Earlier this spring, Noma Projects took its efforts across the Atlantic, embarking on a weeklong tour of New York City through a series of pop-up events, ranging from book signings to cooking at the Union Square Greenmarket. Among those tour events: a school lunch takeover, closed to the public, in which DREAM Charter School students in grades K-8 were offered sandwiches and yogurt parfaits made using Noma Projects’ Pumpkin Seed Praline.

The DREAM Charter event on April 19 was facilitated by , , formerly Noma’s head chef, that places professional chefs in public foodsystems like schools, senior organizations and prisons.

Through three back-to-back lunch services last month, the Noma Projects team experienced first-hand the challenges — and joys — of ensuring students are provided a nutritious, delicious lunch every day. Watch how this unprecedented service went for a team from the world’s best restaurant as they faced their toughest critics — schoolchildren.

This is what inspired the creation of Mott Haven Charter School Academy over 14 years ago. The school’s founders and their partners at The New York Foundling, one of New York’s oldest and largest social services providers, asked some essential questions: What can we achieve together for students in the child welfare system? What kind of outcomes could a school specifically designed for students in foster care, and those experiencing poverty, produce?

Those outcomes are pretty incredible.

By design, Haven Academy serves a highly vulnerable student population. Roughly half are in the child welfare system or receive services preventing entry into foster care. The other half come from a local school district that is in one of the poorest congressional districts in the country. One key aspect of the school’s model is that students are considered part of the child welfare group if they have ever been involved with that system. This speaks to the school’s belief that the trauma and disruptions to a child’s life induced by the child welfare system are long-lasting and should be treated as such. 

Disruption is an important variable for these students. Many face housing insecurity and homelessness. They repeatedly move homes, move schools, change counselors and have to start over, falling further and further behind. As a result, very few students who have been in foster care are able to enroll in college, and of those who do, less than 5% graduate. 

Haven Academy addresses these challenges through three core tactics: enforcing a strong school culture, maintaining robust staffing and providing social services in partnership with The Foundling, such as family counseling, health care and dedicated caseworkers alongside the academic programming. In short, educators and caregivers at Haven prioritize social-emotional well-being alongside academic success. To serve this very unique student population, you cannot have one without the other. 

Haven Academy’s school culture creates an environment that balances predictability and structure with enough flexibility to cater to each student’s needs. When a child’s entire life outside of school feels unpredictable and out of control, that student needs a sense of stability at school. All of Haven’s teachers maintain the same set of expectations for students, which are regularly repeated verbally to students in each classroom. In every area of the school, common expectations are posted on the walls and taught by the teachers. When a child acts out, the response to that behavior reflects the previously communicated expectations. These expectations never change. This creates the most predictable environment many students have in their lives.��

For example, a child facing a behavioral challenge is never removed from the classroom or the school. Instead of suspension or expulsion, students are immediately offered solutions to help them manage their emotions. This might mean a comfortable chair as opposed to a traditional desk chair; sitting at a separate desk rather than at a table with other students; or a cozy corner with books, art supplies and other activities that can help de-escalate big emotions. School must be a place where students are always welcome, no matter what happens inside the classroom or out. 

Haven Academy’s staffing model requires two teachers in every general-education classroom. This increases the investment per classroom and strikes a critical balance between structure and flexibility. If a child needs individualized attention, one teacher can provide it while the other continues with the lesson plan. This creates a sense of consistency and minimizes distractions for the rest of the class. All Haven teachers are also trained to create individualized plans for students as needed. This allows all educators to teach to the student, not the state standards. 

Haven also provides wraparound services, in partnership with The New York Foundling. While the average student to social worker ratio in District 7, where Haven is located, is 371:1, at Haven, it’s 24:1. Haven students also have access to a robust tutoring program that provides academic and life skills support outside the classroom. 

The positive outcomes that have resulted from this unique model are undeniable. On state English and math tests, Haven students outperform their peers in the school district, city and state. This is true for both students who are involved in the child welfare system and those who are not. For example, 51% of students at Haven were ranked proficient in math, based on state test scores for the 2018-19 school year. This is compared with 46% of students in New York City, 47% statewide and just 26% of students in District 7.

Chronic absenteeism is 16 percentage points lower than the citywide average for kids in foster care. During the 2018-19 school year, 28% of Haven prevention students and 20% of students in foster care were chronically absent. This represented a marked improvement from earlier years for children in prevention services, who have historically struggled most with attendance among Haven students. In the same comparison year, 36.9% of elementary and middle school students in foster care citywide were chronically absent. The long-term impact of this last piece is unquantifiable, but it stretches far beyond the classroom, and beyond the Haven campus. 

There are tens of thousands of children in New York City and many hundreds of thousands nationally who have been involved with the child welfare system. Homelessness and other factors that have historically made it difficult for children to learn are becoming more acute. Every family has been affected by the pandemic even three years on, experiencing isolation, disruption and economic impacts. There is an urgent need to support vulnerable student populations like the students at Haven Academy, and Haven’s model is one worth sharing.

A recently announced $100 million donation to Success Academy charter schools by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg will allow the network to move ahead with building a massive K-12 school in the South Bronx, but staffing shortages could prove a major hurdle.

The gift, which roughly matches the entire of the Poughkeepsie City School District, will fund a 300,000-square-foot campus, making it the in New York City history. The facility will create an additional 2,400 seats for Success Academy students and will become one of only a few schools to span all grades from kindergarten through high school in the city. The network does not expect the school to begin enrolling until the 2025-26 academic year, said spokesperson Ann Powell, and will only accept K-4 students unless they are transferring from another Success Academy school.

Success Academy already owns the land, previously a warehouse holding storage units, where they plan to build the new facility. The designs are pending approval from the city’s Board of Standards and Appeals before the network can break ground. Success Academy, whose 47 schools educate roughly 20,000 students, already has a charter for the new school so it will not run into an issue with the existing state-mandated cap that limits charter expansion in NYC. 

But finding — and keeping — teachers to staff the new school may be the bigger deterrent.

A current and a former Success Academy teacher in the Bronx both said that staffing shortages and poor retention had reached dire levels.

Shannon Russo said that at his former Bronx school it sometimes took weeks to replace departed teachers, especially in science and math. While positions were empty, students would sometimes have study hall rather than their regularly scheduled lessons, he said.

“The biggest problem is just how unstable it was as a result,” Russo told ����Ӱ��. “Kids couldn’t reliably believe, ‘I’m always gonna go to science class.’”

He himself left in February after being moved from associate teacher into a lead teaching role that he felt unprepared to fill. With the school’s operations staff seemingly moving in and out through a revolving door, he said he felt unsupported in the classroom and in over his head.

His campus has lost 16 of its 58 faculty members since the fall, the network told ����Ӱ��.

Another Bronx teacher, who asked that her name not be used for fear of repercussions at work, said her students regularly come up to her and ask, ‘Are you going to stay with us or are you leaving?’ 

The teacher, who does plan to depart in June along with several colleagues, called the Bloomberg donation “tone deaf,” saying it should be used to help already-struggling Bronx schools, not to build a new one. 

The charter network says the new campus will deliver sorely needed learning opportunities to the borough with the lowest high school graduation rate and highest poverty rate in the city. Success Academy schools in the Bronx receive roughly eight applications for every available seat, according to the network.

“We believe now and have always believed that it was our moral obligation to open more schools given the many children assigned to failing schools in New York City. It might be easier and more convenient for us just to focus on our existing schools, but we don’t believe in that,” Powell wrote in an email to ����Ӱ��. 

The $100 million gift to Success Academy, paired with a donation of the same amount to the Harlem Children’s Zone, represents some of Bloomberg’s first contributions toward a $750 million initiative to grow the charter sector nationwide announced in 2021. In mid-April, the billionaire pledged $50 million to NYC charter schools to create their own summer learning programs, which he said was separate from the $750 million.

“Over the past two years of school closures and remote instruction, the crisis in public education has grown even worse, especially for low-income students who were already falling behind. Expanding access to high-quality charter schools has never been more important,” Bloomberg said in a announcing the gifts to Success Academy and Harlem Children’s Zone.

Bronx families seeking a Success Academy education frequently are forced to enroll their children in schools in other boroughs, spelling long, tiresome commutes. Koomson Kyere, who lives in the Fordham Heights section of the Bronx, said that until his daughter got a seat in a nearby school, his wife used to get on the train with their little girl before 6 a.m. to budget time for the trip to her Manhattan school.

Should the network open a Bronx K-12 campus, its first high school option in the borough, Kyere has no doubts about whether to send his children there, he told ����Ӱ��.

“If I have the chance I will enroll them 100%,” he said, explaining that the family would be grateful to eliminate the otherwise inevitable commute into Manhattan. 

Their experience with the charter network has been “excellent” he said. His younger daughter is a kindergartener and his elder, now in fifth grade, is at the top of her class and has joined the chess club. Citywide, Success Academy scholars their public school peers on state tests.

The father did note, however, that multiple teachers with whom his older daughter started the year have not stuck around, though said the network has been quick to find replacements.

Staffing woes have plagued schools across the country, with some states mobilizing the National Guard to fill gaps. Schools serving high shares of low-income learners, like the Success Academy campuses in the Bronx, have faced disproportionate challenges.

To remedy the situation, other New York City charter networks, such as Achievement First, are offering a retention bonus for educators who continue through the 2022-23 year. Success Academy has no similar incentive in place for its staff. It does, however, compensate employees who refer job candidates who are hired and stay at least 30 days.

The charter network acknowledged the staffing struggles, but said that the Bloomberg donation is slated specifically for the purpose of opening a K-12 Bronx campus.

“It’s not that we don’t care about retention,” said Powell. “But it wasn’t that the gift was for that.”

Andrés Anderson spent his early years in the Bronx and now works as a biology teacher at a Success Academy campus in Harlem. His school has seen several employees leave this year, he said, but resources have not been scarce. His classes recently have been dissecting frogs, and he’s grateful the network allows for the expense. To him, the Bloomberg gift and the new Bronx campus are welcome news.

“These kids need a school,” he said. “Let’s try to at least get one of our nice and shiny and amazing schools into the Bronx.”

Charter schools, which are publicly funded but independently run, for years have been a matter of fierce debate nationwide and in the country’s largest district. Bloomberg oversaw an explosion of charter school enrollment as mayor, and the sector now serves 143,000 youth, compared to 938,000 in NYC district schools. Charter enrollment rose in the 2021-22 academic year while district enrollment fell, and charter schools serve a higher share of Black, Hispanic and low-income students than NYC Department of Education schools.

Proponents cheer the trend as evidence that families long underserved by their traditional public schools are voting with their feet. Opponents fear that pulling enrollment away from district schools, where the majority of students still attend, drains much-needed resources from the system, which funds campuses on a per-pupil basis.

Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center Law Professor David Bloomfield said the former mayor’s tactics are the wrong remedy.

Bloomberg’s gift “privileges” an already prosperous charter school network, he said, while lowering his taxes through donations to a nonprofit organization. “This is the former mayor of the city of New York who seems to have abandoned the public schools.”

Mayor Eric Adams, Bloomfield predicts, will continue to “have it both ways” by keeping support for charters “on a low boil” while also seeking to improve district schools — though “it’s not clear how [long] he can keep that game going.”

To Bronx parent Selena Carrion, there appears to be a concerning pro-charter consensus emerging among the school system’s key power players. A longtime special educator in the borough, she has watched numerous families switch to charter schools, including Success, only to be disappointed, she said, with a lack of services and what they perceived to be a “militaristic” culture of behavior and discipline.

“It worries me that Bloomberg as well as the current mayor and chancellor all seem to be on board with charter school expansion,” Carrion told ����Ӱ��.

Disclosure: Campbell Brown sits on Success Academy’s board of directors. Brown co-founded ����Ӱ�� and sits on its board of directors.

Having worked for five years as an attorney at , he would repeatedly see the Administration for Children’s Services, NYC’s child welfare agency, “blatantly violating family’s rights,” he said. 

They would intimidate families to gain entry into their homes, he said, conduct intrusive searches, including asking children to take off their clothes to look for bruises and, in the most dire cases, separate youth from their parents without judicial approval by acting under what’s known as emergency removal powers. Yet in hundreds of instances each year, according to city data, judges would then deem the agency’s use of those emergency powers unlawful.

The attorney last week launched what he says is the nation’s first civil rights organization dedicated to fighting back against such violations: the . 

There’s a long tradition of groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union or the NAACP Legal Defense Fund bringing lawsuits against alleged government wrongdoing, but “there’s no comparison to the child welfare system for when families’ rights are violated,” said Shalleck-Klein.

“This is the first organization in the country that is going to be dedicated to going on the offense and suing government agencies when they violate families’ rights,” he told ����Ӱ��. “We’re filling a gaping hole in advocacy for parents.”

The Center will bring cases against ACS including alleged Fourth Amendment violations for illegal searches and seizures, he said. It will seek financial penalties to compensate families for their damages and will request injunctions against ACS practices it says are illegal.

“They’re not going to just get a slap on the wrist. They’re very literally going to have to pay for their mistakes,” said Shalleck-Klein.

“These types of lawsuits are hard,” he admits, but said he’s confident that “we’re going to be able to have not just success for individual clients, but also transformative systems change success.”

As many as are the subject of ACS investigations each year, 87% of whom are Black or Hispanic. Although 23% of youth in the city are Black, they make up removed from their families and placed in foster care. 

In 2019, out of more than 1,750 emergency family separations, were immediately rejected by a Family Court judge and still more were thrown out in the days and weeks to come — meaning hundreds of children were unnecessarily put through the trauma of family separation, which studies show is associated with .

“When ACS removes a child from a parent without a court order, if they did not have legal justification for that [removal], that is a constitutional violation,” said Shalleck-Klein. “We know that it is happening routinely.”

“ACS follows federal, state and city laws, and respects the constitutional rights of parents and children,” an ACS spokesperson said in an email to ����Ӱ��, adding that the agency “is committed to being responsive to the needs of children and families.” ACS is required by law to investigate all reports it receives, the spokesperson said, noting that the total number of children entering foster care since 2017 has dropped by more than a third. 

Fewer than 2% of ACS investigations in 2021 resulted in child separation, the agency said.

“It is deeply concerning to us,” the spokesperson added, “that, year after year, there are dramatic racial and ethnic disparities in the reports ACS receives from the state.”

The agency is working to provide child care professionals with implicit bias trainings and education on ways to support families without calling the state’s child abuse hotline, it said.

Across the country, Black youth are to experience a child welfare investigation, with 53% of all Black Americans undergoing the experience before they turn 18. Even if the investigations find no evidence of abuse or neglect, charges can remain on parents’ records for years, jeopardizing job prospects in fields like education and child care. 

Meanwhile, many white families hardly feel the presence of child protective services at all. A former ACS caseworker spoke with in 2020, relaying that, once, when she was looking for an elusive parent, she saw a white woman nearby and asked if she knew the parent’s whereabouts. The neighbor had never even heard of the caseworker’s agency.

“I never met one single Black family that asked me, ‘What’s ACS?’” the caseworker reflected. “There’s one group of people walking around not knowing that ACS exists, and there’s another group of people walking around living in fear of ACS.”

In fall 2020, Harlem community advocate Joyce McMillan interviewed New York City residents in majority-Black, Hispanic and Asian-American neighborhoods about their experiences with the agency and turned their responses into posters that now hang throughout the city.

“They tore my family apart,” one parent said.

“I felt like the police had come to my house once ACS came because they investigated my household like the police,” said another.

Out of the 500 residents to whom McMillan spoke, all but two or three, she said, knew about the agency. Youth and parents alike were haunted by their experiences, she said.

“For children, ACS is like the boogeyman. They run and hide when ACS knocks on the door. They think they’re going to be taken away from their parents,” explained McMillan, who is executive director of . Her organization seeks to abolish what it calls the “family regulation system” and calls for the government to support rather than punish families living in poverty. She now sits on the Family Justice Law Center’s community advisory board.

The new legal organization, she told ����Ӱ��, will be a game-changer for families, finally giving them the opportunity to fight back when they believe their rights are violated.

“Families will have resources to deal with the harm,” she said. “ACS, we call them the family police for a reason. … Until the cameras started rolling, people didn’t believe that Black people got shot in the back and weren’t actually carrying a gun. And it’s the same thing with ACS. So I hope that this work that’s being done will bring out the truth.”

Attorney David Bloomfield, who represented NYC as an assistant corporation counsel, said “on a case-by-case basis, I think there are winnable situations of improper separation,” but system injunctions against ACS might be a “heavier lift.”

Still, the Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center law professor said “it can have a chilling effect on improper conduct if there’s able counsel for the families.”

The Family Justice Law Center has been selected for in-kind funding and guidance from the Urban Justice Center’s program. Legal scholars from Stanford, Harvard, New York University and other institutions sit on its academic advisory board.

ACS obtains court permission to enter homes in of all investigations. In most other searches, parents give the caseworker verbal permission to enter their space. But if a caseworker bangs on the door saying that they will return with the police if the family doesn’t let them in, and if the parents don’t know their legal rights, “Was that really a voluntary entry into the home?” asks Shalleck-Klein.

“[Child protective services] may seek the assistance of the police if CPS determine that immediate protective measures are necessary,” the agency said.

Similarly, of emergency child removals get immediately struck down by a Family Court judge. While the emergency removal power is vital when youth are in imminent danger, said the attorney, its abuse can represent an unconstitutional seizure.

“ACS knows there’s no consequence for them doing something illegal,” he said. “If they violate families’ rights, what happens is that the child is returned home. But there’s nothing in the moment stopping them or giving them any pause from conducting an emergency removal when there’s not just cause.”

“We hope that the [Family Justice Law Center] will inject more accountability into the process,” he continued, “because they are now put on notice that they can’t act with impunity and their illegal actions will be challenged in court.”

Shalleck-Klein hopes the Center’s work will lead to fewer children in the foster care system and shorter durations for those who are, while not worsening, or even decreasing, the rates of child maltreatment. “In other words, keeping as many children home safely with their parents as we can,” he said.

The goal parallels the impacts of other changes in the Family Court system. When the legal team representing defendant parents includes social work staff and parent advocates, foster stays were significantly reduced with no change in child safety outcomes, a 2019 NYU found. And similarly, pilot programs that boosted legal defense for families led to major savings for municipalities by avoiding costly foster care when poverty-induced issues might otherwise have been mistaken for parental neglect, a 2020 from Casey Family Programs revealed.

McMillan hopes the plan succeeds, not just for the children who might avoid unneeded family separation, but also for those who indeed are suffering from abuse at home.

If ACS spends less time mistaking poverty-related issues for abusive parenting, “then maybe they will focus on children who actually need help,” said the advocate.

In early March, Schools Chancellor David Banks announced he would eliminate the executive superintendent role from the Department of Education’s internal structure and require district superintendents to re-apply for their jobs. The shifts received a in The New York Times story covering the chancellor’s remarks, his first major address as head of the DOE.

But to Bronx parent Ilka Rios, the news hit like a thunderbolt.

“Initially, when [the chancellor] made the announcement, at that point, I didn’t hear nothing else that came out of his mouth,” she said.

To her, the update meant only one thing: Her borough, which suffers the city’s highest poverty rates and lowest high school graduation rates, would lose a leader who had finally started to turn around the area’s schools, Erika Tobia.

“Dr. Tobia has been a godsend to the Bronx,” Rios told ����Ӱ��. “Every time the Bronx finds someone to help them get better, it’s like someone from downtown swoops in and removes them.”

A 30-year education veteran in the borough, Tobia had only assumed her post as executive superintendent 11 months prior. The position itself was created just three years earlier in 2018 under former Chancellor Richard Carranza, who to increase oversight and support for district superintendents.��

With a total of eight positions, one or two per borough, eliminating the posts will save millions of dollars, said Chancellor Banks, who founded a Bronx high school early in his career.��

“We want to push those dollars closer to schools,” the chancellor later said. “That’s all this is about.”

The idea that parents would rally to preserve an additional layer of bureaucracy is hardly typical and, indeed, not all parents are equally enamored with their executive superintendent. In Brooklyn, Yuli Hsu praised the chancellor’s move.

“​​When the previous chancellor added the executive level of superintendents, to me it just added another level of expense and bureaucracy,” she told ����Ӱ��. “I haven’t really noticed any impactful change since [Executive Superintendent Karen Watts] arrived” in her role in North Brooklyn.

����Ӱ�� reached out directly to each of the city’s eight executive superintendents. None responded.

In the Bronx, Tobia’s parent-first style won families over.

The leader ran food drives, held sessions to build trust between campus police and families and launched a series of “” for adult education that regularly drew dozens of participants. Every month, Tobia held gatherings — dubbed “just us” meetings because she honored parents’ request that no other district officials attend — for families to share their education concerns, said Rios, who was president of the Community Education Council in the borough’s District  12 for nearly a decade.

“For us in the Bronx, it’s really important because we never had that voice before,” said Farah Despeignes, District 8’s CEC president. “That is why parents are so upset… that they would eliminate that position.”

With parents and school leaders across the city looking to get a handle on the new administration’s education agenda, they say how the chancellor moves forward with his planned shakeup will be an early test of his priorities and willingness to incorporate community voices.

So far, Rios remains unsatisfied.

“The chancellor nor the mayor, neither one of them brought us to the table to ask us parent leaders how it was working with [Tobia],” she said. “They just made the decision, ‘We’re eliminating the position.’ And I get it, eliminate the position, but then tell us, you’re going to put her somewhere else in the district.”

Despeignes penned a December letter on behalf of her parent organization, , to then Mayor-elect Eric Adams urging him to consider the Bronx executive superintendent for a post where she could engage with and uplift families across the city.

Banks has dropped indicators that he may still heed their advice. While the executive superintendent role will be going away at the end of this school year, some of those leaders “may reappear in other positions” in the DOE, he said.

During a two days after the chancellor’s announcement, Bronx Assemblywoman Chantel Jackson pressed Banks on his choice to get rid of the position prized by many of her constituents.

The chancellor empathized: “I’ve heard from a lot of parents in the Bronx who are really supportive of the Executive Superintendent Tobia,” he said. “I’ve become very fond of her myself in the two months that I’ve been here and I’ve seen her work — so stay tuned.”

“We are working diligently to finalize the execution of [the chancellor’s] announcement and additional details are forthcoming,” a DOE spokesperson wrote in a March 14 email to ����Ӱ��.

The Power of Community! When we come together…we can achieve anything!

— Erika Tobia (@BxSuptTobia)

Experts agreed with that, structurally, the role “adds a level of bureaucracy without adding enough value to schools and students.” According to David Bloomfield, the extra layer actually restricts the authority of local leaders.

“The executive superintendents handcuffed the superintendents, and now the superintendents will be freer,” said the Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center education professor. 

“This is a win-win,” he added. Because there will now be 46 superintendents — presumably some of them new faces after the reapplication process — reporting to the chancellor rather than eight executive superintendents, “the chancellor’s office is going to have more information to assess its policies and the principals and superintendents will be able to act with more discretion.”

Since taking office in January, Banks has repeatedly vowed to improve the city’s schools “” by giving principals more autonomy, an agenda item reminiscent of the Bloomberg era.

Parent leaders like Kaliris Salas-Ramirez, of Harlem, say their schools became more responsive to the community once the executive superintendent role was introduced.

“There was a systemic issue in my district where parents were not empowered and parents didn’t have a voice,” Salas-Ramirez told ����Ӱ��. “When the executive superintendents were put in place, Marisol [Rosales, the Manhattan leader at the time,] was incredibly responsive to parents on the ground.”

That indicates, said Andrea Gabor, author of , not that another layer of bureaucracy was necessary, but that perhaps Salas-Ramirez’s district superintendents weren’t properly doing their job.

“In an ideal world, teachers and principals should be the ones who are responsive to parents,” the Baruch College professor told ����Ӱ��. “You should not have to go through a four-layer cake in order to get some kind of a response.”

The DOE took a similar stance: “[School] leaders will be successful when they work closely with families. … There are phenomenal schools in every neighborhood across the city, and it is our responsibility to cut bureaucracy and grow what is working at the school-level,” said Press Secretary Nathaniel Styer.

Still, based on her experience in the Bronx, Despeignes pushed back. 

“Yes, it is another layer of bureaucracy… but it’s a layer of bureaucracy that is needed because it brings all the schools and all the superintendents under one tent,” she said.

“It’s not outlandish,” noted Bloomfield, to eliminate executive superintendents in most boroughs, but keep them on a case-by-case basis in areas where they’re making a positive impact, perhaps like the Bronx.

Back in Brooklyn, District 14 Community Education Council President Tajh Sutton said the bulk of the Adams’s administration’s work building families’ trust is still to come.

“I’m happy to see one layer of the bureaucracy go, but what does that look like in practice? And how does it improve the lives and interactions between families and districts on the ground?” she wonders. “Are we talking to the most marginalized members of each district community to really try to get a sense of, ‘Is this superintendent effective? Is this principal effective?’”

Hsu, also on the District 14 CEC, agrees. She’s been frustrated by the lack of action after she raised concerns over anti-Asian racism her kids and others have experienced in school, she said. To her, re-ordering the DOE’s organizational chart is not enough.

“You’re just kind of shuffling pieces of a broken system around,” she said. “What I really want to hear is about meaningful change from the ground up and meaningful engagement with parents.”

“I think the school experience is gone. People aren’t even showing up.”

“I avoid the cafeteria now.”

NYC students explain why they walked out of class.

Thousands of students from more than 29 New York City public schools abandoned their classes Tuesday walking out into frigid weather, demanding a remote learning option as Omicron surges and they feel unsafe at school.

As COVID cases rise and attendance remains unpredictable, New York City parents, students and teachers uncomfortable with in-person learning took to social media.

From coast to coast, Oakland and Boston students will soon stage their own walkouts.

One student’s reddit post last week described being in school as “beyond control,” detailing a day of absent teachers and “functionally no learning.” Study halls became “superspreader events.” Bathrooms were full of students taking COVID tests. 

Teachers abandoned their classes when notified they had tested positive. Skipping class became “ridiculously easy,” the student wrote.

An anonymous student that their parents are forcing her to go to school despite testing positive for COVID.

Despite last week’s low attendance and 2022 first major snowstorm, Mayor Eric Adams has consistently opposed closing schools or offering a remote learning option.

“We don’t have any more days to waste and the long-term impact of leaving our children home is going to impact us for years to come,” Adams said, stressing schools are “sanctuaries.” 

Students left the conditions they called unsafe in hopes of garnering attention from “policy-makers that can help close down schools temporarily,” organizers said in .

Cruz Warshaw, a Stuyvesant High School Junior behind the walkout, charged it was “ignorant and inconsiderate to put people’s lives at risk for without reason.” 

Three more juniors and seniors from Brooklyn Technical and Stuyvesant High Schools created social media accounts to share walkout plans and information on what they’re asking for — and why: 

Before long, students from more than two dozen of the city’s schools said they would join in. The plan: Leave school at 11:52 a.m. — right before sixth period, around lunchtime for many — and head straight home. 

Right on time and one after the other, Brooklyn Technical High School students did just that.

By lunchtime, the cafeteria in New York’s largest school — by enrollment — looked like this:

Their exit was met with backlash, accusations they simply wanted the day off — and that they were probably all going to hang out. 

This Brooklyn student insisted that wasn’t the case:

However, some participants faced more than online anger. A redacted email from a Brooklyn school official threatened students with mandatory detentions upon their return.

“There are so many people sick and our mayor is not doing enough to protect us … We want the choice to keep our bodies safe,” Felicia, a junior at Bronx High School of Science told The Riverdale Press reporter Sarah Belle Lin during Tuesday’s walkout.

Some of the city’s youngest learners, alongside parents, also joined the .

Many students and parents disagree with offering a remote option and point to its shortcomings, including that . 

While attendance is , it is up 9 percent . 

A few hours after the walkout, New York Schools Chancellor David Banks responded to the protests, asking student leaders to meet with him to work together for safe and open schools.

The New York City Department of Education has not yet released data on the total number of young people enrolled in its schools, nor has it confirmed exactly how many students have shown up each day — figures that officials say the DOE has on hand but is choosing not to make public.��

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“They are refusing to disclose critical information,” New York City Councilman Mark Treyger, who has repeatedly pressed the district to release the counts, told ����Ӱ��. “The situation right now is concerning because we don’t have a full picture of enrollment and attendance per school.” 

Those figures will be released, the DOE said, after registers close for the district’s Oct. 31 reporting deadline to the state.��

Meanwhile, officials fear that as many 150,000 students may have in city classrooms this year.��

There’s “no question” the school district has more detailed attendance and enrollment data than it’s releasing, said Randi Levine, policy director at Advocates for Children of New York. Using numbers obtained from the DOE, her nonprofit recently found that attendance among students without permanent housing was just through the first weeks of school. Attendance for that highly vulnerable population has since ticked up to , the DOE said on Oct. 18 — further indication there are more detailed data that the city is keeping under wraps.

On Sept. 28, Los Angeles Unified School District made headlines after revealing a compared to its enrollment the previous year — the steepest decline seen by the city in years. The same week, a news analysis of showed the district had lost 10,000 students, meaning it may no longer be the nation’s third-largest. Other top school systems, like Houston Independent School District, have yet to publicize their counts.

In late September, the New York Post that roughly 200 schools in New York City were missing at least a quarter of their student bodies, and 51 had absentee rates above 40 percent. In hopes of tracking down missing kids, the Department of Education pressed principals to reach out via .��

A spokesperson for the school system explained that those numbers may be misleading because the counts include so-called “transfer schools,” which historically have had lower attendance rates because they serve students as old as 19 who often work jobs.��

But the district failed to provide a more accurate tabulation of the share of schools struggling with high absenteeism when asked by ����Ӱ��.

Last year, New York City schools saw a in their overall student body — from slightly over 1 million students to 955,490 — with indications that the problem may only worsen in 2021-22: In April, kindergarten applications were down , with 8,000 fewer applicants than the year prior.

The district this year is requiring in-person learning for most students after last year when a majority of families opted for online instruction. With for the spread of COVID-19 in schools, especially those whose children are still too young to receive coronavirus immunizations, it remains unclear how many have chosen to keep their children home for safety concerns.

The city publishes a day-by-day attendance rate, which on Oct. 19 was reported to be . But Mayor Bill de Blasio has the numerator and denominator behind the percentage — the district’s total enrollment divided by the number of students in attendance that day. Those counts are normally released later in the school year, the district maintains.

But this year is different, emphasized Treyger, who chairs the Education Committee and  formerly worked as a New York City public school teacher. Anecdotally, the council member said he has heard accounts from principals in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx of attendance rates that have reached what he called “emergency status” — as low as 40 or 50 percent. In light of the dire concerns, he believes the school district ought to release the attendance ledgers.

“Nothing prohibits the city from sharing those enrollment numbers with the public,” he said.

But with the school system dragging its heels, the council member has filed legislation requiring it to publicize those data, as well as school-by-school attendance counts. If passed, the bills could go into force as early as late November, Treyger said.��

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office did not respond to questions from ����Ӱ�� about whether he  would sign those pieces of legislation should they reach his desk. The mayor leaves office at the end of the year.

Separately, ����Ӱ�� filed a public records request in May for the number of students chronically absent — those missing 10 percent or more days — in the 2020-21 school year. The DOE, which was forced to reform its public records procedures in 2018 after being sued for non-compliance with the law, delayed its response to the request from June to October and then from October to January.

Levine, of Advocates for Children, feels similarly to Treyger, that quality data are necessary to help diagnose the most pressing problems facing students in the nation’s largest school system.

“If the bus isn’t coming, there’s a very different solution than if a parent is concerned about safety during COVID-19,” she said. “Public data helps to shine a light on disparities within the education system and allow stakeholders to help identify and push for solutions.”