pupil Transportation provides MetroCards to cover students’ travel costs for weekday and Saturday classes.

Chowdhury said the program “created new bonds that I probably would not lose, and it made me realize, ‘OK, this is what I want in a friend, regardless of academics.’”

SEO students can commiserate about having to drag themselves out of bed on Saturdays and on weekdays during the summer. They’ve even created Snapchat groups to hold one another accountable.

“We call each other, keep each other going,” Chowdhury said. If a student is late, “we text, ‘Where are you?’ or call them.”

They say their shared passion and drive has made all the difference.

“We’re all in this together,” Acheampong said. “We all have to do it. So we might as well do it.”

After weeks of Monday strikes demanding school desegregation, several hundred New York City teens turned out to quiz education department officials directly about what is being done to make schools more integrated and equitable.

“Segregation is a citywide issue which requires a citywide solution,” student panelist Toby Paperno told three Department of Education officials in front of more than 300 attendees at the Bayard Rustin Educational Complex in Chelsea.

Thursday night’s forum was the first time student advocacy group Teens Take Charge had hosted an event specifically for students to ask Department of Education officials about school diversity, integration and equal resources. New York City is the largest and one of the school districts in the country, with of schools in the city considered “diverse.” More than 1,300 students have turned out for seven strikes demanding immediate action on integration since mid-November, though those near-weekly strikes are as of Monday.

Three Teens Take Charge leaders, including Paperno, shared the stage with Kenyatte Reid, the DOE’s executive director of the Office of Safety and Youth Development; Sayde Campoamor, director of community affairs; and Josh Wallack, deputy chancellor for early childhood education and student enrollment. The forum was planned in collaboration with the DOE’s Student Voice Team.

Students sharply questioned the DOE about its progress on what they consider integral steps toward desegregation: eliminating competitive admissions screens at middle and high schools, ensuring all schools have equal resources, and fostering inclusive school climates. Throughout the forum, both students and DOE officials agreed that integrating schools is a top priority. There was considerable discord, however, on the extent of community engagement and time needed to usher in widespread change.

Officials said they’re taking “bites at the apple,” notably by supporting at the local level, such as in Brooklyn’s District 15. But for systemwide desegregation to be successful, they stressed that there needs to be robust community engagement and buy-in. Many integration proposals thus far have elicited from predominantly white and Asian parents.

“We believe that we will make more change and make it stick if we hear from voices all over the city, and try to explain and make a case that integrated schools are stronger schools,” Wallack said.

For many students, however, the fact that it’s been 65 years since Brown v. Board of Education — the landmark Supreme Court ruling that declared separate but equal schools unconstitutional — is a sign that community engagement can only go so far.

“There are some things where, yes, it’s important to have conversations,” said Sokhnadiarra Ndiaye, one of the Teens Take Charge panelists. “But at what point in the conversation do we pause and say, ‘You know what? It’s about time we did away with the system.’”

Mayor Bill de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, who have taken heat from student activists for lagging systemwide integration efforts, were not asked to attend.

Inequitable resources��

One key point of discussion at Thursday’s forum was the pervasive inequality across schools when it comes to sports programming and resources like PTA funding.

Paperno attends Beacon High School, a selective college-preparatory school in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen where . The school has more than 25 sports teams. One of those, the ultimate frisbee team, “has really helped me grow a lot as a student,” he said.

He turned to his peer Ndiaye, also on stage, who attends a school with mostly black and brown students. “Sokhnadiarra’s school, [Brooklyn College Academy], has next to none. They have two sports teams. That difference is insane.”

Paperno asked the DOE: What is your plan for adjusting the inequities in sports at schools?

Campoamor, the director of community affairs, pointed to a program announced last spring across 23 high schools, where students from neighboring schools come together to play as one team. The intent is “to only expand,” she said, “because we do believe that access to sports in an equitable way is critical for our young people.”

The state owes at least in funding to city schools, she added, which would help fill resource gaps.

“We think the [state funding] formula itself needs to be amended, so we’re working with our partners in Albany to fully fund our schools,” she said. New York City spends an average of $28,808 per student — higher than most other large, urban districts — though the state’s share of the city’s school budget .

Another student, Mika Shiffman from Millennium Brooklyn High School, asked if the DOE was planning to change the way PTAs can raise money “in order for all students to receive an equitable and fair education.” PTA funding can hinge on zip code; a wealthy Upper West Side school saw in PTA funding last year, for example, compared with some schools in higher-poverty areas reporting less than $5.

Her question prompted the forum’s moderator, Teens Take Charge leader Tiffani Torres, to ask the audience how much their own schools raise. Beacon High School, Paperno’s school, raises more than $500,000 annually, he said. (Chalkbeat’s puts it at $685,767.)

“Less than that!” one student shouted.

“$1,200,” another called out.

“$500.”

Education department officials didn’t expound on changing PTA funding protocol, but Campoamor acknowledged that “we need to think of resources more expansively, which includes PTA funding.”

Targeting admissions screens

Top of mind for students was also admissions screens.

of New York City’s middle and high schools have admissions screens, meaning they consider students based on factors such as their grades, state exam scores, attendance, essays, interviews and zip codes. Research shows that schools with some type of admissions screen — excluding those that are designed for English learners — are more likely to have student bodies unrepresentative of their neighborhood populations.

Yet “[Mayor] de Blasio has not eliminated or even reduced the use of these discriminatory screens,” moderator Torres said. “Why not?”

Wallack acknowledged that the DOE isn’t “remotely close to doing enough … but we’re working on it.” He noted how the district already , which had no academic requirements but gave preference to families who had the time to attend open houses. Wallack added that the DOE is also “particularly targeting schools in underserved neighborhoods with ,” including AP for All, 3K and Pre-K for All, Computer Science for All and College Access for All.

The DOE is continuing to review the latest School Diversity Advisory Group recommendations as well, he said. Those recommendations included dismantling gifted and talented programs.

Torres asked pointedly whether DOE officials “believe that screens are discriminatory.” Another student requested an answer, “honestly,” on whether screens could be removed from all schools within the next three years.

Wallack said the department couldn’t commit to a timeline. And on the discriminatory nature of screens — it could be situational.

“We see some screens that clearly have a disproportionate result, and those we’re looking at really intensely,” he said. “There are others that screen for things like language or interest or audition, that may be a benefit to the system … we’re trying to take a nuanced view and listen to you and other stakeholders to get that balance right.”

On the topic of the SHSAT, the controversial exam that determines whether students get into eight of the city’s storied specialized high schools, Wallack reiterated prior district sentiment that “the admissions test should be scrapped.”

A bill to eliminate that exam in the state Assembly last year. State law dictates admissions at three of the eight schools.

Improving school climate

Many in attendance also wanted to know what’s being done to make schools safer and more inclusive for students of color.

“Integrated classrooms are not just about giving the black and brown kids what the white kids have. It’s about creating environments that foster learning for all students and decrease social anxiety,” said Alexander Rodriguez, a Teens Take Charge panelist.

A few students cited concerns, for example, with the use of metal detectors in schools, which disproportionately end up targeting black and brown students. Zoe Simpson, from the Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice, also asked what the DOE is doing to address the power imbalance that arises when staff don’t accurately reflect the student body.

“The faculty who look like me and who I can identify with are the correctional officers. They’re the people that I go to when my teachers feel disrespected in the classroom or they feel their white fragility has been challenged,” she said.

Although DOE officials didn’t offer an explicit plan or timeline to further diversify its workforce, Campoamor, the director of community affairs, acknowledged, “Representation is a really big deal in New York City right now. We don’t think that our teachers are as representative at all of the students, and we realize that that has an impact.”

About of city teachers are educators of color, serving a student body that is about 80 percent minority.

Reid, the executive director of the Office of Safety and Youth Development, said the Office of Equity and Access has to train every educator over the next three years on implicit bias and culturally responsive education, or teaching that embraces curricula relevant to marginalized students’ experiences.

DeKaila Wilson, director of decriminalization with student group IntegrateNYC, asked about the scope of the district’s investment in restorative justice practices, which focus on how to de-escalate conflicts and rebuild relationships with students who act out, rather than taking punitive action. Reid said the DOE is currently supporting 502 schools citywide but hopes to expand trainings “to all middle and high schools.”

“All schools are open to do [trainings],” he said, adding that schools that send five staff members can receive four days of on-site coaching. Reid directed attendees to , which has videos explaining what restorative justice is, along with the email RespectforAll@schools.nyc.gov for more information.

The nearly two-hour forum ended with students still lined up at the microphone with questions. Although DOE officials declined Teens Take Charge’s request to answer remaining questions directly with students on Twitter, they said they will answer emails sent to the district’s new student voice manager at studentvoice@schools.nyc.gov.

One of the last questions to the panelists was what they’d learned that night. For Reid, it was the depth of students’ frustration.

“What I’m learning today is that we have to have an expedited approach to integrating schools,” he said. The room erupted.

A deep-dive compilation of 2018-19 education department data by Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York found that of some 1,800 city public schools do not have racial and ethnic compositions that reflect their local districts’ overall student populations. The advocacy group observed that disparities in student representation by race/ethnicity at individual schools occur even when the local district — NYC’s school system has of them across the five boroughs — has a diverse student enrollment.

The starkest divides are seen in District 3 on the Upper West Side and District 2, which includes the Upper East Side; both are neighborhoods with concentrations of affluent white residents. At P.S. 87 in District 3, for example, 65 percent of students are white, even though District 3 student enrollment on the whole is 27 percent white.

Hoping to help inform desegregation initiatives in the nation’s largest school district, the group released its analysis Jan. 7 alongside an . The map color-codes every public school with a red dot (“not representative”), an orange dot (“somewhat representative”) or a green dot (“representative”) based on how drastically its student body demographics deviate from the local district’s.

Systemwide, racial and ethnic diversity “is only one part of the story,” . “While we want all our schools to be diverse, we also want schools to reflect the diversity within communities.”

The analysis comes amid mounting pressure to integrate New York City’s public schools, including almost��weekly student protests demanding . New York City is one of the most segregated school districts in the country, with��, widely defined as no one group exceeding 50 percent and no two groups exceeding 80 percent. City schools on the whole are 41 percent Latino, 26 percent black, 16 percent Asian and 15 percent white.

Systemwide integration efforts, however, are in a state of inertia. Proposals such as eliminating the entrance exam at the city’s elite specialized high schools, abandoning middle school admissions screens and scrapping gifted and talented programs have��, mostly from white and Asian-American parents. Mayor Bill de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza both to commit to an expansive integration plan.

While diversifying schools citywide should remain the “long term” goal, Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York suggests local reform as an intermediate step — a stance that reflects made by the mayor’s School Diversity Advisory Group in February. It hopes its analysis and interactive map can serve as a guidepost of sorts for local officials and advocates.

“Diversity shouldn’t be ambitious,” said Daryl Hornick-Becker, a co-author of the analysis and a policy and advocacy associate. “Our hope with this is that [local] districts can — instead of looking at a standard definition of diversity and saying, ‘How do we get to that?’ — they can look at a more local definition [relating to representation] and ask, ‘Where are the problem areas in our district, what’s causing them to happen, and how do we fix this?’”

Community-level initiatives are already happening in parts of the city. A few districts have implemented integration plans, including Manhattan’s , which the analysis called out for its segregated schools, and District 15 in Brooklyn, which eliminated selective admissions criteria at its middle schools this year — a move .��

The NYC Department of Education has also�� $200,000 grants to support at least five other local districts’ integration proposals, and it recently a Brooklyn elementary school’s decision to end separate gifted courses. More plans are imminent after the New York City Council that will ultimately require every local district in the coming years to create one.

As with systemwide proposals, though, local integration plans can still elicit apprehension and vitriol. Earlier this month, parents in Queens District 28 at a public school board meeting to condemn preliminary discussions of a middle school integration plan, reportedly .

Nyah Berg, the integrated schools project director for advocacy group , said starting to look locally to enact reform is vital in working toward a diverse and equitable system.

“We definitely don’t have all the answers, as of yet, working on systemic change in such a large system,” she said, noting that the “great data visualizations” in the Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York’s report help make some already-known information more accessible. “Breaking it down into those communities and making sure that they’re adhering to community needs, I think, is an incredibly important first step.”

Leanne Nunes, an NYC senior and director of equity for student advocacy group , said in an email Friday that integration “has never been a one size fits all approach. Each community and district has its own unique obstacles, and if we want to respect the people and uplift their power they should be allowed to change their environments in ways that are best for them. … [though they’ll still] be held accountable.”

On the , a red dot means that a school’s enrollment by race/ethnicity is more than 20 percentage points off from the local district’s student demographics for at least one racial group. (For example, if a local district is 30 percent Latino students and a school’s student body is either less than 10 percent Latino or more than 50 percent Latino, that school is considered unrepresentative.) An orange dot indicates that a school’s demographics are between 10 and 20 percentage points off, while a green dot signals that they are within 10 percentage points.

The group based its definitions on School Diversity Advisory Group recommendations.

Key takeaways from the data:

1 Concentration of unrepresentative districts

Districts 2 and 3 in Manhattan, Districts 13 and 15 in Brooklyn and District 27 in Queens have the largest shares of unrepresentative schools. They contain 15 percent of the district’s schools, but almost a third of those that don’t reflect their local districts’ student enrollment,��.

As of this school year, District 3 gave admissions priority for a to students who are low income, struggle on state tests and earn low report card grades.����is also a recipient of one of the DOE’s $200,000 grants.

In order from least representative as of 2018-19:

● District 3 (Upper West Side): 83% of schools unrepresentative

● District 2 (Stuyvesant Town, Upper East Side): 76% of schools unrepresentative

● District 27 (Jamaica, Howard Beach, Rockaways): 73% of schools unrepresentative

● District 13 (Brooklyn Heights, Downtown Brooklyn): 72% of schools unrepresentative

● District 15 (Park Slope, Sunset Park): 69% of schools unrepresentative

2Concentration of representative districts

Local districts that are almost entirely black and Latino, however, see the inverse: a large percentage of representative schools. Districts 9 and 7 in the South Bronx, for example, have 60 and 71 percent of schools reflecting the local district’s demographics, respectively. A handful of districts in Brooklyn, including District 23 in Brownsville, record similar percentages. All three of those local districts are at least 95 percent black and Latino.

District 9 is also the recipient of a $200,000 DOE grant.

For research associate and report co-author Jack Mullan, these patterns serve as a reminder that some aspects of school segregation stretch “beyond the domain of education policy.”

“It’s broader — it’s housing segregation, it’s discrimination, it’s employment [opportunities]” and many other factors, he said.

City officials last week�� a five-year “fair housing” action plan, , that addresses the underlying segregation and proposes solutions such as bolstered resources to combat persistent housing discrimination, along with plans to add and preserve affordable housing and encourage broader acceptance of housing vouchers.

When asked whether these particular data suggest that representation doesn’t always achieve diversity, New York Appleseed’s Berg pointed out that racial composition is only a surface indicator of who students are.

“I’d also be curious to see those dots broken down by the representation of English language learners, students with disabilities, [students with] free and reduced-price lunch,” she said. “And when we say black and Latinx, we also know that within those groups, there’s also West Indian, there’s Mexican-American, there’s Salvadoran. … There’s diversity within this data.”

3 Elementary schools most likely to be unrepresentative

Elementary schools make up 55 percent of unrepresentative schools, . Comparatively, 13 percent are middle schools and 31 percent are high schools.

There are more elementary schools total districtwide than there are middle or high schools, likely contributing to the disparity. The report’s authors also reasoned that segregation at the elementary school level is exacerbated in part by families “exercis[ing] school choice to send their children to out-of-zone elementary schools they consider better academically.”

Citing the , the analysis added that white families often “choose schools that have more White children than their zoned schools do. Black and Hispanic families, on the other hand, choose schools with the same proportion of Black and Hispanic children as the schools to which they were zoned.”

4 Charter vs. district school representation

In an independent review of the advocacy group’s , ����Ӱ�� noted that 41.3 percent of non-charter schools do not reflect their local district’s student body, compared with 40.4 percent of charters.

Inversely, charters are slightly more likely to have representative schools, at 30.7 percent, versus 26.3 percent of non-charter schools.

“It’s not surprising that charters would have a slightly higher share of representative schools than their district counterparts,” as charters “tend to be both majority-minority [in terms of enrollment] and located in areas with concentrated minority populations,” a staffer with Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York wrote in an email Thursday.

The staffer added, “As we move from tackling factors contributing to segregation at the local level to effecting large scale changes that bring us closer to citywide diversity, charters will have an increasing role to play in that effort.”

5 Admissions screens a likely contributor

Schools with some type of admissions screen — excluding those that are designed for English learners— are more likely to be unrepresentative of their local districts, according to the analysis.

Broken down by school level:

● 58 percent of screened middle schools are unrepresentative, compared with 27 percent of unscreened middle schools.

● 53 percent of screened high schools are unrepresentative, compared with 33 percent of unscreened high schools.

The round of the School Diversity Advisory Group’s released in August called for a moratorium on all new screened high schools and the elimination of screens in middle schools. of New York City’s middle and high schools have admissions screens.

The nonprofit says it’s been in touch with student groups such as IntegrateNYC and Teens Take Charge — which has spearheaded the recent near-weekly student protests — and aims “to engage them further on how [the data] could benefit their specific goals.”

Nunes from IntegrateNYC indicated Friday that the group intends to use the new tools, writing that it relies heavily on data “to inform the decisions and policies we make.”

“Monitoring how things are changing district by district and even school by school if necessary is very useful,” she said.

Amid a year of damning reports and investigations that unveiled continuing failures within New York City’s massive special education system to evaluate and provide timely supports to tens of thousands of students, the city’s Department of Education released in November touting a record 84.3 percent of special education students receiving their full required services in 2018-19.

Also within the 47-page document was a less heralded statistic: There were 130,885 boys with special education accommodations in NYC schools that year, versus 66,995 girls, despite a distribution of both boys and girls systemwide.

That boys far outnumber girls in special education is a historically unchanged and seemingly accepted data point — girls make up of students with special education supports nationally as well — and gender appears largely absent in mainstream conversations about the system’s inequities. Girls with special education accommodations have “never come up” in discussions by the Panel for Educational Policy, the city DOE’s governing body, said Lori Podvesker, a panel member for nearly six years, director of disability and education policy at and the mother of a son receiving special education services. “Never. I’m on the record for that.”

Much of the discourse in New York City and nationally has centered on race and the question of whether students of color, especially black males, are being over- or under-identified. An in-depth analysis by ����Ӱ�� of federal civil rights data trained the lens on girls across racial groups, revealing that Hispanic, black, white and Asian girls in NYC are all receiving special education supports at noticeably lower rates than their respective shares of the city’s roughly 1.1 million public school students. The disparity is starkest for Asian girls, whose representation plummets by 77 percent when comparing their enrollment across the district, at 7.84 percent, with their enrollment in special education, at 1.81 percent.

Meanwhile, every male racial group, apart from Asian males, reported the inverse trend, making up a larger portion of students in special education than in the city school system as a whole.

While there isn’t a “correct” rate of identification, experts say the findings add to existing notions that some girls may be under-identified for special education accommodations compared with their male peers. Though girls are equally entitled to that assistance , theories suggest they may not be getting services as readily for reasons that are more rooted in how girls are perceived than a likelihood of boys having more learning disabilities.

“It’s a big deal,” said Cheri Fancsali, the deputy director of the Research Alliance for New York City Schools, who this year published a on the city’s special education data. “There may be a lot of girls who are underdiagnosed and who could really benefit from special services, and they aren’t getting it. And on the other side of the coin, if some boys are being inappropriately referred to special ed services … they may be missing out on access to a high-quality, general ed curriculum.”

A DOE spokeswoman declined to comment on how the district tailors supports for girls with disabilities specifically, writing in an email Friday that accommodations are “universal and appl[y] to all students based on need, not on gender.”

Data gleaned from the analysis also revealed that among girls who do receive special education services, there are racial patterns that mirror their male peers. For��nearly every 5 black or Hispanic girls, there is 1 white or Asian girl. (In the city’s public schools, Hispanic and black girls outnumber white and Asian girls 2 to 1). The special ed discrepancy, Fancsali noted, further underlines the importance of looking at race and gender data together — and the need for even more detailed demographic information on these students.

“Gender and race intersect in complex ways,” said Rachel Fish, an assistant professor of special education at New York University whose ��explores how special education identifications hinge on a slew of factors, including who the students are, and their particular needs. “We treat these gender questions as if they’re race-less in a lot of popular discussions, and it’s really important to treat them with the nuance of understanding that intersectionality is crucial here.”

����Ӱ�� sought out the data after noticing that the broke out total counts of students with special education plans by students’ race and language or students’ gender and language, but not in a way that allowed the public to see how many girls or boys of each race��existed in both the special education system and in the school district more broadly. After being told by the DOE that it doesn’t break down the numbers that way, ����Ӱ�� extracted it from the Office for Civil Rights’ .

The special education system in New York City is vast, serving upward of 200,000 students across K-12. Its handling of these students’ individual learning needs has been widely criticized, with recent reports exposing special-education-related complaints and severe in addressing them. Even with the revelation that 84.3 percent of students in special education last year received all of the services mandated by their — up from 78.4 percent in 2017-18 —��organizations such as Advocates for Children of New York have stressed that there are still not getting their full, legally required supports.

The DOE spokeswoman noted Monday that the district this year has invested an additional $33 million citywide in special education resources, which includes the hiring of about 200 clinicians to improve the accuracy of identifications and the timeliness and quality of services.

“We have unified and streamlined instructional supports — including professional development and curricular resources and materials — to make rigorous teaching accessible to all learners, including students with disabilities,” she said.

‘We can ignore behavior from girls’��

When Marisol Nunez recalls how her daughter was left behind in school, it brings her to tears.

Emely, a Latina student in NYC, was still reading at a second-grade level when she was 14. And although school staff had brought Emely’s floundering academics to her mother’s attention, it was years before anyone told Nunez a crucial detail: Something could be done about it.

“They just started to say that she was struggling, but I never heard anything from the district that she needed special support,” Nunez said in Spanish through a translator. She spoke on behalf of her now 17-year-old daughter, who, , is receiving services for a language disorder and learning disability.

Emely had been overlooked for help — something that may happen with girls more often than boys. Looking at the breakdown of student enrollment in NYC:

● Hispanic girls make up 19.84 percent of students in the district but 17.05 percent of all students with special ed services. Hispanic boys make up 21.05 percent and 32.74 percent, respectively.

● Black girls make up 11.87 percent of students in the district but 9.92 percent of all students with special ed services. Black boys make up 12.62 percent and 19.90 percent, respectively.

● White girls make up 7.43 percent of students in the district but 4.10 percent of all students with special ed services. White boys make up 8.13 percent and 9.15 percent, respectively.

● Asian girls made up 7.84 percent of students in the district but 1.81 percent of all students with special ed services. Asian boys make up 8.47 percent and 4.55 percent, respectively.

The information, to note, has its limitations. It covers the 2015-16 school year — the most recent year these broken-out counts are available. The NYC DOE’s year-over-year totals of boys versus girls with special education plans suggest, though, that the gender proportions have budged only about 0.3 percent since then. And although the database tallied students of all disability classifications who are receiving accommodations mandated under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, some students may still be missing. Per privacy laws, if a school identified fewer than three students with special education supports in a particular gender or racial group, that data was omitted.

Experts point to a few established theories for why these gender disparities in special education within New York City public schools and nationally might be happening, and why they persist.

“It could be as simple as boys tend to be more physical, and sometimes behavior can’t be ignored from boys as much as we can ignore behavior from girls,” INCLUDEnyc’s Podvesker said. She added that with disabilities like , students “could be really dreamy and spacy and just always out of it. And since we tend to see girls as being more passive, we don’t always associate that with learning problems.”

This could especially be the case if teachers aren’t readily trained on how to recognize different disabilities, Podvesker said. The DOE confirmed Monday that teachers have to be trained on identifying students with disabilities, noting that per New York state regulations, “all teacher candidates for all subjects and levels must receive coursework on working with” these students. Prospective educators, for example, have to pass a that includes a section on understanding “the characteristics, strengths, and needs of students with disabilities” before obtaining their teaching license.

Another factor, NYU’s Fish said, could be some teachers’ and parents’ perceptions of girls’ academic prowess compared with their male counterparts. “If [a teacher] thinks that girls are less academically capable, then that means that if a girl is performing at a lower level in math, for instance, the teacher might say, ‘Yup, that’s about what I expected,’” she said.

Parents could also be reluctant to seek special education accommodations for their kids “because of the stigma associated with it,” Fancsali added. Negative ramifications frequently include restricted access to a rigorous curriculum, lower expectations and segregation from peers in traditional classes.

As a mother of two daughters, Nunez said she can’t speak to whether Emely’s gender influenced her access to services. She does believe, though, that Emely being Latina contributed to the delay.

The system “undermines our culture and our people,” she said.

Girls ‘not a monolithic group’

Considering race along with gender adds more nuance to the special education landscape. It also magnifies its complexity and raises more questions.

While ����Ӱ��’s analysis surfaced the common thread of girls receiving special education supports at disproportionate rates compared with almost all boys, it also found that the vast majority of girls with those services — nearly 82 percent — were black and brown girls.

On the one hand:

● Hispanic girls make up 51.58 percent of girls in special ed, compared with 41.05 percent of girls in the school system.

● Black girls make up 30.02 percent of girls in special ed, compared with 24.56 percent of girls in the school system.

On the other hand, the inverse:

●��White girls made up 12.40 percent of girls in special ed, compared with 15.37 percent of girls in the school system.

● Asian girls made up 5.46 percent of girls in special ed, compared with 16.22 percent of girls in the school system.

“This is not a monolithic group,” Fancsali said. The data “makes that point even more strongly.”

The notion that students of color may be overrepresented in special education isn’t new; a federal judge in September, in fact,�� the U.S. Education Department to implement Obama-era regulations that address concerns that students of color, especially those who are black, are disproportionately identified as having disabilities. President Donald Trump’s administration had sought to delay implementing those regulations for two years while it studied the issue further.

As with the broader gender disparities, there are existing ideas about how a girl’s race could factor into whether she’s referred for special education services. For , “when there’s a behavioral challenge … it’s something that is very much noticed” and often acted on punitively, Fish said. Research shows that black girls are�� to get out-of-school suspensions as their white counterparts, written off as insubordinate and aggressive because of race and gender bias.

“There is a very unique experience to being a black girl in schools that isn’t just being a girl and being nonwhite,” Fish said. “Being black in America and being a black girl in America, that is a particular social location that’s oppressed in very specific ways.”

Fancsali also noted that for girls who are English language learners,��many of whom are Hispanic, it could be that “sometimes their development of English is mistaken as a disability, when really it’s just the natural progression of developing English language.”

Some academics, such as Paul Morgan, challenge the notion that bias is the catalyst for over-identification —��and even dispute the idea of over-identification altogether. Morgan, an education professor at Penn State University, previously told ����Ӱ�� that “historical and ongoing racial segregation” heightens the risk for disabilities among students of color.

“Children of color are more likely to be born with low birth weight or experience fetal alcohol syndrome or be exposed to lead,” he said, causing an unequal distribution in disability across racial groups.

Addressing what appears to be a comparative under-representation of white and Asian girls, Fancsali speculated that more affluent white families may have the resources to set their kids up with private services outside the system, leaving them undetectable in the federal database. Speaking anecdotally, INCLUDEnyc’s Podvesker added that the stigma attached to special education can be a particular deterrent to Asian-Pacific American communities.

“It’s societal; it’s norms. Culture plays into it,” Podvesker said. “It’s not just teachers. And I hate making excuses and letting the DOE off the hook, but it’s the truth.”

A need for built-in screening

Experts interviewed for this story all agreed that more information about these girls is needed to draw any sound conclusions about under- versus over-identification.

Fancsali wants to know these girls’ specific disability classifications��as well as their socioeconomic statuses. Fish is also curious about their test scores; are these girls performing better academically than their male peers?

“The reality is a much more nuanced situation and can’t be easily explained with a single pattern or trend,” Fancsali said. “And it speaks to the complexity of identifying students and correctly assessing their educational needs.”

When asked what the district could be doing better to help girls needing special education supports, Podvesker reiterated the urgency of ��on the central characteristics of disabilities and what they look like in the classroom. For example: the hyperactive and impulsive behavior of students with ADHD and the potentially lackadaisical, inattentive nature of students with ADD.

“It’s really that basic,” she said, adding, “All school staff needs it. Bus drivers, bus attendants need it.”

Expounding on New York state’s regulations for teachers, the DOE spokeswoman noted Monday that coursework required for certification reviews “the categories of disabilities; identification and remediation of disabilities … individualizing instruction; and applying positive behavioral supports,” among other things.

Fish said the district should also ensure that it’s prioritizing early intervention for students “as soon as they are starting to show some challenges.”

“I think we need a lot of built-in screening mechanisms,” she said. “I know that teachers are stretched really thin, so we can’t just say, ‘OK, teachers, take one more thing on’ — but we need staff supports in schools to help teachers identify kids as early as possible in the school year and as early as possible in their school career.”

In that vein, the DOE spokeswoman said the district employs a “” that “provides services and intervention as soon as the student demonstrates a need,” and it especially targets schools “with disproportionate referral rates, providing the right interventions on the front end, so that students aren’t referred to special education when there were potential interventions or core instruction improvements that could have been made.”

For Nunez, her request of the district wasn’t about data or programs or money. It was an emotional plea.

District officials “should keep in mind that their actions really affect families,” she said. “Be a person. See others.”

She added, “As a mom … I just want the best education, the best life, for my daughter.”

Staff reporter Esmeralda Fabián Romero provided translations for this article on behalf of Marisol Nunez.

“Teachers are essential to this initiative,” the city’s Department of Education told ����Ӱ��, referring to the Imagine NYC Schools undertaking to open 20 new district schools and revamp another 20 across the five boroughs starting in fall 2021.

Adopting an untried approach for New York City, the DOE invited educators, along with students, parents and the broader community, to submit innovative design ideas for these future schools as part of a . Ideas can be “outside the box,” officials say — schools could cater to the needs of certain student populations or neighborhoods, specialize in particular subject areas or adopt nontraditional methods of instruction, for example.

In another marked shift politically and philosophically, the de Blasio administration is partnering with , Laurene Powell Jobs’s endeavor to promote high school innovation nationwide, and , a long-standing, Wall Street-backed anti-poverty foundation, to help fund the $32 million initiative. Both outside partners are aligned with education reform.

While the teachers union is historically wary of private money and influence in education — it opposed the opening of dozens of small schools  under former mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration and has railed against charter schools — teachers are excited by this new collaboration, UFT President Michael Mulgrew told ����Ӱ�� last month.

For teachers, this is “basically like, ‘Oh, wow, they’re asking us [what we want to see in schools]. This is kind of nice,’” Mulgrew said, adding, “Teachers are pretty much tired of the top-down.”

Educators have turned out in droves to district-led information sessions to learn more about the design process, with dozens on one occasion braving a Wednesday downpour in mid-October to attend a session in the Bronx. The first deadline a “statement of intent” is Tuesday, Nov. 12 — just six weeks after Imagine NYC Schools was announced. The DOE will continue to accept applications in future rounds.

����Ӱ�� spoke with Mulgrew about making sure Imagine NYC Schools delivers on its promises, the role teachers will play and whether this will define de Blasio’s education agenda in his last two years in office. Answers have been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

����Ӱ��: What makes this different for you [when it comes to private money in education]?

Mulgrew: First, I want to be clear — we don’t appreciate when people come in and try to tell us what we have to do. [That’s different] if we’re going to work with them in partnership and they’re putting money in place. … When I started speaking with the Department of Education over last spring, they said, ‘Look, would you be supportive if we went out and worked with private partnerships?’ … They said they wanted to engage the stakeholders. I said if you want to do that, we will work with you hand-in-hand in partnership. Because if we talk to a community ahead of time and really get them excited and engaged about this school that they’re getting, that school has a much better chance of being successful right off the bat.

But let’s be clear — there’s no strings attached.

What were some of the main concerns, if any, that UFT initially brought to the table?

The concerns were really more about how do we actually do this process of engaging the community, and how do we help them create a vision for the things that they might come up with. … Right now, we’re thinking [design teams] might be playing with [ideas about] schedules, or specific approaches to instruction, as well as specific subjects that they want to emphasize. You might want a school that’s completely about project-based learning and all hands-on instruction. That’s a whole different school than building just a traditional school. We just have to be able to meet the needs of what the community is asking us to do.

What do you see as the role of teachers and the union in this competition to create new schools and redefine existing ones?

Two different ways. For a “reimagine” school … that would be a group of teachers working with a group of parents. For a new sited school, it gives teachers an opportunity to go to a community and say, “Look, this is what I would love to do in terms of, [as an example], project-based learning,” and explain to parents what that means. Then that teacher could work with a group of other teachers and actually start the birthing of a school.

When that comes together, that’s really exciting, because then you have parents and teachers working on a unique vision.

So you’re saying teachers, along with parents, should really be leading this.

Yes. … For decades, New York City would build a school and tell the community, ‘Here’s a school and this is what it’s doing.’ … We’ve switched it this time. We want you to tell us what you want in your school. Do you want a school with humanities? Do you want a medical tech school with information technology? Do you want a school that’s based off of children working in group instruction the majority of the day?

Part of this has to be giving people some ideas and options [though]. Because especially if you’re not a teacher, you might not know. And even if you are a teacher, you might not know about the different ways and different ideas that people have out there that —when implemented properly — have proven to be successful.

If we’re imagining it’s fall 2021 already, these schools are opening — what constitutes a success in UFT’s eyes? 

Well, it takes two to three years to see where a school is moving. To me, first and foremost, it’s how much involvement does it have with the parents. It’s attendance. I would do a deeper dive to make sure that the instructional practice and the curriculum that we said had to be in place is in place, and that the professional development is completely aligned. You put those things in place and make sure they’re in place for a couple of years — then I’m 99.9 percent sure that school is going to be highly successful.

Does UFT see its role as holding the district accountable for making sure that the vision currently matches the end reality?

Once there is an agreed-upon vision and it has been accepted in a plan design, yes. I would hope that there’s not too much that we have to do, because I believe that [the DOE] really wants to do this work with complete fidelity. But if there’s a problem, of course we would look at that, and we would go deal with it. But I think the majority of our role will actually be to help the teachers and everyone through this process and support the work.

Do you think this undertaking should be the mayor’s education focus for the last two years of his term? Or are there other more pressing problems?

Look, this is 20 new schools being sited and the possibility of 20 schools doing a reimagine. That’s 40 schools total. This is just a side piece on his education [agenda]. This is important — this is a new way for New York City to do it; it’s never done it this way before — so I think this is something that is really worthwhile and meets his agenda. But on the other hand, completing is probably the biggest challenge they have over the last two years.

District officials last month invited educators, students, parents and the broader community to form teams and craft “innovative” designs for these future schools as part of the $32 million announced Oct. 3 by the mayor and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza. After a competitive process, the 40 new or reconfigured schools will open across the five boroughs starting in fall 2021. The DOE is receiving $16 million in private funding and outside counsel from��, Laurene Powell Jobs’s effort to promote high school innovation nationwide, and��, a long-standing, Wall Street-backed foundation that combats poverty.

Nov. 12 is the first deadline for interested teams to submit “statements of intent” that tell the DOE, “This is who we are, this is who we’re going to be … [and] this is the big idea that we’re working with,” Karin Goldmark, the education department’s deputy chancellor of school planning and development, told the audience at an October information session.

The first round of design team winners will be announced in May 2020. But what happens in the meantime — what it means if a team misses the Nov. 12 deadline, how applications will be reviewed and what selected teams can expect next — is more opaque.

This community-driven process is a first for New York City and its 1.1 million students and more than 1,700 schools. Charting a new way to create or re-create schools can be “messy” and “iterative,” Goldmark said last month. She had added later to ����Ӱ�� that the directives for the project are purposely more open-ended so that communities “really drive the process.”

But for those like fifth-grade math teacher Nekia Williams, more information could, in fact, be helpful.

“I am optimistic about this whole thing, but I hope that there’s some type of organization,” said Williams, who teaches in District 11 in the northeast Bronx. “I hope that they already have in their minds what they’re expecting from these new schools.”

‘You want to get started’

If a team doesn’t submit a statement of intent by Nov. 12, it’s not out of luck. The DOE has confirmed that there will be subsequent application rounds, adding in an email Thursday that “exact dates of these rounds will be announced in the near future.”

The Nov. 12 deadline is the cutoff for teams that want a chance at joining the initiative’s first “design days” process in December. This months-long exercise, which will run into early February, will be inspired by XQ’s own design days model — six to seven full-day sessions where teams complete various benchmarks in developing their school plans, such as surveying the community on their design ideas and analyzing student data to deepen their understanding “of the school community’s challenges and opportunities for growth,” an XQ spokeswoman said. Teams during this time will have access to professional development and support. There will be another selection round after that where a smaller set of chosen teams will progress to additional design days, according to the DOE.

“The design process is community-driven, which takes time. It’s really rigorous, which takes time,” Goldmark said. “You want to get started.”

Not everyone who applies by Nov. 12 will make it to design days, though. “Our goal is not to narrow a lot, but we will be narrowing” the applicant pool, Goldmark told ����Ӱ��. The department was unable to provide an estimate on the number of teams that had applied leading up to Tuesday’s deadline. The design day process at its limit can host up to 150 teams —��and even then, “it’s not our goal to have that many,” Goldmark said. It’s unclear if that means up to 150 teams could be accepted from this first deadline pool alone, or if that cap considers future rounds too.

Teams moving forward will be notified before the beginning of December, the DOE said.

What’s also been fuzzy about this next phase of the initiative is who will be looking at the teams’ applications, and what factors will determine which ones are green-lit.

The group reviewing the submissions is “expected to include students, parents, business and industry leaders, higher education representatives, former or current principals, representatives from community-based organizations, our partners and DOE staff,” the department spokeswoman said. This kind of collaborative framework is what helped win over United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew, who said the DOE approached him in the spring about whether the union would be supportive if it took on private partners to create, or re-create, schools. He agreed that the UFT could be, as long as this was different from past efforts in which outside partners, in Mulgrew’s view, held too much sway.

“They [DOE officials] said they wanted to engage the stakeholders. I said if you want to do that, we will work with you hand-in-hand in partnership. Because if we talk to a community ahead of time and really get them excited and engaged about this school that they’re getting, that school has a much better chance of being successful right off the bat,” Mulgrew told ����Ӱ��. “But let’s be clear — there’s no strings attached.”

XQ and the DOE co-creators

Although the DOE has final say over which design ideas move forward and ultimately materialize, XQ and Robin Hood do “get input on the schools that they are funding supports [to],” Goldmark said.

XQ is contributing $10 million for up to 10 new or revamped high school plans. Robin Hood is putting $5 million toward as many as 10 new schools across grade levels and $1 million toward professional development.

Nicole Campbell, XQ’s senior director of state and local partnerships, said XQ and the DOE have been co-creating a rubric that reviewers will consult as they evaluate design team ideas for the prospective high schools XQ is backing. The education department has also promoted XQ as guidance for design teams.��“For us, what’s been really exciting is being able to show schools what different models look like,” Campbell said.

XQ is a driving force in the high school innovation realm: It’s committed $136 million to 19 design teams since 2016 to “rethink high school” through its . Results have been mixed, though; some of those schools have , with three not opening or expanding as planned and a fourth closing earlier this year.

Asked about lessons learned heading into Imagine NYC Schools, Campbell emphasized the importance of fostering “deep community partnership and deep partnership across the board [for these new schools] … from the beginning.”

Robin Hood declined to answer questions about its role in the initiative, though it looks forward “to working closely with the Department of Education on the rigorous selection process to choose new school designs and principals with the greatest promise of closing opportunity and achievement gaps for underserved students,” CEO Wes Moore said in a statement to ����Ӱ��.

Looking for student engagement

While the education department has been reluctant to expound on what it personally considers a “strong” design plan, there have been some glimpses into its thinking.

At the October session, Goldmark encouraged teams to think “outside the box.” That could mean envisioning a school that caters to a certain underserved population, or specializes in a particular subject area, like technology or art, or adopts nontraditional methods of instruction, like real-world learning through internships and community projects. Although locations for the future NYC schools are not yet known, teams are allowed to tailor their ideas for a particular community of interest as well.

The department is also looking for teams to engage students in ways “that go beyond participating on the design team,” Goldmark told ����Ӱ��.

If a design team is proposing an elementary school, for example, “You might prototype a learning experience for kindergartners and see what they do with that learning experience” and then use that feedback in the design plan, she said.

Getting these types of insights is what brought universal-literacy coach Bianca Jackson to the information session in the first place.

“I wanted to feel out the different mindsets that are represented by all the people here, and hopefully get some new ideas on how to implement —��how to take it from the idea stage to the implementation stage,” said Jackson, who works at an elementary school in District 9, home to Yankee Stadium.

Mulgrew said he embraces the district’s approach of first asking the community what it wants to see in a new school after “decades [when] New York City would build a school and tell the community, ‘Here’s a school and this is what it’s doing.’” Beyond that, the union leader said the design teams do need guidance.

“Part of this has to be giving people some ideas and options. Because especially if you’re not a teacher, you might not know. And even if you are a teacher, you might not know about the different ways and different ideas that people have out there that —when implemented properly — have proven to be successful.”

Jeremias Mata started his junior year thinking he’d already learned everything he needed to know about slavery.

“When I found out I was going to learn about slavery [this year], I was like, ‘Urgh … again?’” said Mata, 16, sitting in his 11th-grade history class at the Facing History School in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen. Over time, he’d connected slavery with hopelessness and a certain simplicity — that many black people had once been slaves, and that was that.

“But when we got into it” this year, he continued, “it was a lot of stuff that I didn’t know about.”

Part of what’s making this year’s lessons novel for students like Mata is an addition to the school’s history curriculum: The New York Times’s — a compilation of essays and poetry, penned almost entirely by black authors, that re-examines slavery’s legacy in the U.S. 400 years after the first enslaved people arrived here from West Africa.

The project, released in August, is helping schools nationwide reframe how slavery is taught in a way that captures its brutality, complexity and influence in shaping America, while also affirming the experience as integral to black Americans’ identity and their contributions to the country. Already a supplemental resource this year the project isn’t mandated material in the country’s largest school district. Its launch this summer, however, coincides with a encouraging schools to adopt curriculum that’s relevant to marginalized students’ experiences.

For many communities, having what’s known as culturally responsive education and implicit bias training is “a matter of life and death,” Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, a vocal advocate for the policy, last month. New York City is a predominantly minority district — about 26 percent of students are black, 41 percent Hispanic, 16 percent Asian and 15 percent white — and many schools are deeply segregated.

“It’s extremely important, especially with the student body that we teach here,” said Eric Albino, a history teacher at the Facing History School, whose enrollment is roughly 25 percent black, 71 percent Hispanic or Latino and 2 percent white.

The decision to intermittently weave the 1619 Project into the class curriculum throughout this year was immediate, co-teachers Albino and Alexa Achille said — especially as it aligns with the school’s existing mission to “recenter” history around “people who are often forgotten.” The district school, which opened in 2005, is one of the nonproft����19 partner or lab schools in the tristate area.

It serves 359 students in grades 9 through 12, many of whom commute from Washington Heights, Harlem and the South Bronx. It’s one of the city’s more than 30 , small schools that teach a few subjects deeply to students who demonstrate their learning through a portfolio of oral and written work. Students are exempt from all but the English Regents exam.

While race plays a critical role in teaching the 1619 curriculum — and other parts of history that are often glossed over — Albino stressed that its lessons are important to all students.

“The general scholarship of topics like this needs to be pushed,” he said.

Mata and his peers spent class on a Thursday morning in late October digging into parts of the 1619 Project. depicted the devastating emotional and physical toll that the transatlantic journey known as the Middle Passage inflicted on those bound for slavery in America. Others told the story of how enslaved people, including Native Americans, erected much of the country’s early infrastructure, from railroads to churches, and how slave labor fed a surging cotton market that enabled America’s rise as a global economic powerhouse.

“I kind of feel like it gives me a new sense of what it means to be gritty. To make it out of a bad situation,” said Mata, whose family is from the Dominican Republic and Cuba.

Mata said he doesn’t believe that his peers attending other district schools are getting the same exposure to these in-depth conversations about slavery as he is now. He thinks they should.

“It relates to a lot of stuff that happens now,” said Mata, alluding to the prevailing racial inequities and tensions roiling the country. “People of color are automatically one step behind other people. Because of slavery, that was a barrier that was put in front of them, and it took them a long time to break out of it. Even now.”

Cotton, slavery and the building of America

Albino and Achille saw an opportunity to surface the 1619 Project last month during a history unit exploring the roots of early America from the 1600s to the 1700s — a time frame that coincides with the start of American slavery.

Class that Thursday morning began with students comparing by author Clint Smith: one on the Middle Passage, and a second describing the inside the New Orleans Superdome, where thousands of residents were held for days without adequate water, working toilets or power as Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Louisiana city.

“I slide my ring finger from Senegal to South Carolina and feel the ocean separate a million families. The soft hum of history spins on its tilted axis. A cavalcade of ghost ships wash their hands of all they carried.”

“Before desperation descended under the rounded roof … There were families inside though there were some who failed to call them families … There were people inside though there were some who only saw a parade of disembodied shadows.”

“What are the similarities?” asked Albino, who that day taught the class without his co-teacher, Achille.

Class participation, at first, was subdued. The 15 or so students were infants when the historic hurricane made landfall in 2005, and they didn’t appear to have much context.

Albino expounded a bit more. He displayed an image of the city submerged underwater on the class prompter, noting, “Everything you see on there is a roof.” He explained how the government�� and responded to the hurricane — a decision that left many poor black people stranded to bear the brunt of the storm.

He asked again: “How does Hurricane Katrina and the way it played out in New Orleans reflect the legacy of slavery?”

Answers started trickling in. One student likened the packed Superdome with the confined space on slave ships. A few identified how both groups of people lost control. “Originally with slavery … all of a sudden they were taken abruptly to a whole new land,” one of the students said. With Hurricane Katrina, “These people were living their normal lives and then this hurricane came, basically forcing them to restart.”

“The hurricane is a metaphor [for] the white people, taking all of the black people from their homes and taking them away from [comfort],” another surmised.

Albino piggybacked off of the last student’s interpretation. “It’s kind of a reflection of the dehumanization that plays a role throughout American history,” he said. “These poems, I thought, really nailed down this connection.”

The class then split into groups to analyze four other short poems and , which underlined slavery’s role in U.S. wealth and trade, the connection between police brutality and power dynamics and the roots of black mistrust in the medical system. Students were preparing to submit their first major assignment for the unit — an essay on how identity affected power in early America — and their teachers wanted them to cull compelling quotes from the 1619 materials about slavery’s impact to add to their final products.

Discussion was particularly lively at one table around the ��“Fabric of Modernity: How Southern Cotton Became the Cornerstone of a New Global Commodities Trade” and “Municipal Bonds: How Slavery Built Wall Street.”

“New Amsterdam’s and New York’s enslaved put in place much of the local infrastructure, including Broad Way and the Bowery roads,” one student read from the latter essay about the creation of the two iconic city streets. Another lifted a quote on how the cotton trade initiated modern-day contracts: “From the first decades of the 1800s … the sheer size of the market and the escalating number of disputes between counterparties was such that courts and lawyers began to articulate and codify the common-law standards regarding contracts.”

These readings prompted 15-year-old Justin Ventura to make a self-proclaimed “pretty controversial” statement to his classmates.

“I don’t feel like slavery was good, but it was kind of necessary for the world to become what it is,” he said. “Obviously we had to start somewhere, build from the ground up.”

Those at his table were in agreement. One female classmate, venturing away from the readings in front of them, added that slavery and the civil rights activism that ensued a century later to try to undo its harmful legacy ushered in equal rights laws, including in .

Darielle Santana, 16, said he finds it all “very interesting.”

“In my other schools, I would just learn that slaves came, they worked on the plantations, were mistreated and then were freed after the Civil War,” Santana said after class. “But now I actually learn … how this history impacts us today.”

Like Mata, he wants his friends to learn too. “They should know about 1619,” he said.

Changing how history is taught districtwide

Teaching curriculum that focuses on the perspectives of often-overlooked groups is not mandated in New York City. But district policy does recommend the practice, and schools and educators can choose to bake it into their class lessons, as teachers Albino and Achille have done with the 1619 Project.

If teachers want “to take the opportunity to provide more perspective on the subjects that they’re talking about so students get a deeper understanding, they can use pieces of what we’re doing if they have time to pause and reflect,” Achille said.

The city education department has for educators “that can be enriched by essays and poems from 1619,” a spokeswoman wrote in an email Tuesday. New York Times reporter , for example, can tie into eighth-grade-level lessons on Brown v. Board of Education and the Little Rock Nine and a profile on David Ruggles, an African-American abolitionist in New York City in the 1800s. The DOE will host professional development sessions that “examine certain aspects of the 1619 Project” this school year, she said. The district announced in a report last week that it invested $23 million in culturally responsive education and implicit bias training in 2018-19.

Facing History and Ourselves hasn’t developed its own curriculum around the 1619 Project, though it pointed to its that ties in those materials. Much of the nonprofit’s work in the city involves its collaborations with the education department to provide history such as lessons to more than 700 schools, said Pam Haas, the organization’s executive director for New York. The organization also conducts professional development trainings relating to bias, hatred and equity, she said.

Yet another avenue is the Pulitzer Center, a nonprofit journalism organization that offers a —��and a space for teachers —��along with�� of the project. While the Facing History School teachers didn’t explicitly follow the center’s curriculum, it’s an “inspiration,” Albino said.

Despite widespread interest in the project, this approach to teaching history hasn’t been without criticism. that Chancellor Carranza’s intense focus on race, class and equity is a distraction from the urgent need to teach basic math, reading and science. The 1619 Project specifically has also with more conservative critics, who don’t consider slavery part of “the essence of America” and who believe that the U.S. definitively moved past this “original sin” after the Civil War and subsequent civil rights movement.

For educators who want to dive in, Facing History School’s Assistant Principal Calee Prindle urged professional development training on how to broach difficult topics in the 1619 Project with their students. Facing History and Ourselves cited various�� teachers could listen to, like����on creating “class contracts” where students agree on expectations for how members of the class will treat one another during tense discussions.

“It could be really harmful if you just say, ‘Go do this curriculum,’ and teachers aren’t trained to create positive relationships with students, to have brave spaces in classrooms,” she said.

Teaching history with the 1619 Project is an ongoing process, Prindle added. She’s eager to see what’s next.

“I’m really excited to see … how it will manifest itself, especially in the spring semester,” she said. “The journey has just begun, really.”

The number of homeless students in New York City stabilized in 2018-19 after ballooning over the past decade — but “dismal educational outcomes” for these young people continue to constitute a crisis, according to a released Monday from Advocates for Children of New York.

The organization, using state-compiled data, reported 114,085 homeless students across both district and charter schools — about 1 in every 10 students in a system that encompasses 1.1 million students in district public schools and about 126,000 in charters.��That’s enough to fill Yankee Stadium twice, or Barclays Center six times.

The count marks a modest 0.5 percent drop from the 114,659 record-high total for 2017-18 and a divergence from the past 10 or so years, when totals rose steadily by thousands of students annually. ��The number of homeless students in the city has spiked 70 percent since 2009-10, up from .

Homeless students are defined as those who live “,” which includes living “doubled up” with other families, or who stay in a shelter, hotel or motel. They are considered one of the most vulnerable student populations in the school system.

Other key data from the report:

● 103,013 of New York City’s reported homeless students last year —about 90 percent of the total — attended district schools. This closely matches the city’s overall proportion of district vs. charter school students.

●��Of the total, more than 34,000 students were living in New York City’s shelters, and 73,750 were living “doubled-up” in temporary housing situations.

●��85 percent of these students are black or Hispanic.

●��Homeless students make up 20 to 25 percent of the student populations in Local District 5 in Manhattan, Districts 9 and 12 in the Bronx and District 23 in Brooklyn.

●��Districts across New York state reported a total 148,554 homeless students in 2018-19 — down from the prior year — with Rochester, Hempstead and Syracuse school districts each reporting more than 1,600 homeless youth. This means that New York City public schools account for nearly 77 percent of the state’s homeless student population. The city is home to more than 40 percent of all New York state’s students.

Advocates for Children of New York is “certainly glad to see that the number is flat,” policy director Randi Levine said on a call Friday. But that 1 in 10 students remains homeless, she said, underscores city and education officials’ responsibility to “pay attention to students who are homeless, and to increase resources and attention to this population.”

While outside factors like unaffordable housing and domestic violence are known contributors to student homelessness, the lack of a high school diploma is “the single greatest risk factor for homelessness among young adults,” according to the report.

Homeless students often face many barriers to obtaining that diploma, however. They regularly confront uncertain or unstable home environments, school disruptions and emotional trauma that can hurt their standardized test scores and spur higher dropout rates. On state exams, homeless youth’s math and English proficiency falls about 20 percentage points below the districtwide average. Only about of those who are homeless at some point during their high school career graduate.

Advocates for Children of New York does credit Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration and the Department of Education for taking “some positive steps” to support homeless students in school. There have been new leaders to serve this population, such as Deputy Chancellor of School Climate and Wellness LaShawn Robinson, Levine said. In the past year, the city — — increased the number of “Bridging the Gap” social workers from 69 to 100 and ��100 community coordinators in schools with high numbers of homeless students. Under de Blasio’s administration, K-6 students living in shelters also receive bus service, and more of these youth are enrolling in pre-K, according to the report.

As the city works to expand school resources for homeless students, it’s simultaneously tackling a citywide epidemic. In the past week alone, de Blasio’s administration took heat from critics for a little-known city program that to other cities, and for its homeless counts, which inaccurately portray the scope of the problem. While some metrics suggest progress — population growth within city-run shelters is reportedly slowing, for example, increasing by since 2016 — de Blasio continues to face pressure from advocates for more affordable housing options and resources.

De Blasio reiterated the city’s support of homeless youth to ����Ӱ�� at a press conference on the first day of school in early September.

“There was not a particularly clear strategy in our schools [in the past] for addressing homeless kids,” he said. “Now, we provide a whole lot of extra support to schools that have a substantial number of homeless kids. … It is about taking the initiatives we started and deepening them and making them more effective.”

Advocates are eagerly waiting for those newer supports to yield tangible results.

“We need to see the city translate the supports to educational outcomes,” Levine said. “Now the harder work begins.”

The New York City Department of Education says it will identify which students are foster youth in the pupil data it sends to the New York State Education Department starting with the 2019-20 school year. That information should have been on hand with the state beginning with the 2017-18 school year under mandates spelled out in the , the federal K-12 education law adopted in late 2015.

New York City is not alone. More than half of New York state’s 721 districts did not identify a single foster youth student in 2017-18 —��despite their numbers being estimated at — and, as of April 2019, 33 states across the country had yet to report any test score data for foster youth.

In New York City, where the state’s concentration of foster youth is greatest, the delay means their test scores and high school graduation rates won’t be broken out and publicly available until at least late 2020 or early 2021. That’s when the state is expected to release its 2019-20 report cards — a public that provide parents and others with information on state-, district- and school-level performance and progress each year. The 2017-18 report cards are the most current; the 2018-19 report cards are likely expected early next year.

The number of school-age foster youth in the city varies by source; reported 4,500 students in a “snapshot” count in May, whereas the district recorded during the 2017-18 year. In most cases, foster youth are children who’ve been removed from their parents or guardians by a child welfare agency and placed into alternative care, which can from living with a relative to staying in an emergency shelter.

Without this mandated separation of data, the performance and of foster youth and other high-risk groups, such as homeless students,��often “gets lost” within sweeping district and statewide rates, effectively “masking the inequities in our system,” the Paige Kowalski said.

“When we don’t shine a light on individual groups, it’s hard to figure out what we have to tackle; where we have to put our resources and time,” said Kowalski, the campaign’s executive vice president. Already existing “subgroups” that states have to report on include students with disabilities and English language learners.

It’s unclear whether the lag constitutes a failure to comply with the law. The U.S. Department of Education —��speaking generally — appeared to place the onus on states for any district-level reporting delays, writing in an Oct. 4 statement, “If a district were not collecting data for those students, and the state did not have another way to collect and report that information, the state would be out of compliance.”

New York’s state Education Department was unable to confirm how many districts as of 2018-19 were providing information on foster youth to the state, but it said 380 of its 721 districts, or about 53 percent, reported no foster youth during the 2017-18 year. Spokespeople for two of New York’s other largest districts, Buffalo Public Schools and Syracuse City School District, confirmed separately that they currently identify both homeless and foster youth.

A New York City DOE spokesperson didn’t offer a clear explanation as to why its subgroup reporting for foster youth is rolling out late. They noted that the DOE collects and disseminates some data on foster youth, such as the number of students on track to graduate, in a separate . “Data helps educators, families, and community members understand the progress our schools are making, and we work with the State to share requested information,” the spokesperson wrote in an Oct. 3 email.

As required, New York City schools did identify homeless students in its state-submitted data for both the 2017-18 and 2018-19 school years, the spokesperson said. The state has released test scores for New York City’s homeless students, but not their graduation rates, which require multiple years of data to compile and are expected to go public when the 2018-19 report cards are released. About 1 in 10 of the city’s 1.1 million public school students, or young people, are deemed homeless or “,” which includes living “doubled up” with other families or staying in a shelter, hotel or motel.

Foster and homeless youth are considered two of the most at-risk student populations in the U.S. While each have unique challenges, both groups must cope with uncertain or unstable home environments, school disruptions and emotional trauma that can hurt their standardized test scores and lead to .

Yet even four years after ESSA’s passage, reporting setbacks in New York City, New York state and across the country continue —��due in part, experts say, to ESSA’s vague guidelines that curtailed the federal government’s control over state education policy and promoted local autonomy. There are also complications in collecting foster youth and homeless student data when it requires education officials to coordinate with child welfare agencies.

Even once states have the data from their local districts, they have in deciding when to make the information public.

At this point, though, New York and its districts —��along with other states —��have “had four years to get this done,” Kowalski, of the Data Quality Campaign, said. “That’s enough time.”

Graduation rates, test scores far behind their peers

The published by the state Education Department so far for New York City homeless students and a small number of foster students statewide underscores their challenges in school.* Test score data for 2018-19 are , ahead of the formal report cards’ release:

●�� of NYC homeless students in third grade are proficient in English, compared with 53 percent of all students districtwide and 52 percent statewide

●�� of NYC homeless students in seventh grade are proficient in math, compared with 42 percent of all students districtwide and 43 percent statewide

●�� scored proficient on their 2017-18 chemistry Regents exam, 9 percentage points below the district average and 22 percentage points below the state average

●��At the state level, of seventh-graders in foster care (from a small sample) are proficient in math — the lowest of all student subgroups

*Note: Students with disabilities and English language learners regularly score below homeless students.

Research culled outside of state databases also highlights markedly lower-than-average graduation trends. In 2016-17, NYC students who had been homeless at some point in high school graduated at a rate of , compared with the 74 percent rate citywide, according to the Institute for Children, Poverty & Homelessness. That same year, only of the city’s foster youth were on track to graduate in four years.

Data reporting for the purposes of ESSA works like this: School districts have to self-report student enrollment and demographic data, including pupils’ subgroup status, to the state Education Department every year.

The state is then responsible for compiling districts’ data by subgroup and posting the information annually in its . ESSA directs states to publish test scores and graduation rates in particular for foster and homeless youth. States can release more information on these students if they choose — Indiana, for example, provides data on suspension and expulsion rates for foster youth.

New York’s state-level 2017-18 report card includes broken-out test scores for homeless students and at least some foster youth. In this way, New York is actually “leading” many states, Kowalski said. Only 17 states published similar data for these students as of April, according to a , and 28 didn’t report outcomes for either group.

The state’s data, however, are still incomplete. There were a reported homeless students in New York state public schools in 2017-18 — but were identified as homeless in report card enrollment data. Ninety-one districts out of 721 identified no homeless students that year, according to the state.

The gap is even more stark for foster youth: While there were an estimated 11,000 school-age children in foster care in New York state as of late 2017, only ��were listed in enrollment data for that school year. Each grade level accounted for some 200 or fewer foster students.

The scarcity of foster-youth-specific data thus far isn’t lost on education equity groups like Advocates for Children of New York.

“It’s easy to overlook students in foster care because their numbers are relatively small, but given the many challenges they face, they require a greater level of attention and targeted support from school districts,” staff attorney Chantal Hinds said in a statement.

The state did not break out high school graduation rates for either foster or homeless youth across its 2017-18 report cards. It needed four years of ESSA subgroup data, which it got with the 2015 freshman cohort that just graduated in June. The state Education Department confirmed it will start disclosing those rates based on the districts that provided the needed data in the 2018-19 report cards. Though there is no set publish date, the department noted for reference that it released the full 2017-18 report cards beginning in January 2019.

No punishments per se

A large reason for the often staggered publication of report cards in New York and other states, experts say, is the looseness of ESSA’s deadlines. Although states were directed to separate out test scores and high school graduation rate data for foster and homeless youth starting with their 2017-18 report cards, there is no hard deadline for actually publishing the information —��or any clear repercussions for states that take their time doing so. An annual Dec. 31 publishing deadline existed when ESSA initially passed, but Congress tossed out the Obama-era regulation, along with others, in 2017.

“The enforcement remedies are not as strong as they would be if there had been a firm deadline,” said Anne Hyslop, a former senior policy adviser with the U.S. Department of Education. “It’s a judgment call —��if data is a year late, is that too long?”

Hyslop, who now serves as assistant director for policy development and government relations for the , said the state holds responsibility for “setting out a clear deadline and process for when this data is due from districts,” making sure that there are clear definitions for who counts as a foster or homeless student to ensure consistent data reporting, and by saying “[this reporting] is going to be contingent on us giving you your federal money.”

She added, though, that “the state can’t do it alone. The district ultimately is the one that is interacting with students and is gathering the data. They both have a role to play.”

A state education department spokesperson said the department has “been proactive in communicating” districts’ responsibility to report student subgroups. They added, “While there are no ‘punishments’ per se” for districts that aren’t yet identifying those groups, “failure to report could, for instance, result in loss of funding for a district.”

The department didn’t directly provide reporting deadlines for New York’s but cited a that outlines when certain types of student data are due.

Kowalski does give New York state credit for its decision to leave a visible space in its report cards for data it doesn’t have yet, rather than not mentioning it at all.

“It takes courage, because someone is going to pick up the phone and say, ‘Where’s our kid?’”

Sitting next to three women whose families took enormous risk to help usher in school desegregation 65 years ago as part of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, high school senior Sokhnadiarra Ndiaye’s outrage was palpable.

“We are another class of students who have been in and out of this system and still have been deprived of the education that we deserve,” the 18-year-old told a rapt audience at the . “I feel the anger of 65 years. I feel the anger of 250.”

The three women beside Ndiaye — Cheryl Brown Henderson, Brigitte Brown and Joan Anderson — had come to Harlem as part of a nationwide tour to share the unsung stories of plaintiffs in the pivotal 1954 Supreme Court case, which declared separate but equal schools unconstitutional. Yet right outside the center’s doors, New York City’s public schools, with its 1.1 million students, remain in the country.

Ndiaye said only “a handful of white students” have sat next to her in the 11 years she’s been a student in New York City schools. A leader in Teens Take Charge, a student activist group that’s��, Ndiaye joined the panel midway through to talk about the city’s continuing struggles with segregation, and the ways her generation is taking up the mantle.

The teens’ efforts embody a call to action that was as much a part of Thursday’s two-hour discussion as was the celebration of past civil rights battles. Panelists stressed the urgency of raising awareness about educational inequities for students of color — both in the time of Brown v. Board and today — along with the importance of valuing education and holding those in power accountable.

“It’s important for us to know this history so we can recognize the dynamic [of segregation] when we see it happening … so we can stop it,” said Henderson, the youngest daughter of Oliver Brown, the case’s namesake. “Vote, shout, show up, stand up and speak up.”

The panel, which drew about 100 attendees and was co-sponsored by ����Ӱ��, kicked off with the women sharing their families’ often-overlooked contributions to Brown v. Board. The lawsuit is often misrepresented as Henderson’s father’s fight for an equal education for his oldest daughter, Linda, in 1950s Kansas. In actuality, Brown v. Board was five different cases that also encompassed families from Delaware, South Carolina, Virginia and Washington, D.C. The cases were consolidated as the Supreme Court took up the issue of school segregation.

Brigitte Brown and Joan Anderson’s parents were plaintiffs in one of those cases: , brought by a group of African-American parents fed up with traveling 20 miles round trip to send their children to Howard High School — the only high school in Delaware that admitted black students — when the all-white Claymont High School was nearby. A judge ruled for the immediate integration of the plaintiff’s children at Claymont in 1952; the State Board of Education appealed the decision to the Supreme Court. (Read about the other cases ).

When Brown’s mother, Ethel, was a teenager, she would take an arduous hours-long commute on a city bus to Howard High each day, despite suffering from a heart condition. Located in the northern part of the state, the school was in “an industrial area” and flanked by old buildings, Brown said. It was filled with caring teachers who “stressed” education, but it was severely underfunded, with old hand-me-down books.

“If you were in lower Delaware … you did not go to high school once you passed eighth grade —��period,” Brown said. “Unless you could find a way or live with some relatives or friends up north.”

Anderson’s experience was more direct — she was one of 11 children tied to the lawsuit who integrated Claymont High School in 1952 after the judge’s ruling. (Brown’s mother Ethel ended up moving, and was the one child in the case who didn’t end up attending Claymont). While there was widespread support at the school for integration, Anderson said navigating uncharted territory was still stressful.

“We were used as a test as to whether integration could work or not” before Brown v. Board, Anderson said. Outside of Claymont, “There was still segregation around us.”

Their families’ sacrifices “opened a door for many, many people,” Brown said. Nonetheless, she bemoaned how desegregation has “happened at a slow pace.” Brown saw the aftermath of firsthand when she lived in the suburbs during her secondary school years in the late 1970s and was one of only about 30 students of color in a high school of 3,000.

“Sometimes I look at [the history of desegregation and think], did it really happen?” she said.

Addressing long-standing segregation in New York City’s public schools has taken on fresh urgency in the past two years, particularly in its eight specialized high schools. At one of them, the storied Stuyvesant High School,�� out of some 900 went to black students in the fall 2019 freshman class. But a comprehensive solution continues to evade schools officials amid contentious disagreements citywide on how to create an equal education for all students. When Mayor Bill de Blasio last year a plan to secure more spots for students of color at the specialized high schools, in part by eliminating the sole entrance exam, Asian-American families — whose children disproportionately make up of enrollment —�� for discrimination. A�� proposal in August to phase out the system’s predominantly white and Asian gifted and talented programs also unleashed , and it has yet to garner explicit support from the city’s education department or mayor.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, who cited desegregation as a top priority when he assumed his role in April 2018, a citywide integration plan of his own. He has, however, been a major proponent for in schools —an approach that embraces curricula relevant to marginalized students’ experiences.

For now, school integration remains a in pockets of the city.

Carranza “64 years [after the Brown v. Board ruling], what do we, the collective we, have to show for that? I will tell you that in communities across America, the answer is, not much.”

The district’s failure to take immediate action is a slap in the face for students who have repeatedly demanded a better education, Ndiaye told the panel.

“I was told that things changed. Why do the adults keep on lying to me?” she asked. Ndiaye added: “I have a sister who’s going to be applying for the high school process, and I feel fear knowing that I am going to college and leaving her in a school system that I do not trust.”

Ndiaye was vague about Teens Take Charge’s agenda for this year, but she suggested the group would be upping the pressure on local officials. Last year, they at City Hall, spoke before the New York City Council and demanded action from de Blasio .

It’s students like Ndiaye who give the Brown v. Board generation hope, Henderson said.

“It was young people that brought us this far, so it’s good to see that this generation of young people recognize that,” she said. “We applaud you.”

“The squeaky wheel gets the attention,” Brown added. “And that’s what you have to do. Be the squeaky wheel.”

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation, a sponsor of the event, also provides financial support to ����Ӱ��.��

One of the three finalists, Amallia Orman, immediately stood out, Marquez recalled.

“When she walked in, she didn’t even acknowledge any of the adults in the room,” said Marquez, a 2018 high school graduate and member of��, a student activist group in the city. “Her attention [that day] was always with the students. The full attention.”

Orman is now the DOE’s first-ever “student voice manager” — a direct response to student activists’ in policy discussions and decisions on everything from integration to school discipline. A 38-year-old white woman, she is adamant that despite what her title may suggest, she is not the “voice” of the system’s predominantly black and Latino population. Rather, she says she considers herself a “facilitator” and “connector” who “makes more opportunities for youth to be at the center of the decision-making that impacts their educational experience.”

“I’m the person who’s [thinking about], ‘How can we get students to this table, or how can we get the people at this table to students?’” Orman said. “Youth are the most valuable and transformative stakeholders in education, and our most abundant resource.”

A Minneapolis native, Orman has lived in New York City for more than 20 years. She’s worked with students extensively, most recently as a student success advocate and instructor at CUNY’s Guttman Community College. She beat out about 350 applicants for the job, which formally started in April and comes with a $77,000-a-year base salary.

Orman’s day-to-day agenda in the country’s largest school district isn’t prescriptive — more “grassroots,” as she likes to say. She’s in schools regularly; last week, she visited a school that wants to start a student council. She’s sitting in on meetings with student groups and district officials, “taking notes … following up on the next steps, making sure youth are kept in the loop.” She’s getting youth feedback on a . She also intends to help plan a few forum-like events for students this year who want to craft “a youth agenda for the city.”

“When students see their voices reflected in the policies that we put forward, it gives you not only the proof, but it gives you what we call agency — the presence to know that what you say is being listened to. And that’s incredibly powerful,” Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza said earlier this month about the position during a first-day-of-school visit to Newcomers High School in Queens.

Considering there are about 1.1 million district students, the position’s focus has mainly been on high schoolers so far, Orman said. There aren’t plans at this time to hire another student voice manager, a DOE spokesperson wrote in a Sept. 23 email.

Marquez and senior Tiffani Torres, also with Teens Take Charge, stressed that they want Orman to invest time connecting with underserved students who aren’t already activists — something Orman told ����Ӱ�� she is prioritizing.

“There are so many students and families who don’t have the time to [get involved] and whose voices aren’t being represented,” Torres said. “Our hope is that Amallia takes her time, especially within these communities. ….We need her to be able to facilitate the conversations and the interactions that need to happen with these students.”

While Torres said she thinks Orman will “do an amazing job,” she wishes the student voice manager were a person of color. The�� is about 40 percent Hispanic, 26 percent black, 16 percent Asian and 15 percent white.

“It does matter,” said Torres, 16. “We talk a lot about representation and how we need integration, not only on the student level but on the level of the administration.”

Marquez, now an incoming New York University student, agreed that it’s “an issue.” But the eight to 10 students who attended that final round of interviews “were able to connect more with Amallia” than the other two candidates, she said — even with one who was a person of color.

“What makes her capable is the fact that she doesn’t disengage with the fact that she’s white. She’s aware of it,” the 18-year-old said. “And more than that, you can call her out on it. You can still share your personal experiences. And she’s more than open to talking about it.”

Orman was quick to acknowledge her “whiteness” when asked about whether she felt capable of understanding minority students’ life experiences and their needs.��“I’m comfortable helping facilitate and listening to critical conversations about race, class [and] gender,” she said, emphasizing that “listening is the most radical practice that I’ve done, not just as an educator but as a white educator.”

“This is something that I thought about a lot in the hiring process,” she added. “But I left it up to young people, and that’s it.”

Orman has connected with numerous students, student groups and organizations with youth programs, such as , , , and Chancellor Carranza’s , a department spokesperson said. But her appointment wasn’t publicly announced — DOE hires typically are not — and many other students appear unaware that the position exists.

“We should have heard more about it,” said Sarah Kogan, a 16-year-old from Staten Island who — when asked at the Sept. 20 Climate March — didn’t know that the DOE had brought on a student voice manager. “That should’ve been made more clear to us because that’s directly affecting us.”

Another Climate March attendee, Zakariah Massoud, 14, also had no idea about the new role. But he liked the concept. “Yes [it’s important]. We are the people who need to decide the future, because we’re the ones having that future,” said Massoud, who’s from the South Bronx.

Right now, it’s hard to find Orman personally or through accounts dedicated to her new role on the platforms teenagers use most — Snapchat and Instagram — or on Twitter. Orman noted that “part of the work of this job is creating more student-facing communication.” Launching social media platforms and content “are priorities for this school year,” a department spokesperson said.

The best way for students to reach her currently is by emailing studentvoice@schools.nyc.gov.

“I don’t have to come through direct channels,” Orman added as she passed along her email. “I’m happy to meet with students and go to them.”

Lower Manhattan was jam-packed with students chanting and carrying vibrant posters Friday as tens of thousands of kids from around the city and metropolitan area skipped school to demand action on climate change.

“What do we want? Climate justice! When do we want it? Now!” students yelled in call-and-response fashion as they waited at Foley Square to march downtown to Battery Park. Many waved handmade posters: “There Is No Planet B.” “When I grow up, I wanna be alive.”

New York City’s Climate March — part of the broader starting this week across more than 150 countries and all 50 states — comes on the eve of the United Nations’ Climate��Action Summit on Sept. 23, when world leaders will discuss how to avert a climate crisis. By some estimates, climate change will by 2050.

City students marching Friday received an from school from the city Education Department, with a parent’s permission. Early estimates of overall participation in the NYC march stood .

����Ӱ�� spoke with students at the march about why they left class and whether they think their actions can make a difference.

Student: Eliza Knoepflmacher
Age: 13
School: The Center School
Neighborhood: Upper East Side, Manhattan

“Our earth is dying. There’s no Planet B. There’s nothing else we can do … we need a change and we need it right now. … Even if we don’t make a difference, we are showing what we want, and people all over the country are marching.”

Student: Xuemin Weng
Age: 16
School: Brooklyn Technical High School
Neighborhood: Marine Park, Brooklyn

“I know a bunch of people who came to this march to tell us that it isn’t going to do anything. … And I was like, yeah, things don’t happen overnight. If you do it over and over again, they will realize that there’s a purpose to it and that people are protesting for a reason.”

Student: Zakariah Massoud
Age: 14
School: LaGuardia High School
Neighborhood: South Bronx

Climate change “is an issue that affects everyone, not even just the right side or the left side. We have no future if we don’t stop this now. So why am I going to school if I can’t learn anything that will help me in life? I’m not going to have a life to look forward to. … [It’s not true that] little things don’t matter. … It’s everyone doing something that changes everything.”

Student: Sami Friesen��
Age: 18
School: Weehawken High School
Neighborhood: Weehawken, New Jersey

“I was told that if I left school halfway through the day I was going to be penalized. I decided it was worth it. Because this is our world, and if I sit inside and I stand by, then we are not changing anything. … I believe this will be in textbooks one day. If we are able to make the difference that we have come here to make, we’re going to be able to do this.”

Student: Taylor Southerland
Age: 21
School: Borough of Manhattan Community College
Neighborhood: Harlem, Manhattan

“I think unity is power, and the more we come together and we do things like this, we’ll be saving our schools while saving our planet. … It really is about the small minuscule things that you can do at home to start adding to the difference.”

Student: Lucy
Age: 7��
Neighborhood: Park Slope, Brooklyn

“[I came here today] because I love penguins and I don’t want them to get extinct. They’re my favorite animal.”

Student: Johny Guaman
Age: 17
School: Aviation High School
Neighborhood: Jackson Heights, Queens

“I think we’re making a big difference. I feel like there’s not a lot of work being done by adults and the powerful people that are running our government and running our country, so I’ve always believed that the youth has the most power in terms of making changes. …��[I have] a few friends who are completely against the idea of fighting against climate change because they don’t believe in it. And I think it’s a failure by the schools, especially here in New York, because they’re not teaching the children enough about the facts.”

Student: Max Rosario
Age: 17
School: Brooklyn Technical High School
Neighborhood: Staten Island

“It’s not just the government that can change. We can change our own lifestyle. … And I think that if each one of us does something about it, that difference can actually be made. … I find that inspiring to think about.”

Student: Karla Azcona
Age: 15
School: Hostos-Lincoln Academy of Science
Neighborhood: Pelham Bay, Bronx

“People who are supposed to protect us from [climate change] aren’t doing anything. So I feel like it’s in our hands, our generation, to make a change.”

Student: Kadijah Prince
Age: 17
School: St. Joseph High School
Neighborhood: Midwood, Brooklyn

“A lot of times you don’t get any voices for this type of situation, so I’m glad to see that there’s a lot of people here; some kids from my school came as well. … [Our teachers] were really supportive. As soon as they heard there was going to be a march for climate change and that some students were going, they told us, ‘Make sure to be safe’ and, ‘Go out there and march for what’s right.’”

Recent public discourse on how to remedy the educational inequities that exist in the city’s highly segregated school system has often fixated on its elite specialized high schools — and, in the past few weeks, gifted and talented programs. Both serve mostly white and Asian students in the predominantly black and Latino district. The first string of questions at Thursday’s back-to-school news conference with the mayor and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza — held in the basement of a newly minted 3-K for All center on Staten Island — referenced the recent explosive by a mayor-appointed advisory group to dismantle the city’s gifted and talented programs.

The specialized high schools and the gifted programs combined serve only about 3 percent of the city’s more than 1.1 million students. The highly sought-after elementary school G&T programs enroll roughly , and about 18,500 students currently attend the city’s nine elite specialized high schools.

Meanwhile, systemwide, more than half of students still struggle to meet academic standards. While New York City students made modest gains on the 2018-19 state exams, about 47.4 percent in grades 3-8 scored proficient in reading while 45.6 percent did so in math. Scores were more disparate when parsed by race; 28.3 percent of black students were proficient in math, compared with 66.6 percent and 74.4 percent of their white and Asian peers, respectively.

Responding to a question from ����Ӱ�� on how he’d help all students achieve, de Blasio first acknowledged that the issue of “How can we make every school a good school, how can we make every school a strong school?” has “not been the essence of the conversation.” Parents, including himself, he said, have been guilty of assigning some schools as good and dismissing others as permanently bad.

“The conversation in this city should be about how do we educate all of our kids in the most effective manner and that the ultimate measure of fairness is that every child is getting just as good an education regardless of where they live,” said de Blasio, who’s running for president. He added, retrospectively: “My kids went to New York City public schools the whole way through, and there’s this vernacular we would all use when thinking about which school — that’s a good school, that’s a bad school, you know, when you think about where your kids are going to go next. It’s horrifying language.”

De Blasio then pointed to the city’s ongoing����agenda as a broader, systemwide approach to student success. A focal point is growing the mayor’s signature pre-K and 3-K initiatives — 3-K programs, for example, are now officially in all five boroughs this school year, enrolling nearly 17,700 students. It also includes beefing up professional development for teachers and expanding programs like , , and the , which aims to recruit and retain employees in hard-to-staff schools. De Blasio’s four-year, nearly $800 million Renewal program to turn around the city’s lowest-performing schools was ended in 2018-19 after posting overall lackluster results.

It’s “just adding piece upon piece upon piece to the point that schools actually start to move,” de Blasio said. He wasn’t able to provide specific details on exactly how and where these programs are expanding in 2019-20, though he said efforts are “building every single year.”

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, who chimed in after the mayor, had a starkly different reaction to the question. He warned against trying to separate the issue of segregation from helping all students achieve academically. The two, he said, “are inextricably linked.”

“The fact is New York City’s public schools … is the most segregated school system in America,” he said. “You can’t divorce academic achievement, social-emotional learning, professional development from the population that is in those classrooms. It’s part of the educational process.”

Watch the mayor and Carranza speak on the topic here:

Read their comments below:

����Ӱ��: So, in talking about improving educational equality, I feel like a large portion of the conversation has been geared more towards segregation, first at the elite high schools and now the elementary G&T programs. In reality, this is only serving a small fraction of New York City students. So, what is your plan this year for all New York City students, many of whom, more than 50 percent, are not proficient in math and reading?

De Blasio: So, I’ve – it’s a great question and I would say it goes right back to we’re going to spend a lot of time talking about Equity and Excellence in the coming months and trying to help people understand it again. This is the core vision, and the chancellor will jump in – I think that the discussion has often veered into one piece of the equation or another, and as you said, sometimes pieces that are very important but only affect a small number of kids. I think the conversation in this city should be about how do we educate all of our kids in the most effective manner and that the ultimate measure of fairness is that every child is getting just as good an education regardless of where they live. That’s what Equity and Excellence seeks to do. And we honestly believe that could not be achieved without going first at early childhood education. That was the foundation of both creating a much more effective school system but also a much fairer school system.

So, we’re going to keep building that out, and I think that when we think about how to move the schools forward, this is where we have to move this conversation. What uplifts all of our schools because in the end — I used to talk about the good schools and the bad schools. I mean, if you —��my kids went to New York City public schools the whole way through, and there’s this vernacular we would all use when thinking about which school — that’s a good school, that’s a bad school, you know, when you think about where your kids are going to go next. It’s horrifying language. Right, that’s disgusting when you think about it and yet we’ve all done it. And that’s because, for years and years, there was an acceptance of the idea that some schools had it all together and had everything they need. Other schools were just objectively failing, but that couldn’t be changed, a lot of people thought.

And I think a lot of times, in the history of this city, that was sort of just accepted as a reality. But we don’t accept that reality. Equity and Excellence is about literally saying we’re going to disrupt that entire history. We believe we can make every school a good, strong school. We certainly have the caliber of educators to do it, and we’ve been pouring on professional development which our educators want and is working. But we were missing a lot of the strategic and programmatic pieces. We were missing on early childhood education. We were missing on things like AP for All. And as we’re adding those pieces into the equation, it’s working. But I would love it if we could move the conversation to the central question, how can we make every school a good school, how can we make every school a strong school? That has not been the essence of the conversation.

Carranza: So, I just fundamentally disagree with the premise of the question. The conversation has not been solely focused on equity and issues of integration. The fact is New York City’s public schools, not by my estimation, not by the mayor’s estimation, by research, researchers, is the most segregated school system in America. That’s just a fact. And when you think about the fact that 1 out of 300 Americans is sitting in one of our classrooms, then we have to make sure that those classrooms are responsive to the needs of the students that are in those classrooms. So, you can’t divorce academic achievement, social-emotional learning, professional development from the population that is in those classrooms. It’s part of the educational process. So, please, stop bifurcating those issues. They are inextricably linked.

Now, with that, what we’re doing in New York City is at scale. No one in the country is doing what we’re doing at the scale that we’re doing it. Yet in New York State, New York City continues to lead the five largest school systems in New York State in terms of academic achievement. And year over year for the last five years, in spite of changing accountability systems in the State of New York, we have continued to show academic progress in our subgroups and with our student bodies as a whole. So, we continue to move the ball forward.

The mayor spoke about this notion that you have good schools and bad schools. That is an antiquated way of looking at schools. You have to look at the progress that schools are making. How are they moving their student achievement, but also how are they moving their environments in their schools so that they are safe and supportive environments? We have schools in all five boroughs in some places where people would say, “Well, there’s a good school there — absolutely.” Let me take you and show you what teachers are doing to create learning environments. Let me show you what teachers are doing when students come in reading at a second-grade level and by the end of the year, they are reading at a fifth-grade level in the fourth grade. There are incredible things that are happening in New York City, but that never gets told.

So, you can’t divorce the issue, but at the same time, we are moving academically, the school system, in a very positive way. We had the highest graduation rate in the history of the New York City public school system. We have the greatest achievement that we’ve ever had in spite of shifting standards. We continue to have lowering dropouts. That means students are voting with their feet and staying in school. We continue to have increasing college-going culture rates, attendance rates. We continue to have the number of teachers that are seeking professional development that is increasing. We have a culturally responsive and sustaining curriculum definition now, which is being informed by our very community.

And again, I don’t want to go on a long monologue on this, but somebody asked me, “Well, can you give me an example of culturally responsive and sustaining curriculum?” I can, absolutely. Everybody knows this example. The most popular Broadway show in the history of Broadway is Hamilton. That is culturally responsive and sustaining. They told the story of Hamilton – American history – through hip-hop and rap. That’s what we’re talking about – how do you make it relevant for students. And you don’t have to go to Broadway to get culturally relevant and sustaining education, but you should have it in your classroom —��who you read about, what the figures are. If a student is in school in New York City, and it’s commonly accepted that the civil rights movement includes the LGBT civil rights movement, and that started right here at the Stonewall Inn uprising. And if students don’t understand that going through the public schools of New York City, that that’s part of our civil rights movement, then we have not done the service we need to for those students.

That’s another example. So, all of these things are things that we are working on in conjunction with the Equity and Excellence agenda. That is the Equity and Excellence agenda. So we are proud of where we are. We are not satisfied with where we are. And that’s really the urgency with which we’re doing the work.

Reporter Question (Summarized): So what are the next steps? Are there any timelines in place because I’ve heard a lot of, “We’re going to talk about it, we’re going to talk about it.” But what can parents expect next?

De Blasio: So, this is — I appreciate the question because this is an indicator of something we have failed to do effectively, which is to communicate this agenda which has been in place for years and continues to build. But I don’t think it’s widely understood. So, one of the things we’re going to do this school year is go back and explain it again and really make it vivid to people. Equity and Excellence includes pre-K and 3-K, it includes things like Computer Science for All, it includes AP for All, it includes making SAT tests available for free, and CUNY admission fees being waived. It’s a whole host of strategies to open up opportunity for kids across the board and to improve schools in every zip code.

And when I mentioned the professional development, that’s also a key part of it. The Bronx Plan, which we’re going to talk about later in the day, which is already working bringing a lot of educators to schools in the Bronx that couldn’t fill their rosters because we weren’t applying the kinds of strategies that actually would bring those educators to some of the toughest schools in the Bronx. Now, we’re finding a way to fix that, right. When you think of it through an equity lens and you say, OK, we used to accept the good schools and the bad schools concept. Just think how sick it is that we used to think that was normal. We don’t accept that anymore. So, now we are taking every tool we’ve got to fix that and bring up and support a whole host of schools that used to be left for dead. We’re actually giving them the help they need to become really good schools.

And then, regardless of the composition of a community, every child is getting a strong education. That is the vision, and it is so important to understand that that’s — and I’m speaking as a parent now, too. Like, all the theory about how we create a utopian world, you know, how we get everything to be perfectly balanced and all — that’s not what parents are talking to me about. They are talking to me about how do you make my child’s school better right now? That’s what they care about. And we need to understand that the Equity and Excellence vision is a right-now thing.

Everything I just talked to you about is literally building every single year. I mean you’re sitting here right now in a place that exemplifies the growth of one of the strategies, which is 3-K coming to Staten Island for the first time. So, to me — and this is based on a lot of conversations with educators for years and years and years — this is everything people kept asking for, right. For years, we would have this conversation – I’ve had it with Richard [Carranza] and [UFT President] Michael [Mulgrew], I’ve had it with [former schools chancellor] Carmen Fariña and many others before, and they said, “What would actually be transcendent?”

Professional development was one of the biggest things. It doesn’t get talked about in the public debate a lot. But taking our professionals and help them get stronger all the time was one of the big missing links, right. Early childhood education — huge missing link. And just adding piece upon piece upon piece to the point that schools actually start to move. And now these test scores say – we’ve got a long way to go, I’m not saying these test scores are the end-all be-all, but they prove that these things actually start to move the ball. So, there will be a lot more of that this year, and what we need to do is make that vision very clear to people.

Question:��But my question specifically is what’s next? What’s next on the agenda? There’s a lot on the plate, but what is next? What can you tell parents to look out for next and what’s the timeline for it?

De Blasio: So, I think – and this is to say to you that there are so many pieces that have been started. What I can tell parents to look for is each of these things to really blossom and have more and more effect on their school. There’s not always going to be a new announcement each month of, we have a new program and a new program and a new strategy. Some of this is about taking strategies that are working and making them reach each school more deeply. The Bronx Plan is a great example.

We see already a number of educators going into schools that didn’t have enough educators in certain areas. That’s just begun. You’re going to see more of that in the course of this year. You’re going to see more of that even next year. So, it is taking the strategy and getting it to deepen across schools and watching those schools start to move. That’s what we’re doing now.

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The nation’s largest school district is headed back to school on Thursday. And while many of New York City’s 1.1 million students may have gotten a reprieve from the classroom, the education news cycle certainly didn’t idle.

Headlines this summer highlighted the deep challenges New York City schools still face in tackling educational inequity, though they’ve made progress in becoming more inclusive. The district continues to wrestle with how to integrate some of the most segregated schools in the country and to address its widely criticized special education services. Just in the last month, those two storylines spurred explosive to eliminate gifted and talented programs in elementary schools and news of a state-led audit of schools serving more than 20,000 students with severe disabilities.

At the same time, the Department of Education is moving to expand restorative justice practices, incorporate curriculum that reflects student diversity and enable non-conforming students to more easily change their name and gender on school records.

Here’s a rundown of key issues to watch in 2019-20.

1 New (and even more controversial) integration ideas

How to create equity for students of color in New York City’s heavily segregated school system is one of —��if not the — most hot-button and complex issue facing the district. And new school integration proposals released last week have already unleashed .

The , commissioned by Mayor Bill de Blasio to find ways to desegregate the city’s schools, phasing out gifted and talented programs, which test children as young as 4 years old and are overwhelmingly populated by white and Asian students. The G&T programs, which enroll roughly , would be replaced with either ” — though it’s not entirely clear what those would entail —��or non-selective magnet schools, whose instruction is usually built around a particular theme or subject. The recommendations also include ending selective admissions at most middle schools and prohibiting high schools from using lateness, attendance or geography to select their students.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza to welcome the proposals at a news conference last week, but gave a more constrained take on while confirming that no changes to G&T programs would happen this school year. “What I’m reading from the recommendations is that … we have to serve gifted students in a better way, in a way that makes sense, in a way that doesn’t exclude students,” Carranza said on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show. “I think that’s something that we can all get behind.”

De Blasio, who is running for president and perhaps reluctant to embrace a fresh controversy, has been even more measured, saying in an interview Aug. 27�� that, “It’s literally a recommendation that just came out. I’m going to assess it.” The mayor, who has state-appointed control over the system, has the power to end G&T programs, along with selective admissions at all traditional public schools except for three of the oldest elite specialized high schools.

There has been swift — and sharply divided — reactions to the recommendations. Some in support of eliminating G&T that the programs help “maintain racial and socio-economic segregation by creating exclusive educational spaces.” Teens Take Charge, a student activist group, the idea of ending G&T and academic screening in middle schools, though it lamented that the report’s recommendations for high school integration “do not go far enough.”

Some critics worry, however, that dismantling the G&T program would drive higher-achieving middle-class white and Asian-American families out of the city’s public schools. Others, like , contend that it would be better to grow the gifted programs to reach a more diverse group of students than eliminate them.

These recommendations haven’t been the only integration proposals on the table. The mayor this year to overhaul admissions requirements for the city’s eight elite specialized high schools, which only consider a student’s score on the rigorous SHSAT test. Student activists have presented to the administration. And some districts, such as District 15, have taken matters into their own hands. The Brooklyn district is currently considering integrating seven elementary schools in the Red Hook, Carroll Gardens, Boerum Hill and Cobble Hill neighborhoods, with of support.

2 Latest test scores

Grades 3-8 in New York City schools saw on state exams in both English and math in 2018-19, though proficiency continues to fall below 50 percent.

Some 47.4 percent of test takers scored proficient in English— a 0.7-percentage-point rise from last year that puts the city above . Meanwhile, 45.6 percent passed math, a 2.9 percent increase from 2017-18 but shy of the statewide average. De Blasio also for third-grade students who’d been enrolled in his signature universal pre-K program.

The achievement gap, however, remains vast. About 28.3 percent of black students and 33.2 percent of Hispanic students were proficient in math, compared with 74.4 percent and 66.6 percent of their Asian and white peers, respectively.

Traditional district schools’ performance on these tests also continues to lag well behind charters’ performance: 63.2 percent of charter students in grades 3-8 scored proficient in math, and 57.3 percent were proficient in English. Apples-to-apples comparisons are tricky, however, when considering charters’ different demographics — they tend to serve a smaller proportion of students with disabilities, for example, and can have a longer school day and year.

3 School discipline reform��

In a continuing shift from a “zero tolerance” approach to school discipline, the city is embracing a new “” that emphasizes students’ emotional well-being and , a practice of defusing conflicts when students act out rather than doling out punishments. A few key takeaways from the package, introduced in June:

●��A between the DOE and the New York Police Department, which oversees school safety agents in public schools, for the first time in two decades. Part of that agreement includes discouraging school safety agents from arresting students for minor offenses, such as marijuana possession or disorderly conduct.

●��The maximum length of an out-of-school suspension is dropping from 180 days to 20 days. Suspensions disproportionately affect students of color; for example, about of total suspensions in 2017-18 were issued to black students, even though they make up 26 percent of the school system. (There will be exceptions for violent offenses, including incidents involving guns and other weapons.)

●��The DOE is bringing and restorative justice practices . Elementary schools will have access to grade-specific SEL curriculum this year, thanks to a partnership with the National University System’s Sanford Harmony program. Restorative justice training will also be implemented over a three-year span at the middle and high school levels; it wasn’t immediately clear which schools are receiving that training in 2019-20. At least 50 middle schools systemwide will benefit from “intensive” restorative justice services through the .

The district this year is also hiring a “mobile unit” of 85 clinical social workers to help with crisis intervention and long-term care as necessary, department spokesman Will Mantell wrote in an email Thursday.

“We want our children to know that their voices, their struggles, and their triumphs matter. And we want them to build and practice the skills they need to become well-adjusted adults,” De Blasio and his wife, Chirlane McCray, wrote in a recent about the changes. “Our students deserve nothing less.”

4 Special ed oversight

Amid mounting complaints that the district is failing to provide vital and mandated services to tens of thousands of special education students, a state overseer is stepping in.

The Office of the State Comptroller announced last month that it would audit “health, safety and accessibility conditions” at District 75 schools, which enroll with severe disabilities, the . One District 75 school in Queens featured in a disturbing story in the Post , with cracked plaster and peeling paint.

The state comptroller’s oversight, which began on Aug. 13, is the office’s first District 75-specific audit to its knowledge, spokeswoman Tania Lopez wrote in an email. It’s not known at this point how many of the 57 schools in District 75 will be examined. A report isn’t expected for nine months to a year at the earliest, Lopez said.

Beyond the crisis facing the District 75 schools, nearly a quarter of the district’s more than 220,000 special education students . The number of special-education-related complaints also spiked 51 percent between the 2014-15 and 2017-18 school years, with 7,448 complaints received by February for the 2018-19 year, a state-commissioned report found.

Bronx City Councilman Andy King became so disillusioned that he����moving special education services to be under the purview of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. is under review by the City Council’s Committee on Education.

Department officials, however, insist they’re doubling down on improving services. “We’re committed to serving students with disabilities in the most inclusive environments appropriate for their needs,” DOE spokeswoman Danielle Filson last month. She noted that “[De Blasio’s] administration has hired 4,500 special education staff, added new autism and bilingual programs, and is investing $33 million in new special education resources this year.”

Separately, the DOE starting this school year is also for students with disabilities at schools that are designated as partially and/or fully accessible.

5 Busing facelift

The DOE is optimistic that busing this year will run .

The department in August confirmed that GPS capabilities will be installed on every bus by the first day of school — something the City Council in January for the 2019-20 school year. It also announced a $36 million, five-year partnership with Via, a ride-share service, to optimize the city’s bus routes and provide an app for parents to track their child’s bus location, route changes and vehicle delays. About 150,000 students take the bus every day.

The development follows a year of high-profile busing snafus, including an incident where preschoolers with special needs were for eight hours. The number of breakdowns and delays have increased 73 percent in the past four school years, from 63,184 in 2015-16 to 109,058 in 2018-19, a recent analysis by revealed.

The mobile app will not be ready for start-of-school, though the department “will begin piloting the mobile app this year,” Mantell said. De Blasio parents can call the to check on their child’s whereabouts in the meantime.

“It’s an unwieldy system,” De Blasio acknowledged in an with Inside City Hall’s Errol Louis. “We’ve been working internally to figure out how to make it more uniform, how to make it more streamlined.”

6 Culturally responsive education��

The Panel for Educational Policy in late July Chancellor Carranza’s call for “culturally responsive-sustaining education” that embraces curricula relevant to marginalized students’ experiences. This doesn’t mean such curriculum is mandated, but rather establishes a of what this type of education should look like in schools. It also affirms the DOE’s support of de-emphasizing Eurocentrism —��the tendency to interpret the world in terms of European or Anglo-American values and experiences — in the city’s predominantly black and Hispanic school system.

Students of color often don’t see themselves in school curriculum and textbooks. Authors of books commonly used in elementary schools are, on average, 84 percent white — even though only 15 percent of the city’s public school students are white, according to released earlier this year from the NYC Coalition for Educational Justice.

The DOE had already developed some “culturally responsive resources” prior to the creation of this definition, Mantell pointed out, such as the curriculum and the . He added that the department held a related training for teachers this summer and will “continue to provide new professional development opportunities” throughout the year.

While these latest efforts are widely supported, some argue the department’s focus needs to be on “the urgent need to teach basic math, reading and science” rather than on race, .

Other syllabus items to know

●��LEAD PAINT: Nearly across the five boroughs have now tested positive for lead —��about double the number in late July. The latest count includes additional inspections of more than 3,000 first-grade and District 75 classrooms, which serve students with severe special needs. The department has promised all affected classrooms will be remedied by the first day of school, and announced Thursday that it will now test for lead in school common areas. The ordeal this summer spurred calls for better and more . Exposure to lead paint can interfere with young children’s brain development and impede academic achievement. See all of Chalkbeat’s reporting in the last month .

●��FATE OF RENEWAL SCHOOLS: The 2018-19 year saw the end of the “Renewal” program, a more-than-four-year, nearly $800 million school turnaround effort that overall yielded lackluster results. And although the DOE the 71 low-performing schools left in the program would retain their partnerships with nonprofits, which offer wraparound services such as mental health counseling, as well as their current funding levels, a lot of questions remain. Chalkbeat this summer that interviews with principals across the city “suggest schools lack precise details about what type of support they will receive, creating uncertainty for the coming school year.” Carranza has an alternative initiative for bolstering the city’s lowest-performing schools.

●��RE-EXAMINING REGENTS EXAMS: Amid a national debate over whether to decouple standardized test scores from student, teacher and school evaluations, New York state will re-evaluate the storied 141-year-old Regents exams (10 exams, five of which New York high schoolers have to pass to graduate). A commission assembled by state Board of Regents Chancellor Betty A. Rosa will this fall “to what degree requiring passage of Regents exams improves student achievement, graduation rates and college readiness,” . At the local level, Mark Treyger, chair of the City Council’s Committee on Education, is drafting a resolution that calls for “abolish[ing] the Regents exams” in favor of other assessments, such as project-based learning, the .

●��ADMISSIONS PROCEDURE CHANGE: Starting this year, the middle and high school admissions processes will no longer have a second round of placements. Students will still initially apply to (and rank) up to 12 schools, but if they don’t get their top choice, instead of ranking 12 more schools, they will automatically be waitlisted at the schools they ranked above the one they got. (So, for example, a student accepted to the fourth school on their list will be placed on the waitlists for their top three choices). Read the department’s announcement — and .

●��HOMELESS STUDENT POPULATION GROWS: The city saw a of homeless students last year, with nearly 115,000 —��about 10 percent of its total enrollment —��living “doubled up” in someone else’s apartment, in shelters or unsheltered. That’s more than twice the size of the Boston Public Schools system and enough students to fill Yankee Stadium twice. Homelessness places unrelenting stress on students, says, resulting in a greater incidence of behavioral and academic difficulties.

●��LGBT NAME/GENDER CHANGES: now allow students to change their name and/or gender on their permanent school records without legal documentation. Permanent records include transcripts, diplomas and report cards. Any student can request a name and/or gender change via , though a parent or guardian has to sign off if the student is under 18 years old.

●��SEX ABUSE PREVENTION ED: The New York state legislature in June mandating that public schools teach all K-8 students how to spot the signs of child abuse — largely through learning about “safe” versus “unsafe” touches. have already passed similar bills mandating or allowing sex abuse prevention education in schools. Gov. Andrew Cuomo into law two months later, on Thursday.

*This story has been updated to add Chancellor Carranza’s latest comments Tuesday on the School Diversity Advisory Group’s recommendations.

A lot has changed since Jared Fox took the helm three and a half years ago as New York City schools’ first LGBTQ liaison.

When the Cleveland, Ohio, native started in January 2016, there had never been a designated LGBTQ advocate in the department running the country’s largest school district. There was no formal Department of Education guidance specifically geared toward protecting transgender students, and there was limited curriculum covering LGBTQ history and culture. Single-stall, gender-neutral bathrooms weren’t mandated in each school.

Fox’s mission, as he’d told ����Ӱ�� that year, was to cultivate safe, inclusive learning environments for LGBTQ students.

As he was preparing to leave his post Aug. 16 for a three-year doctoral program at Harvard University, Fox reflected on the city’s progress — from expanding a pilot program that brings LGBTQ writers into schools to crafting systemwide guidelines that outline protocols and best practices for empowering transgender and gender-nonconforming youth. The 32-year-old cited these guidelines as among the things he and the DOE are most proud of.

The , released earlier this summer, allows students to change their name and/or gender on their permanent school records without legal documentation. Permanent records include transcripts, diplomas and report cards.

“This was a really big step, but it was a step that took many baby steps to get there,” Fox said.

Any student can request a name and/or gender change via , though a parent or guardian has to sign off if the student is under 18 years old. The guidance does not apply to such as a driver’s license, which still requires a legal name change.

Public-facing documents like diplomas have recently been updated to intentionally not include any mention of gender, a DOE spokeswoman said. After that happened and “the sky didn’t fall,” Fox said, expanding the guidelines seemed logical, especially considering the arduous process students often go through to have a name and/or gender change legalized.

“[Legal] name changes can be really difficult,” Fox said. “They often result in [students and their families] going to court, having to pay to file in a court. … Many of our families just weren’t taking that step, and it was really hindering our ability in a huge system to make sure that everybody was using the right name and gender.”

It’s still a work in progress, as the form includes only a “male” or “female” gender option. Fox said that department staff is working with the state education department and federal partners and that “further guidance will be coming.”

“We’ll still affirm you as a non-binary student or however you want” in the interim, he said, “but right now in the system we just don’t have the capability to put anything other than M or F.”

Fox noted that a few students have already started filling out the form. The percentage of LGBTQ students in the city is at record levels, with nearly a quarter of teens identifying in categories other than straight,��. The city’s education department says it doesn’t centrally track how many of its roughly 1.1 million students request name and/or gender changes.

Newly released����also allow students to participate in competitive sports that align with their identified gender instead of granting permission on a case-by-case basis, and they prohibit health classes from being separated by gender.

The city’s latest inclusion efforts aren’t entirely isolated. , for example, also permit name and gender changes without legal documentation.

Fox said he doesn’t closely follow other districts’ policies but “hopes that we’re leading the way.” The city issued a spate of LGBTQ guidance during Fox’s tenure — requiring at least one gender-neutral bathroom in each school and mandating that teachers and staff refer to students by their desired name and pronouns — a contrast to the federal administration’s efforts to dismantle guidance protecting�� rights.

Affirming students’ identities in school is paramount to their success, said Sarah Rosenbach, a Ph.D. student and volunteer board member for the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network’s NYC chapter, which Fox founded.

“When inclusive policies like this are in place, then students are less likely to miss school for safety reasons. They’re also more likely to have higher levels of school belonging,” she said. “It’s sometimes the case that school is the place where a student can be their most authentic self.”

Separate from the guidelines, Fox considers his chief achievement the Gender and Sexuality Alliance Summit — which, in its second year, hosted more than 1,500 students in January — along with the expansion of gay-straight alliances (GSAs) across elementary, middle and high schools. There were about 450 GSA clubs systemwide in 2018-19, education department spokeswoman Miranda Barbot wrote in an email.

“I was a part of a GSA when I was at my high school; it was how I met other LGBTQ kids and felt less alone,” Fox said. Speaking about the summit, he added: “We brought together students from a lot of these clubs and allowed them to learn from one another, to grow. To celebrate. It was a beautiful moment and something I hope will continue.”

Looking to next school year, Fox said he and students he’s spoken with are eager to see the continued growth of Fox highlighted the , which he said has grown from about 25 participating schools in 2016 to about 80 schools in 2019-20. The Panel for Educational Policy in late July also ��Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza’s call for “culturally responsive” education that embraces curricula relevant to marginalized students’ experiences.

“Our students want to see themselves in the books that they’re reading in the classrooms, in the history lessons. And our students deserve to see themselves,” Fox said. “And they also, if they’re not LGBTQ, deserve to see out the window. Kids deserve to see a world outside of their own.”

Queens City Councilman Daniel Dromm, who led the effort to fund the liaison position, said Fox has played a fundamental role in helping integrate the public school and LGBTQ communities.

“Having that position is so important, because you’re talking about building bridges,” he said. “He was the perfect choice.”

Mark Rampersant, senior executive director of the Office of Safety and Youth Development, where the LGBTQ liaison position is based, called Fox an “invaluable asset.”

“Jared has been … a tireless champion for LGBTQ students and educators citywide,” he wrote in an email. “We thank him for his leadership and wish him all the best as he continues his own education. We hope to one day welcome him back as Dr. Jared Fox.”

At Harvard, Fox is joining the in the Graduate School of Education. He said he intends to “take my passion of LGBTQ issues and what I’ve learned here in New York City and think about where that intersects with other issues around [K-12] education.”

The department said Wednesday it’s “still in the process of hiring and looking to bring someone on as quickly as possible” to fill Fox’s position, which comes with a nearly $97,000 base salary. Although it’s unclear whether there will be a new hire by the start of school, Barbot said the Office of Safety and Youth Development has staffers well equipped to handle LGBTQ student needs.

Whether Fox will return to the education department post-Harvard is open-ended. But he said he’s optimistic that his successor will champion the existing guidelines and push for more inclusive practices, as he has.

Fox offered a few words of wisdom.

“You’ve got to reach out and talk to the students and talk to their families. You have to talk to the principals in the schools. And you have to hear them — truly hear them,” he said. “Because the answer is in the room.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated which New York City Department of Education student records no longer included a reference to gender.