New York City students with a passion for STEM — and an interest in artificial intelligence — may soon have a high school dedicated to training “the next generation of technology professionals.”

But families in Manhattan’s District 2 are pushing back against for , a new screened admissions high school that would take the place of the tiny, girls-only Urban Assembly School of Business for Young Women. Next Generation would be the first city public school to focus its curriculum on AI and computer science.

As details of the two proposals emerged over the last month, so have dual tensions: What should fill the space left by Young Women in Business, and how private technology companies and their artificial intelligence products could shape the curriculum at Next Generation.

Much of the opposition to Next Generation has come from families at a middle school also in the Broadway building, Lower Manhattan Community School. Also known as LMC, parents at the school have called on the department for years to expand enrollment from grades 6-8 up to grade 12.

The Panel for Educational Policy, the board that votes on new schools and closures, is expected to consider the proposals for Next Generation and Business for Young Women at its April 29 meeting.

The Education Department released both proposals on March 6, the day after the city’s eighth graders received their high school acceptance offers. If approved, Next Generation would welcome its first class of ninth graders in the fall. (The plan to close Business for Young Women in June is not contingent on Next Generation’s approval.)

Despite not having the green light yet, Next Generation has already held three virtual open houses. Its states the school is “set to open” in fall 2026, noting that applications would open March 19.

Parents ask: ‘Why this school and why here?’

Manhattan High Schools Superintendent Gary Beidleman introduced the idea for Next Generation Technology High School at a .

Panel for Educational Policy members and families of the three co-located schools at 26 Broadway — in addition to LMC and Business for Young Women, Richard R. Green High School of Teaching shares the building — said that meeting was the first time the district school community had been notified of the proposed STEM- and technology-focused screened high school.

At the Feb. 25 announcement, Beidleman said Next Generation grew out of his experience as a summer 2024 , and that Google and OpenAI are part of the planning team for the school. One of the school’s goals, he said, is to “expand pathways connected to high-growth technology careers” and provide advanced STEM and technology programming for NYC students. Next Generation also plans to offer a summer internship program with Carnegie Mellon University.

Caleb Haraguchi-Combs, founding principal and project director of Next Generation High School, said in an information session that the school would utilize . How much of this AI-powered, AI-focused Google coursework would comprise the curriculum is still in flux, according to the proposal’s .

The school’s academic description includes similar or identical language as found on the Google Skills website: Next Generation’s “special access to technology industry mentors,” “technology certifications,” and “curriculum that adapts to the dynamic changes in the technology field” are offerings advertised on the homepage of the Google Skills site.

Officials and families question new school proposal process

The community and Panel for Educational Policy members have asked questions about the fast proposal process, speaking to uncertainty around admissions for the coming school year.

in a letter to the Panel for Educational Policy that the proposal seemingly came out of nowhere, and families were not provided adequate engagement opportunities before its release. Panel Chair Greg Faulkner said he has received hundreds of similar letters from parents since the community learned of the incoming proposal in late February.

High school offers were released March 5, ahead of the panel’s vote and months before the proposed school would open. It remains unclear how the Education Department would handle screening requirements — such as interviews or assessments — after the main admissions cycle has concluded. The Office of District Planning did not respond to questions about how enrollment would work for this fall.

of the school, created by the Next Generation’s founding principal and program director on March 8, had under 100 signatures at the time of publishing.

A public hearing is scheduled for April 14, two weeks before the panel’s vote.

“I would love more transparency around why the department chooses certain schools to go in certain places,” said Sarah Calderon, a parent at Lower Manhattan Community School. “When we asked the superintendent, ‘Why this school and why here?’ he said he had no data on district demand.”

Beidelman told parents at the Feb. 25 District 2 meeting that expanding Lower Manhattan Community “was not an idea that was on the table.”

The Education Department receives many proposals each year, including some from outside New York City, said Sean Rux of the Office of New School Development.

“This was the proposal that spoke to us,” Rux said.

Families push to expand Lower Manhattan Community School

The plan to close the underenrolled Business for Young Women school has been percolating for a few years — with just 91 students this year, it’s the smallest district high school in the city, said Education Department officials.

Families at Lower Manhattan Community School say they have pushed for years to expand into a 6–12 model, and would like to move into the space used by Business for Young Women, if closed.

“A proposal to expand LMC could potentially open up sixth grade admissions to applicants citywide, but we have not been given the opportunity to even submit a proposal,” said Anne Hager, a parent of a sixth grader at Lower Manhattan School.

At a PTA meeting with Education Department staff on Wednesday, LMC’s Student Leadership Team presented its case to expand the school instead of opening Next Generation.

A new 6-12 would eliminate the need for LMC students to go through a second, onerous application process, something that students with disabilities would especially benefit from, they said. The presentation also cited Department of Education data from 2024 that showed 6-12 schools have nearly three times higher demand than their 6-8 middle school counterparts.

compared with citywide averages.

The department’s proposal focuses largely on space at the Broadway campus, estimating that Next Generation would serve roughly 450 students by its fourth year. All three schools can comfortably co-locate, according to the proposal, though its capacity calculations do not allot for significant expansion for either Richard R. Green High School or LMC.

Debate over AI timing and oversight

Next Generation’s proposal arrives amid over artificial intelligence in schools.

The school initially marketed itself in information sessions and on social media as an “AI school,” though DOE officials later clarified that students would learn about artificial intelligence rather than be taught by it.

“Students need to be creators, not consumers, of technology,” Beidleman said at the Feb. 25 meeting. “Lessons learned from the past show us that new tech in place creates an opportunity.”

Some parents have argued that broad use of an AI platform in public schools should not be allowed before comprehensive guidelines have been released by the city.

Greg Faulkner, who chairs the Panel for Educational Policy, said he first learned of the proposal after receiving Next Generation’s last month. Since then, the panel has received hundreds of letters from parents opposing the plan and raising concerns about the lack of community engagement so far.

“I have two major hesitations with this: We don’t know what kind of AI involvement there will be. The development team has not provided a playbook for how that will look,” Faulkner said. “And in reading the response letters from District 2 parents, I see that proper engagement and process was not done.”

At a District 2 town hall on March 5, Chancellor Kamar Samuels said the Education Department expects to release AI guidance in the coming weeks and will provide a 45-day window for community feedback once it’s published.

Five Community Education Councils have passed resolutions calling for a two-year moratorium on artificial intelligence use in schools. But calls for broad AI guidelines implemented at the city level are nothing new; of an AI-powered reading program in 2024 after former Comptroller Brad Lander called for a citywide playbook.

“I think the question of teacher capacity and teacher shortages, the research on kids and AI, is still nascent, and the DOE’s lack of its own AI policy leads me to question the timing of any AI school,” said Calderon, the parent at Lower Manhattan Community.

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Her son spent four months in New York City schools without receiving his legally required services while school officials developed a new IEP from scratch and family memory. Asking his school back in Delaware for a copy would have been too risky – the abuser could contact the school to figure out where they’d fled.

The family, whose names are being withheld for safety reasons, is one of many whom school systems have failed to serve properly due to a lack of clear safety plans and policies for families experiencing domestic violence, a persistent driver of homelessness. 

Nationwide, at least 80% of women with children experiencing homelessness also experienced domestic violence, and . In alone, roughly 40,000 people became survivors in 2022. 

In fact, more families entered the city’s Department of Housing Services shelters due to domestic violence () than evictions (11%). 

With at least 146,000 children experiencing homelessness in New York City and domestic violence on the rise, advocates, experts and families are and urging schools to develop clear safety plans with shelter staff to better support survivors. 

Even when families disclosed instances of domestic violence to schools and asked them to alter contact information, New York City schools failed to immediately update student profiles and contacted dangerous individuals on several occasions. Some survivors were forced to seek emergency shelter and school transfers out of their borough as a result, said Janyll Canals-Kernizan, director of the Robin Hood project with Advocates for Children of New York.

Some school staff have misguidedly asked survivors for confidential domestic violence shelter addresses, or refused to set up busing because they claimed P.O. box numbers are unacceptable. The lack of clear guidance has produced harmful ripple effects on families, including limiting kids’ ability to get to school and feel safe and stable once there, as well as parents’ ability to attend work.

“I’ve had families have to pick between participating in an economic empowerment program or taking their kid to school because the bus has never been set up and now they can never get to their economic empowerment program, which means then that they can never really establish independence and get out of shelter … All of that is interrelated in a way that we don’t talk about,” said Canals-Kernizan, an attorney who represents families facing school-based discrimination.

Beyond the challenge of affording housing, survivors navigate “long lasting” consequences of physical, psychological and financial abuse, which requires individualized case management and makes finding secure housing even more difficult, said Gabbi Sandoval Requena, director of policy and communications with New Destiny Housing, a nonprofit providing permanent housing and social services to survivors in NYC.

“Abuse and gender-based violence is really all about power and control. It usually starts gradually, and it’s really hard for a survivor to sometimes acknowledge that they’re in a situation of abuse,” she told ����Ӱ��. 

Abusers often isolate their partner from finances, managing any money they earn from work but not letting them access accounts. Some use the survivors’ Social Security number to open credit cards without their consent, destroying their credit score. The survivors may have no history of being on a lease, leaving them unable to provide rental references. 

These are the “consequences that are often undealt with because they’re in crisis mode, trying to just survive day by day,” Sandoval Requena said. 

Today, nearly all residents in NYC’s Human Resources Administration-run domestic violence shelters – the largest network in the country – are Black and brown families with children. The facilities are often at capacity, housing about 10,000 people, and have a stay limit of 180 days, while offering specialized programs for kids and parents. 

In the Department of Housing Services shelters, open to all NYC residents without homes, about a third are families with kids. Altogether, one in three of New York state’s unhoused residents are children. 

Statewide, experience intimate partner abuse, considered a leading cause of traumatic brain injuries by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2023, 10% more people were entered into New York’s Domestic Violence Registry for orders of protection. Around the same time, homelessness . 

Although any children experiencing homelessness should have protections to accessing stable education under the federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, in reality, their experiences vary. 

Families facing shelter limits are moved frequently, sometimes across boroughs, posing an inordinate strain on childrens’ education. From safety scares and hour-long trains to needing to work to help support the family, unhoused students comprise a disproportionate amount of chronically absent students. Overall, about 43% New York City students missed 10% or more of the 2022-23 school year. For students experiencing homelessness, .

One Brooklyn mother and survivor from the Caribbean recognized how disruptive school transfers would be on top of her family’s housing instability. She insisted on keeping her son in the same school even as they moved among shelters across the boroughs four times. 

“I experienced domestic violence all my life,” said the 45-year-old survivor, whose name is being withheld for safety reasons. She witnessed her father abuse her mother, and left her partner her first year in the United States. 

She and her “energetic” son lived in shelters for three years, moving every six months. Twice, seeing her abuser outside of the domestic violence shelters triggered emergency transfers. 

With her then 5-year old in tow, she’d leave her upper Manhattan shelter by 6 a.m. on the dot to get to his Brooklyn elementary school by 7:45. 

She never received any MetroCards from the schools or shelters, commonly provided for free. Over the years, she had to attend housing court and incurred three fare evasion tickets, which her mother helped pay from the Caribbean. 

Against the urging of the shelter staff, she insisted on keeping her son, now 9, in his Brooklyn school. Changing schools “would not have done him any good,” she said. “We all need stability, especially children.”

With the help of a case manager from New Destiny Housing, the mother navigated the process of applying for apartments until securing one of the nonprofit’s 377 units. “She stood by my side, all the way. She took me very seriously,” the survivor said, adding that each time they checked in biweekly, she felt certain something would get done. 

At New Destiny Housing, over 1,000 New Yorkers receive on-site services like financial coaching, food pantries and art therapy. Family residents can opt-in for field trips to Broadway shows, baseball games and museums – efforts to challenge the cycle of abuse and “for kids to be kids and to enjoy the joy of living in New York City, something that they never had access to before,” said Sandoval Requena. 

The survivor said that her son is now “outspoken … he knows what he wants.” She attends support groups with other families, hearing and sharing what they’ve gone through, and credits the case manager as critical in their journey. 

Their new home is about a 25-minute commute from her son’s school, a far cry from the nearly two-hour, one-way commute from their Manhattan shelters. 

“I’m there at every PTA meeting, every parent teacher conference. Every show that they are having, every Funky Friday. I am here for every single thing.”  

New , released today by nonprofit Advocates for Children of New York revealed around 27,000 more students experienced homelessness than in 2022-23 for a total of 146,000 children. Roughly one in eight children lacked a permanent place to call home.

An influx of and a have likely contributed to the stark increase, experts said, outside of persistent drivers like the city’s . 

The 23% increase after a decade of mostly under 10% increases has alarmed education and housing advocates who called for the city, state and department of education to address shortages, , expand , improve the , and prioritize placing students into housing nearest to their school. 

According to the latest demographic data of students in temporary housing available from the 2022-23 school year, one in three were English language learners and nearly all were Black or Latino. 

This marks the ninth consecutive year student homelessness has exceeded 100,000. The latest tally of students could fill all seats in Yankee Stadium nearly three times over. Each of the city’s 32 school districts saw increases, but students experiencing homelessness were most highly concentrated in the south Bronx, upper Manhattan, and central Brooklyn’s Brownsville and Bushwick, where the city’s largest shelters are.

“The challenges remain stubbornly persistent,” said Jennifer Pringle, director of AFC’s Learners in Temporary Housing Project. “…If we’re [going to] talk about ending family homelessness, we need to make sure that education is front and center. Young adults who don’t have a high school diploma are four to five times more likely to experience homelessness as adults. We have to make sure that our young people right now in shelter are getting the support that they need, so they graduate and flourish beyond high school.”

The numbers, while unsurprising to experts familiar with the growing crisis, are likely still an undercount as to how many children are experiencing homelessness. Data capture only school-aged children, but “the most common age that someone is in shelter is under the age of 5,” said Henry Love, vice president of public policy and strategy with Women in Need, the city and nation’s largest shelter provider. 

“We’re probably talking about a quarter of a million or 200,000 children, at least,” Love said, emphasizing families are the main population in shelters today. “I’m still wrapping my mind around it.”

He added that the situation has been exacerbated by Mayor Eric Adams’ vetoing a package of the City Councils’ housing bills, which would have expanded financial assistance to families at risk of homelessness. After the Council attempted to override the vetoes, a . The decision is now being appealed in court, leaving thousands of families in limbo. 

“The number one thing is if we could keep people in their homes,” he said. “…We have decided by de facto that instead of giving these kids housing that they deserve, we said, you know what, we’ll give you shelter instead.”

Just over half of last year’s students who lived in temporary housing were “doubled-up,” sharing homes with friends or family, and more than 60,000 spent nights in the city’s shelters.

Data obtained from the state’s department of education also revealed alarming education outcomes for students in temporary housing in the 2022-23 school year, the latest available: on state reading and writing tests, proficiency for third through eighth graders was 20 points lower on average; and the high school dropout rate was three times higher than that of their peers. 

Students in shelter experienced the most negative educational impacts, seeing rates of chronic absenteeism closer to 70%, in part due to the city’s common practice of initially , adding strain to already costly and lengthy transportation routes. 

About 18% of students in shelters had to move schools at least once during the school year, four times the rate for permanently housed students. 

“It’s not good for students, it’s not good for the school to have that level of churn among your student population. You think about the connections that kids have to their peers, their teachers and how vital those relationships are and how much they can help a student during a time of housing instability,” AFC’s Pringle said. “Yet for so many families, they’re forced to contend between these ridiculously long commutes or transferring schools.” 

Mayor Adams’ administration also enacted an “inhumane” 60-day stay limit on particular shelters, disproportionately impacting the .

In addition to housing policy reforms, adjusting the state’s per-pupil formula would be critical in boosting kids’ educational outcomes by allowing schools to adequately invest in family outreach, attendance improvement, wrap around services with local community organizations, and academic tutoring. 

In a statement, Department of Education spokesperson Chyann Tull said the system has provided “field support, enrollment support, transportation services for students and parents, access to counseling, immunization assistance, and academic support.” 

The city has a goal of placing 85% of students in the same borough as their school, but “they haven’t gotten anywhere close to that .. more needs to be done there,” Pringle added. “I think it’s recognized by the fact that they set a goal that they are not achieving – they know that they need to do better.”

In an effort to address rising incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia, New York City’s Education Department launched an anti-hate hotline, officials said Monday.

The goal is to streamline related to hate, harassment, and discrimination, adding another avenue on top of a four-year-old online portal for all bullying complaints.

The hotline (718-935-2889), staffed with Education Department employees, will be open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday-Friday. Callers can remain anonymous, but the pre-recorded greeting suggests having your student’s ID number or your staff ID number to “expedite your call.”

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“There is zero tolerance for hate in our schools,” incoming Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos said in a statement, “and this new hotline will help ensure incidents are reported and addressed.”

The announcement was part of a suite of initiatives the Education Department highlighted as the city commemorated the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 terror attacks by Hamas on Israel, which killed more than 1,200 people. More than 250 people were taken hostage and Israel’s subsequent attack on Gaza has killed , including many children, and has led to a.

Prior to the new hotline, students and staff members could report incidents with their school or through a bullying portal the department launched in 2020 in response to a

From September to January last school year, the city saw roughly 440 school reports about incidents related to ethnicity or national origin, up about 30% from the same time the year before, . There were nearly 290 reports related to religion, up nearly 78% from the year before.

, according to the annual school surveys. About 40% of the middle and high school students who responded to the survey reported seeing harassment based on race, ethnicity, religion, or immigration status, up from 30% in 2019.

Many people had been asking the Education Department to create a hotline or dedicated way to specifically report hate-rated incidents, including , who faced a raucous student protest over her support of Israel in the aftermath of the attacks on Oct. 7, 2023.

Marder recently sued the city for failing to protect her before students began marching in the hallways, calling for her ouster. She has, however, remained at the school — she now helps oversee student discipline as one of the school’s deans — and has been heartened that the new school year has started off relatively calm under a new principal. She spent much of the past year calling on outgoing schools Chancellor David Banks to create a hotline like the one that was just launched.

“I’m very happy they are finally doing this though it shouldn’t have taken a year,” she told Chalkbeat.

As , the Education Department’s Office of Safety and Prevention Partnerships expected to deploy additional staffers to public schools on Monday, officials said. And ahead of Oct. 7, Education Department officials sent reminders to principals about the role of schools to create safe spaces for students to engage with current events — but in ways that ensure schools don’t take political stances, officials said. Students have previously complained that

Additionally, the Education Department this fall is offering new anti-discrimination staff training with a specific focus on antisemitism and Islamophobia. The city’s Hidden Voices curriculum — which focuses on historical figures whose stories seldom get told — is expected to release installments by the end of the school year on Muslim Americans and Jewish Americans, and the city is encouraging of different cultures and their histories. The school system’s is continuing to meet this year, as a way to demonstrate to students how to build bridges across different groups.

This story was originally published by . Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at . 

Bronx Principal David Liu did not notice an abrupt change in attendance when students returned to in-person learning three years ago after pandemic campus closures. Instead, the problem became clearer to him as the year progressed.

Students and staff at Gotham Collaborative High School became fatigued by five-day school weeks. Child tax credits and supplemental unemployment benefits also , forcing parents back into the workplace and requiring students to take on more responsibilities at home.

“The grind of what school was started to hit students at different times of the school year,” he said. “That’s when chronic absenteeism became kind of more like this slowly growing thing in our school.”

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Now, the school has begun to crack the code on chronic absenteeism, a problem challenging school districts . Administrators implemented a data system to better track students’ attendance and leverage staff and community organizations to counsel those at risk of chronic absence. The school even offers incentives to get students to show up, such as early-morning breakfast raffles or day trips.

Schools across New York City have introduced new initiatives to address the longstanding issue. Some have started to use restorative justice as a guiding principle in group interventions that target chronically absent students, rather than resorting to more punitive measures. Increasingly, schools are enlisting other students to encourage their friends to attend school regularly.

Most districts, including New York City, consider a student chronically absent if they miss at least 10% of the school year, whether those days are considered excused, unexcused, or part of a suspension. With a 180-day academic calendar, that is 18 missed days of school.

The citywide chronic absenteeism rate stood at about 25% before the pandemic. Once students returned to in-person learning in 2021, the city’s share of chronically absent students jumped 15 percentage points. While schools have made progress to lower that rate over the years, citywide chronic absenteeism still hasn’t returned to what it once was. Nearly 35% of public school students were chronically absent last school year, according to data recently released in the .

Though higher-poverty schools began closing the gap on chronic absenteeism in 2022-23, that gap still hovered about 14 percentage points higher than their counterparts. As a result, more and more schools have found themselves addressing issues that exist beyond the school’s environment, such as students’ access to health care, child care, and .

That is why some teachers and school administrators say tackling chronic absenteeism is so challenging – it often requires a deeper knowledge of the students and families that they serve. In its 2022-23 , Gotham Collaborative cited “not knowing our students well” as the root cause of the school’s chronic absence problem.

And while data collection often serves as a first step to addressing chronic absenteeism, creating plans that lead to improvement requires people, said Kim Nauer, an education fellow at The New School’s Center for New York City Affairs who has looked at .

“Every single one of those numbers needs to be a kid and a name and a parent and a person attached to them,” she said. “Otherwise you’re not going to make progress in any sustained way. Like robocalls [are] useless.”

Using data to target specific student groups

Gotham Collaborative High School, which served a little over 300 students last school year, had already viewed chronic absenteeism as an issue worthy of intervention before the pandemic. The school’s pre-pandemic chronic absenteeism rate was already higher than the average, at about 56%, and it then grew to 61% in 2020 when the pandemic forced school closures across the city.

During the 2022-23 school year, however, the high school’s rate of chronically absent students dropped to roughly 29%, its lowest in years.

Tackling the issue has taken years of targeted work and has relied on a data system the school created, grouping students into four buckets according to their absences. Each group receives certain interventions depending on the severity of their record. Those are provided through several support teams that might include peer mediator ambassadors, school counselors, and a social worker.

Sometimes intervention looks like an in-depth, individualized assessment of a student and their needs, or a home visit with a student and their family. But other times it may look like a school social for students who feel that they don’t have a strong network of friends, or an early-morning breakfast raffle.

Addressing the needs of students whose attendance and academic performance didn’t raise warning flags was critical, Liu said. Before introducing the new system, he said, the school identified only a small selection of students – those who came in the least, or about half of the school year, and those who had near-perfect attendance. Changing their focus helped shift the school toward lower instances of chronic absence, he believes.

“This was a main ‘aha’ moment for us,” he said. “These are our students that are coming 80% of the time, four out of five times a week, they might be B-average students. It sparked a lot of conversations about how do we show them that what they’re doing is not meeting what they can be doing and their potential?”

Many schools with a high share of chronically absent students use some variation of Gotham Collaborative’s data tracking system.

New York City schools receive weekly automatic that list students who have missed five or 10 school days. Schools can also print additional reports that show all students who have missed school five or 10 times, or chronically absent students from the previous school year. The reports are most effective when schools create workflows to immediately address what they are seeing in the data, said a spokesperson for the education department.

Hedy Chang, director of Attendance Works, a national and state initiative to address the issue, also noted that early intervention is important. When she and other researchers began using the current, widely adopted 10% rule, she said one of its main purposes was to serve as an early-warning metric. So if a student misses two days of school in a month, she said, that should alert teachers and staff that a student is in need of support.

“I don’t want you to wait til 17 days to notice that things are a challenge,” Chang said, in reference to annual absences. “Or even in the first month, if it’s 10 days, that’s a problem.”

Using peer-to-peer support to overcome chronic absenteeism

Researchers like Chang and Nauer often examine chronic absenteeism among younger students because it is more representative of families’ circumstances. A 5-year-old, for example, isn’t missing school on their own accord, Chang said.

But for teens, chronic absenteeism comes with its own set of complexities. Liu has noticed that some of his students may miss school due to working long hours or having to bring younger siblings to and from school. Some may choose not to show up to avoid conflict with friends, he said.

And because the conversations that staffers have with students inevitably look different than those that students might have with people closer to their age, Liu is now focusing on tapping students’ ability to deeply connect with their peers to curb chronic absence.

“Every year we get older, but the kids stay the same age,” he said. “So every year the staff gets one year removed from being generationally, culturally relevant.”

At The International High School for Health Sciences – where all students are newly arrived immigrants – students may also grapple with other hurdles that affect engagement, such as learning English for the first time, or preparing for standardized tests unfamiliar to them, according to administrators at the school. Yet the high school’s chronic absenteeism rate during the 2022-23 school year fell to 29.5%, nearly cutting its rates from the previous two years in half.

In 2018, the school began using restorative justice — a practice that the school has used in lieu of other disciplinary measures since it opened over 10 years ago – to address chronic absenteeism, administrators say. A chronically absent student – typically in their final year of high school – sits down with a group of their closest friends, a teacher that they have a strong relationship with, and the assistant principal. The group discusses the student’s strengths, reasons for why they don’t show up at school, and how others in the group can support them moving forward.

International High School also receives extra support from staff at Queens Community House, the school’s community-based partner. Now in its third year, the partnership is funded through NYC Community Schools, a grant-based program that extends to of the city’s more than 1,500 schools.

Queens Community House provides services such as tutoring outside of regular school hours – particularly during Regents season – and events that range from self-care workshops to game nights. Communicating with families, however, is one of its primary functions, said the school’s Community Schools Director Lizbeth Mendoza.

“The framework for a lot of these conversations is building relationships,” she said. “So I’m actually the person that sends out the message letting a parent or guardian know that their student was absent at the end of the day.”

At the High School for Teaching and the Professions in the Bronx, groups of older mentors and younger mentees start pairing together in October. The mentors, typically 11th or 12th graders, receive training in their own classes on how to support their mentees, whether that be through engaging in activities together or talking through the mentees’ experiences.

“They go in and they really create this bond,” said Principal Roberto Hernandez. “And what I found within the last two years was a sense of ownership that our mentors are having for their mentees.”

This sense of commitment has trickled into other areas of focus for the school, like attendance, Hernandez said. For some students, it has also created a sense of commitment to the school at large: Two of the high school’s guidance counselors are former students. Now that the school has a designated guidance counselor for every grade level, Hernandez said it is easier for the administration to connect with individual students.

“It’s not just teaching, it’s getting to know them and letting them get to know you, and they love it,” he said. “And I think that’s all contributing to where we are today.”

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at . 

After ChatGPT exploded in popularity, New York City’s public school system quickly , arguing it couldn’t help students build critical thinking skills and often spouts misinformation.

Nearly two years later, during his annual “State of Our Schools” speech on Tuesday, schools Chancellor David Banks completed his about-face on artificial intelligence. The school system should get ready to inject the technology into nearly every aspect of its operations, from teaching and learning to transportation and enrollment, he said.

The schools chief laid out an expansive vision that includes customized college advising, instant assessments of student work, personalized instruction, and even replacing annual standardized tests.

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“AI can revolutionize how we function as a school system,” Banks told the audience of administrators, elected officials, and union leaders at Frank Sinatra School of the Arts High School in Queens as he outlined his plans for the nation’s largest school system.

Still, Banks acknowledged that the Education Department has no concrete plans, timelines, or cost estimates for those AI projects. The goal is to signal to AI companies that the school system is interested in their technology and wants to hear ideas, he said, adding that officials are convening an advisory council next month to help brainstorm.

Aside from his embrace of AI, the most significant announcement from Banks on Tuesday was a plan to open a new high school in southeast Queens next fall, called HBCU Early College Prep, that will have strong ties to historically Black colleges and universities.

Banks’ annual speech otherwise stuck to promoting initiatives that he has been building since taking office in 2022. He noted that his is rolling out to all elementary schools this fall. He vowed to , an initiative in 135 high schools that gives students access to coursework geared toward specific industries and paid internships.

And he noted the city is adding to its library of curriculums focused on underrepresented groups called The city recently launched materials devoted to people with disabilities, and Banks said the department will offer lessons focused on the Latino community soon.

Though Mayor Eric Adams attended the speech, he did not offer any remarks — a break from the previous year. Adams and several senior members of his administration have been . Earlier this month, federal agents searched homes or seized electronic devices from Banks, his two brothers, and his romantic partner, First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright.

Asked about Adams’ lack of a speaking role during the event, Banks declined to comment.

Here are three takeaways from the chancellor’s speech:

Banks thinks AI will become pervasive in the city’s schools

Banks sketched out a few ways he thinks the technology can significantly change the way schools operate. He said the systems could “give teachers a daily, accurate, and comprehensive picture of a child’s progress” based on homework assignments, exams, and other student work.

AI tools could also offer “personalized learning plans for every child” alongside extra instruction based on those plans. The idea, Banks said, is to make it easier for teachers to reach students at a range of academic levels who are all in the same classroom. Still, some previous efforts to promote personalized learning, including by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, .

The technology could also provide students with more comprehensive college and career counseling, Banks suggested, drawing on information like employment outcomes at different schools. An Education Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to a question about whether there are any real-world examples of the technology being used in the ways Banks described.

Asked about the technology’s limitations, , Banks acknowledged it is “not fully baked yet,” but “I wouldn’t be overly concerned about some of the early missteps.”

The schools chief also sought to calm fears about the technology.

“AI will never be able to replace the personal connection that a teacher provides,” he said. “We’re not displacing human beings.”

A new high school is coming to Queens

On the heels of opening two new Bard Early College campuses in Brooklyn and the Bronx, officials said they’re planning to open a third “accelerated” high school this fall in Queens — HBCU Early College Prep.

Officials have previously said opening new campuses is part of a bid to keep families in the city’s public schools, which have seen enrollment drop 9% over the past five years.

The campus will partner with Delaware State University, a historically Black college, and will give students a chance to earn an associate degree before leaving high school.

“They’re also going to be immersed in the history and culture of multiple HBCUs across the country through college visits, the opportunity to study abroad, and research opportunities,” Banks said, adding that there will be “synchronous instruction from professors, alumni, mentors and more.”

Education Department officials said the school will be screened and will give priority to Queens residents.

Spinning up schools that serve specific student populations is in Banks’ wheelhouse. Before becoming chancellor, , a network of public schools geared toward serving young men of color. At the conclusion of his speech on Tuesday, Banks led the crowd in a recitation of the poem Invictus by William Ernest Henley, a at Eagle.

Tweaks to career-focused learning efforts

City officials are making some tweaks to its FutureReadyNYC initiative, which gives students access to career-connected learning opportunities. Participating schools will be able to add new “industry focus areas” in social work and decarbonization.

That builds on existing tracks in business, education, technology, and health care.

Banks touted a plan to launch a new high school, Northwell School of Health Sciences, that is designed to prepare students for careers in the health care industry. The school is supported with nearly $25 million from Bloomberg Philanthropies, which Banks said is the single largest grant the school system has ever received. (Chalkbeat from Bloomberg.)

The chancellor also announced that Mount Sinai Health System will help support the city’s career education efforts.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at

New York City’s free online therapy platform for teens may violate state and federal laws protecting student data privacy, lawyers from the New York Civil Liberties Union and advocates charged in a letter Tuesday to the city’s Education and Health Departments.

, a $26 million partnership between the city Health Department and teletherapy giant Talkspace launched in late 2023, connects city residents between ages 13 and 17 with free therapists by text, phone, or video chat.

In less than a year, roughly 16,000 students have signed up, Health Department officials said. Sign-ups disproportionately came from youth who identified as Black, Latino, Asian American and female and live in some of the city’s lowest-income neighborhoods, .

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Information shared with a therapist is subject to stringent protections under the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA. But before connecting with a therapist through Teenspace, teens go through a registration process that asks for personal information like their name, school, mental health history, and gender identity. Advocates are concerned such information is being improperly collected and could be misused.

For one, teens enter the registration information before securing parental consent – a possible violation of federal student privacy laws, the letter contends.

And families don’t get a chance to review the privacy policy – which discloses that registration information can be used to “tailor advertising” and for marketing purposes – before entering the registration information, advocates allege. There’s an option for teens to request that their data be deleted from the company’s platform, but it’s hard to find, according to advocates.

“It’s all very invasive,” said Shannon Edwards, a parent and founder of AI For Families, an organization that seeks to help families navigate artificial intelligence, who co-authored the letter along with NYCLU and the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy. “It’s also very unclear that parents understand what they’re getting themselves into.”

Advocates also pointed to the risk of a potential data breach – something the city has in recent years.

Advocates say similar about have been circulating for years and questioned whether city officials did sufficient due diligence or built in enough additional privacy safeguards before inking the contract.

“It’s the opacity of the relationship here, and the failure to make manifest what the city is doing to ensure there isn’t this data accumulation and sharing for inappropriate purposes,” said Beth Haroules, a senior attorney at the NYCLU who co-authored the letter.

Health Department spokesperson Rachel Vick said the agency has “taken additional steps to protect the data of Teenspace users and ensure information is not collected for personal gain, including stipulations that require all client data to remain confidential during and after the completion of the city’s contract and barring use of data for any purpose other than providing the services included in the contract.”

Client data is destroyed after 30 days if a teen doesn’t connect with a therapist, officials said.

A spokesperson for Talkspace referred questions to the Health Department.

The extent to which Teenspace is subject to state and federal laws governing student privacy in educational settings is somewhat murky, given that the contract is with the city’s Health Department, not its Education Department.

But NYCLU attorneys contend “the City cannot absolve itself of its responsibility to provide the protections inherent in federal and state laws…simply because the contract sits with DOHMH instead of DOE. The service is promoted on public school websites, and it is DOE’s responsibility to ensure that student data is protected, regardless of which City agency signs the contract.”

Parents may be more inclined to trust the platform because it has a “stamp of approval” from the school system, Edwards added.

A Health Department spokesperson didn’t specify whether the program is subject to education privacy laws, but said it’s “not a school based service.”

Teenspace has been the city’s highest-profile effort to address the ongoing youth mental health crisis.

“We are meeting people where they are with a front door to the mental health system that for too long has been too hard to find,” said Ashwin Vasan, the city’s health commissioner, in May.

Some teens have praised the program, noting it’s a way to bring mental health care to young people who may not otherwise have access.

But some mental health providers have argued it can’t replace the kind of intensive care a clinician provides, especially for kids with severe mental health challenges.

Company officials shared in May that they had helped 36 teens navigate serious incidents including reports of suicide attempts and abuse – cases they referred to child protective services, in-person therapists, or hospitals.

Talkspace CEO Jon Cohen previously told Chalkbeat the company uses an artificial intelligence algorithm to scan transcripts of therapy sessions to help identify teens at risk of suicide.

Even advocates critical of Teenspace’s privacy protections acknowledge the severe shortage of mental health providers and say teletherapy can play a role in filling the gap.

“We know you cannot find providers … there is such a need,” said Haroules. But advocates said the city can do more to ensure its vendors are meeting strict standards for data privacy, especially with such sensitive information.

“Everyone thinks, well, mental health is important for kids, these kids of services are required … when on the other side is: ‘How are they getting to it?’” said Edwards. “It doesn’t matter what the app is, there has to be a standard.”

This was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

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Sweeping changes to literacy instruction are underway in New York City, with all elementary schools for the first time using this September.

By requiring instruction in line with long-standing research about how children learn to read, known as the , the city is hoping to boost its literacy rates. Just under half of students in grades 3-8 , according to state exams.

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After Chancellor David Banks took the helm of the nation’s school district more than two years ago, he said the city’s approach to reading instruction and has since made the curriculum overhaul his signature initiative. His other policies, , pale in comparison to fixing reading instruction.

“None of that will even matter if kids can’t read,” he said.

But what do the new curriculums look like? How do caregivers know if they’re working? And what should you do if your child continues to struggle?

Here are answers to some common questions caregivers may have about the changes, based on interviews with reading experts and educators.

How were schools teaching reading before?

Stretching back decades, the Education Department developed by Teachers College professor Lucy Calkins, which viewed reading as a natural process that could be unlocked by exposing students to literature. Teachers delivered mini-lessons on a specific skill then encouraged students to read books at their individual levels to practice what they learned.

But most reading experts say the approach did not include enough emphasis on teaching children the relationships between letters and sounds, known as phonics, leaving behind a substantial share of students who would benefit from more explicit sound-it-out lessons.

Calkins’ curriculum also , such as encouraging students to use pictures to guess at a word’s meaning rather than relying on the letters themselves. Though she has since on phonics, the city’s public schools will no longer be allowed to use her program.

What is the philosophy behind the literacy shift?

All schools are now required to deliver regular phonics instruction that explicitly teaches the relationship between sounds and letters. Those lessons, which are prioritized , typically run about 30 minutes a day.

In addition to those lessons, schools must also use one of three approved reading programs that are designed to help build vocabulary and comprehension by exposing students to social studies and science topics alongside works of literature and poetry. that students are more likely to understand what they’re reading if they’re already familiar with the underlying topic. The new curriculums are designed to build students’ background knowledge across a range of domains.

“You should, as a parent, ask your kid about the books that they’re reading and be prepared to hear an earful from your child about how they read about Jacques Cousteau and the discovery of the giant squid — or to know a whole lot about pollinators,” said Kristen McQuillan, who consults with districts on literacy efforts and is affiliated with the Knowledge Matters Campaign, which raises awareness about the role of background knowledge in reading comprehension. Students should be bringing home writing about those books, too, she added.

Under the old curriculums, students often picked books that interested them from the classroom library that were targeted at their individual reading levels. Although the city is moving away from that leveling system — and instead having kids spend more time reading common books as a class — the practice may continue to some degree. Teachers will still have access to those leveled books, though they have been asked to organize them by topic or genre. Into Reading, the most widespread curriculum under the new mandate, also offers its own set of leveled books that schools can use.

What are the three new curriculums and which one is my school using?

The curriculum rollout began during the 2023-24 school year with 15 of the city’s 32 local school districts required to use one of the three reading programs: Into Reading from the company Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Wit and Wisdom from Great Minds; and EL Education from Imagine Learning.

Beginning this September, all elementary schools must use one of those three programs, with local superintendents in charge of making curriculum decisions for all schools in their district. Here’s what each district is using:

What do the three new reading curriculums look like?

Into Reading from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Into Reading is . Schools in 22 of New York City’s 32 local districts must use it. The most traditional of the three curriculums, Into Reading is organized as an anthology-style textbook packed with passages specifically designed to help teach reading skills, an approach known in education jargon as a “basal reader.” Some caregivers may be familiar with the approach from .

Unlike the other two curriculums, Into Reading includes a Spanish-language version. And it covers a lot of ground, with roughly that include how plants live and grow, the relationship between sports and teamwork, and how a person’s experiences shape their identity. Some educators say that breadth can be helpful since students may be more likely to encounter subjects that pique their curiosity.

Kate Gutwillig, a veteran New York City educator who has taught all three of the mandated curriculums, recalled one instance where a fifth grader who was reading at a second-grade level was captivated by an Into Reading lesson on Greek mythology.

“He was able to read the Medusa myth and that kid just came to life — he wanted to read aloud and write,” she said. “There’s something good about having a lot of variety.”

Still, Into Reading has earned criticism from some observers, parents, and educators who contend that it is weaker than the other two curriculums because it , and relies too heavily . A New York University report also warned that its materials are not culturally responsive, a claim the company .

Wit & Wisdom from Great Minds

Wit & Wisdom is known for building students’ background knowledge by going deeper into a smaller number of units. The curriculum includes — ranging from civil rights heroes to a study of outer space — devoting about 6-8 weeks per topic.

The curriculum exposes students to a mix of fiction and nonfiction texts. It also stands apart for including a “close examination of artwork related to the core topics,” .

“You tend to see a bit more of that literary fiction,” said McQuillan. One fourth grade unit called “the great heart” introduces students to the biology of the heart as muscle that pumps blood while weaving in the figurative meaning of the heart as a representation of emotion and love.

Some educators say adapting to Wit & Wisdom is challenging. The lessons can be lengthy, requiring teachers to figure out how to cut it down to be more manageable. And, as with all three curriculums, students are generally expected to read the same books on their grade level as a class, a challenge for students who don’t yet have strong reading skills.

“I think that’s our biggest struggle,” one teacher who was implementing Wit & Wisdom previously told Chalkbeat. “We’re coming in assuming that the kids have the skills to do this.” (If you’re interested in a deeper look at Wit & Wisdom, .)

EL Education from Imagine Learning

Similar to Wit & Wisdom, EL Education deploys a handful of units each year that students spend several weeks unpacking. Formerly called Expeditionary Learning, the curriculum and includes lots of opportunities to write. Two kindergarten units , for instance, and a significant chunk of second grade is devoted to pollination.

The emphasis on exploring the outside world, McQuillan said, “tends to be a feature of EL that kids get excited about.”

Janina Jarnich, who teaches second grade at P.S. 169 Baychester Academy in the Bronx, that one of her favorite lessons to teach focuses on paleontology and fossilization.

“By the end of the module, they write a narrative where they are the paleontologist that makes the greatest discovery of their lives,” she said. The lesson “lends itself to lots of hands-on experiences, like making imprints and doing a ‘dinosaur dig.’” She also takes her students on a field trip to the Museum of Natural History.

Some educators noted that the curriculum can be overwhelming — an issue that some teachers said is true of many curriculum packages.

“The weakness is the difficulty of navigating all of the materials,” Jarnich said. “Even after using EL for four years, it can still be tricky to find the end-of-unit assessments and to make sure you have all of the materials necessary for each lesson.”

Are there any exceptions to the new curriculum mandate?

So far, only , a K-8 gifted and talented program. However, some other school communities .

Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, .

How do I know if the new curriculum is working for my child?

Schools are expected to screen students three times a year to assess their reading skills. Caregivers can find the results of those assessments in their , which indicate or needs more support to be performing at grade level. (These screeners are supposed to replace that assigned students a reading level from A-Z.)

Multiple experts said teachers are generally also doing more regular assessments on top of that, so it’s a good idea to get in touch with them if you have any concerns.

“The answer is: ask the teachers,” said Susan Neuman, a literacy expert at New York University. They should have a sense of whether a student needs extra help based on a range of assessments beyond the screeners, she added.

What should I do if I’m concerned about my child’s progress?

Experts said caregivers should reach out to their child’s school if they suspect their child is behind in reading or if their screener results suggest they are below grade level.

“A plan needs to be put in place, so parents do need to serve as their child’s advocate,” said Katie Pace Miles, a literacy expert at Brooklyn College who . “I would ask about what skills can be reinforced at home, and what materials can be provided to the caregivers.”

She said parents should ask their schools to outline whether they are offering their child extra small-group or one-on-one instruction, how many days a week it’s offered, and how long each session is.

“Parents should not be left in the dark,” Miles said. If a student continues to struggle despite efforts to provide extra help, caregivers may want to ask for more detailed assessments of their child and potentially request a special education evaluation, she said.

This was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at . Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

Maud Maron, who New York City Schools removed for “derogatory conduct” in June, can now resume her post on lower Manhattan’s coveted District 2 council. She has also been criticized for making anti-transgender comments against students.��

In her ruling, federal judge Diane Gujarati also deemed the New York City Department of Education’s  anti-harassment policy — which was used to remove Maron — “chilled … expression” and likely violates the First Amendment because of its vague language.

The policy, D-210, is so unclear that it prevents “a person of ordinary intelligence – before such person is subject to investigation” from understanding what conduct is prohibited, the judge wrote.

Schools Chancellor David Banks removed Maron for comments made in the New York Post in which she called an anonymous Stuyvesant High School student author a “coward” and accused them of “Jew hatred” for an op-ed accusing Israel of genocide in Palestine in the student paper.

In December, a 74 investigation revealed Maron also said in a private chat that, “there is no such thing as trans kids,” among other disparaging remarks. In response, Banks called Maron’s behavior “despicable” but did not include the anti-trans comments in documents outlining her removal. 

In a text, Maron told ����Ӱ�� Wednesday she was reinstated because, “free speech still means something in this country. The people who voted for me won today because they were also deprived of their voice by the Chancellor’s unconstitutional decision.”

The judge’s decision was issued after Maron and two other parents sued the Department of Education, the education council for District 14 and its leadership for allegedly stifling their speech. Gujarti’s decision granted an injunction to stop the DOE from enforcing the anti-discrimination policy via removing council members. Their .

Department of Education officials said Gujarati’s decision makes it more difficult to safeguard children. 

“We are disappointed by a ruling that limits our ability to protect students from harmful conduct by parent leaders. Even prior to the court’s ruling, we began reviewing the applicable Chancellor’s regulation and are preparing to propose revisions and initiate our public engagement process,” said spokesman Nathaniel Styer. 

The department, Styer added, is reviewing the ruling for “next steps” and will continue to support district councils in complying with the law. 

Gujarati’s ruling did not call for the reinstatement of Tajh Sutton, who is the only other parent to be removed from a district council post after a D-210 investigation, because it is a separate case. Gujarati’s ruling stated that there is no proper request before the Court to “identically extend” Maron’s relief to Sutton and therefore “is not addressed herein.” 

Sutton, formerly president of Williamsburg’s District 14 council, was removed after their official X account posted a toolkit for a student walkout for a ceasefire in Gaza.  DOE officials said the materials were “perceived by many community members as anti-Israel and antisemitic.” 

As also reported by the , Sutton moved her district’s meetings online to limit threats – which included being mailed an envelope of human feces and death threats –  which the department later said violated open meeting laws. CEC 14’s official X account also blocked Maron. Both actions were categorized in Gujarati’s ruling as limiting free speech. 

Ultimately, “the judge upheld the right to free speech even if that speech is offensive,” said David Bloomfield, former DOE counsel and professor of education law with Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. 

He added the ruling doesn’t justify the “odious” statements made, rather their right to be said in the first place, and that the system likely knew this was a possibility but would “rather be slapped down by a court than allow [Maron’s] behavior to persist.” 

“The First Amendment guarantees a marketplace of ideas,” Bloomfield said. “When the government intrudes on that, it’s hard to defend.” 

Mayor Eric Adams poured cold water Tuesday on an imminent citywide school cellphone ban, citing a number of remaining obstacles and saying the city is “not there yet.“

“There will be some action in the upcoming school year, but the extent of a full ban, we’re not there yet. We want to make sure we have parents on board,” Adams said at a press briefing Tuesday in response to a question from Chalkbeat.

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“The previous administration attempted to do this, and they had to roll back,” Adams added, referencing a previous cellphone ban instituted by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, then overturned by his successor, former Mayor Bill de Blasio. “I don’t want to go backwards after we make a determination.”

Adams’ comments significantly dial back the message that schools Chancellor David Banks offered just months ago about the likelihood of a citywide school cellphone ban.

“You’re going to hear, within the next two weeks, the big announcement, but I will tell you we are very much leaning towards banning cellphones,” on June 26.

But with just over a week before the start of the new school year, city officials haven’t shared any updates, leaving many parents and school staffers craving details. Adams said the city is still ironing out a number of the .

“Once you use … the terminology that it is a full ban coming from the chancellor, there’s a lot of things that will kick into play, including [United Federation of Teachers],” Adams said Tuesday. “Who pays for the pouches? What mechanism is being used? So we’ve been doing a lot of reviews.”

Some educators and advocates have also about if and how the Education Department will offer schools guidance on discipline for students who don’t comply.

Several principals familiar with Education Department plans that education officials were floating a plan to have a ban take effect in February, though it’s unclear whether that timeline is still under consideration.

States and districts across the country have moved towards mandating cellphone bans amid rising concerns about their role in distracting students during class and harming kids’ mental health. New York governor Kathy Hochul is also and is currently soliciting input.

Los Angeles, the nation’s second largest school system, with a district-wide school cellphone ban.

Hundreds of New York City schools already have their own cellphone bans. Many use Yondr, a company that produces magnetized cloth pouches that can be locked and unlocked by schools for students to store cellphones during the school day. But such systems can be expensive, and one of the big open questions about a citywide cellphone ban is whether the city would provide extra funding to schools to help collect phones.

Many other city schools that historically have not fully banned phones are moving towards adopting their own cell phone-free policies, but enforcing those policies comes with significant logistical challenges and staffing needs.

Passing a systemwide school cell phone ban would also require changing the chancellor’s regulations, which would need approval from the Panel for Educational Policy, according to a source familiar with the deliberations.

Adams said the city is trying to learn from the approaches of city schools that have their own cellphone bans and are enforcing them effectively.

“We’re learning from those who are already doing it,” Adams said. “We do have schools in the city that are doing it on their own, and so we want to make sure we get it right.”

Julian Shen-Berro contributed.

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

This was originally published by . Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Gov. Kathy Hochul had earlier announced she’d introduce a bill during the January 2025 legislative session to . The bill would permit phones capable of sending and receiving texts, but not those with internet access.

Objections to allowing K-12 students to use their phones in school stress their addictive nature. Hochul has already signed the , ordering social media companies to ban addictive feeds for those under 18. 

, Florida and Indiana ban cellphones in the classroom, while Ohio directs districts to draft their own policies for “cutting down” on cellphone use and Alabama “strongly encourages limits.” Virginia Gov. GlennYoungkin issued an , instructing his Department of Education to come up with “guidance for public school divisions to adopt local policies and procedures establishing cellphone-free education.” Spokane, Washington, July 10, and the state Board of Education is considering one as well.

Would this be the right move for America’s largest school district? We asked NYC parents to weigh in, and the responses were nearly unanimous.

Brooklyn Mom Lena raved, “I am so unequivocally for the cellphone ban, I can barely contain my enthusiasm. It is insane to me that there are schools in which children are allowed to carry the world’s most addicting distraction in their pocket all day. As full-grown adults, we are suffering from our inability to stop looking at our devices and constantly consuming media in a format we are barely evolved enough to handle — and we want to give that same problem to children without fully formed brains, who already lack the ability to exhibit impulse control?”

“With access to nonstop videos and internet, they have forgotten how to keep themselves occupied,” lamented fellow parent Jessica F. “My son claims there’s nothing to do if he can’t play Minecraft. It has become an obsession.”

With demonstrating a connection between heavy social media use and depression, anxiety, loneliness and suicidal ideation, the majority of parents we heard from were thrilled to know there might soon be a limit on in-school smartphone use. 

“Having their phones at lunch keeps kids, especially socially awkward ones, from interacting with new people,” contributed parent A.F. “They use phones as a crutch and withdraw from socializing. I look forward to my high school-aged daughter being forced to socialize.”

“Although face to face doesn’t make for easier girl drama,” an anonymous mom admitted, “access to quick responses leads to more drama. A lot is said behind a screen that might not have been said face to face.”

Research has also demonstrated that children learn better and with deeper comprehension when .

Dad M.V. said, “I would go a step farther and ask that teachers revert to giving homework assignments on paper, not on computers. Yes, computers are more convenient for teachers and students. But they pose similar addiction and distraction problems.”

Carrie C. recognized the extra burden policing devices would place on educators. 

“I don’t think it’s a good use of teachers’ time or intellect for them to be the ones who have to enforce putting your smartphone away,” she wrote. “But I wouldn’t use that as a reason to shrug your shoulders and conclude that it’s not worth trying to make improvements when possible.”

For mother of three Sophia McShane, however, a ban on phones is unacceptable. 

“I’ve had it with the [city Department of Education] and their constant changes that don’t benefit the children,” she raged. “My eldest goes to school on his own and picks up his siblings from school. A phone is a necessity. The DOE should stick to teaching these kids how to read and write. They’re failing at that but want to focus on phones. It’s ridiculous.”

Travel and safety are the most prevalent arguments for why a school cellphone ban is than the troubles caused by phones.

But Kate L. doesn’t buy it. She argued that, “If (parents) need to contact their child for non-emergency reasons, do so before or after school or during lunch.”

Brooklyn’s Lena went further, saying, “The idea that children need to be immediately accessible to parents all day long is absurd. My middle schooler commutes roughly 40 min on the subway. He has a ‘stupid’ phone in order for me to be in touch with him or him with me to and from school or in case of emergency. If, God forbid, there was an emergency, I have no doubt I could get in contact with him during the day by calling the school. If the argument is, well what if there is a school shooting (again, God forbid), then I think we are trying to solve that problem with the wrong device.”

National polls have run the gamut from opposing cellphones in the classroom to against a ban.

If the largest school district in America goes through with Banks’ cellphone moratorium, would that finally accumulate enough research and evidence to guide definitive policy for the entire country?

The views expressed here are those of the author.

In the first move of its kind, the nation’s largest school district removed two prominent elected parent leaders from community education councils after controversial rhetoric against transgender students and student advocacy for Palestine.

Elected to serve two-year terms on the city’s closest equivalent to school boards, parents Maud Maron and Tajh Sutton were removed Friday from lower Manhattan’s District 2 council and northern Brooklyn’s District 14, respectively. 

Maron appeared in court June 18, seeking an injunction and reinstatement, alleging the Chancellor’s decision was a violation of free speech. The Education Council Consortium, a parent advocacy organization, has demanded Sutton’s reinstatement and criticized the Chancellor for equivalating Maron and Sutton.��

“It is a sad day when New York City Public Schools is compelled to take the actions I have ordered today, but the violations committed by these two individuals have made them unfit to serve in these roles,” Schools Chancellor David Banks said in the Friday press release announcing the removals. 

In closing their statement denouncing Sutton’s removal, the Education Council Consortium said, “it is indeed a ‘sad day’ when New York City Public Schools uncovers a new way to further erode any confidence in this administration.”

A December investigation by ����Ӱ�� previously revealed Maron said in a private chat that, “there is no such thing as trans kids.” Banks categorized her remarks as “despicable” and promised to take action. By March, a petition to remove her from Stuyvesant High School’s school leadership team for “bigotry” amassed more than 700 signatures. In April, the DOE ordered her to cease “derogatory” conduct. 

For months, parents and city leaders condemned Maron for leading a push to re-examine the city’s guidelines for trans students’ participation in sports, and for calling an anonymous student author a “coward,” accusing them of “Jew hatred,” for an op-ed accusing Israel of genocide. 

Across the East River, Sutton was subject to investigation for supporting a student walkout for a ceasefire in Gaza, including posting a digital toolkit and protest chants. In the letter listing his reasons for removing her, Banks said the materials shared by Sutton were “perceived by many community members as anti-Israel and antisemitic.”  

The reported Sutton, then the president and only Black member of District 14 council, had support from many families in her district who believe she was “unfairly targeted” for her advocacy for Palestine and that the DOE did little to safeguard her council against death threats. Sutton said she was also mailed an envelope of human feces. 

In a recent op-ed in the , Maron defended her actions and revealed Banks’s “official” reasoning for her removal pointed to the comments made against the anonymous student author. “But the real reason the Chancellor wants to remove me is because the Democratic establishment in New York City is furious because I know the difference between male and female and am willing to say so in polite company.” she wrote. 

In the letter issuing Sutton’s removal, Banks alleged Sutton violated open meetings laws for moving council meetings online, a decision she maintains was made over safety concerns after violent threats and multiple police reports, for which the DOE offered to provide additional NYPD officers at in-person meetings. 

Sutton told ����Ӱ�� she was never questioned by the DOE’s equity council for the alleged OML violations, only regarding her advocacy. state that videoconferencing or hybrid meetings may be permitted under “extraordinary circumstances,” and do not state that violations may result in removal. 

“If we were so out of compliance, why did you wait until June to remove me?” Sutton said. “Because you were waiting for Maron’s situation to get so hot that you could remove us together, so you could pretend that what I did is equal to what she did.”  

David Bloomfield, an education law professor with Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, believes it was no accident Maron and Sutton were removed simultaneously, and questioned the precedent set for free speech. 

“He seems to be treating them as similar situations and trying to balance the scales by removing a left wing member and a right wing member,” said Bloomfield.

While he did not question Banks’s legal right to remove Maron and Sutton, Bloomfield charged the precedent set is, “precisely what the First Amendment is supposed to protect against, which is the chilling of speech and particularly of political speech.” 

Maron is one of three plaintiffs Sutton, Banks and District 14’s council for violating the First Amendment and suppressing parent voices. She has recently launched a consultancy group called ThirdRail, which promises to “help neutralize counterproductive DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] initiatives” and build “flourishing workplaces where ideas – not ideologies – inspire strategy.” 

Maud Maron, subject of the April order and a member of Manhattan’s District 2 community education council, has received widespread criticism from lawmakers, city leaders and parents for anti-LGBTQ, specifically anti-trans, comments made in private texts first published by ����Ӱ��, including “there is no such thing as trans kids.” 

A few months later, in the , she called an anonymous Stuyvesant High School student journalist a “coward,” accusing them of “Jew hatred.” 

In the April 17 order, deputy chancellor Kenita Lloyd ordered that she “cease engaging in conduct involving derogatory or offensive comments about any New York City Public School student, and conduct that serves to harass, intimidate, or threaten, including but not limited to frequent verbal abuse and unnecessary aggressive speech that serves to intimidate and cause others to have concern for their personal safety, which is prohibited by Chancellor’s Regulation D-210.” 

Lloyd went on to write that Maron could face “suspension or removal” if she did not comply with the order. The directive offered Maron a voluntary “conciliation” meeting with a schools equity officer.

In a statement Maron told ����Ӱ�� she “cannot possibly comply with a directive to cease doing something when that ‘something’ has never been communicated to me,” adding that DOE leadership have never provided her with any “dates, places, quotes, people or any information.” 

She also categorized the “procedure” as “Kafkaesque,” “bizarre,” “speech-chilling,” and an “embarrassment” to the city school system. 

But some critics said the department’s order is too little, too late, stopping short of Maron’s removal, which community members have demanded at education council meetings for months.

“I’m doubtful an order like that will really make a difference because [Maron] has shown she has no qualms whatsoever about targeting students with abuse and hateful rhetoric,” said fellow District 2 parent and council member Gavin Healy.

Schools Chancellor David Banks previously called Maron’s behavior “despicable,” promising to “take action” nearly four months ago. 

In the months since, Maron at a Moms for Liberty event and continued parent leadership duties,  including sponsoring a resolution to reassess the city’s gender guidelines for student sports. The resolution was swiftly condemned by lawmakers and advocates, fearful any change would limit trans students’ rights and open doors for anti-trans violence. 

Nearly 800 District 2 community members also signed a petition to have Maron removed from Stuyvesant High School’s leadership team after her February comments in the Post about the anonymous student, where she urged the writer to make their name public for their opinions about the Israel-Gaza war.

Parents called the rhetoric harassment and a danger to student safety and free speech. 

Due to the DOE’s memo’s vague language, it’s unclear which of Maron’s remarks were the subject of complaint and investigation that warranted the cease order. 

“I have never named any student or directly addressed any student in a manner other than polite, friendly and professional,” Maron said. She is now among several parents , alleging censorship and stifling of free speech.

My daughter, Aries, was one of the students. And I was one of the adults who required educating.

I have written before about my daughter’s struggle with math. My teacher-husband was forced to tutor her at home. My daughter and some fellow students also tried asking their other STEM teachers for help. They did what they could, but, according to my daughter, “They could teach us the math, but since they weren’t making the tests, they weren’t sure what to focus on.”

Matters came to a head before midwinter recess, when the majority of the class failed an exam they’d been led to believe they were prepared for.

My daughter took the initiative to draft an email to her teacher. She ran it by her guidance counselor to make sure it was appropriate. The guidance counselor suggested making it less accusatory and more worried.

The final text read:

Dear (Teacher’s Name Redacted) –

We, the majority of the juniors, are emailing you regarding our concerns about the most recent test.

As you may have noticed when grading it, even the students who completed all of their classwork and all of their homework still struggled.

There were only 3 questions that were similar to the Delta math that we’d been assigned for homework. Because of this, many students who studied hard were still not prepared. The homework led us to believe that the test questions would be different from the ones you ended up using. There were many more of the most difficult questions rather than the ones we’d been assigned for homework.

In class, we spent the entire period working on a total of three questions. On the test, however, there were 10 questions of that nature. We were unprepared to complete 10 such questions in a much reduced time frame. We had never practiced doing so many questions of this type in that amount of time.

Also, in class, it took us a week and a half to complete 25 different types of questions, but, on the test, we were expected to finish 11 such questions in 45 minutes, on top of more questions in areas we hadn’t been prepared for. We are all very worried about the unexpected results of this test, and we are wondering how it will affect our semester grades. In the future, we would all appreciate receiving a more accurate study guide so we can prepare for tests and quizzes by practicing the sorts of problems that will be on our tests and not the material we hadn’t prepared for.

As second-semester Jrs, we are worried about our grades because they are going to be sent to colleges. That’s why we want to work with you to fix and grow from this. This is a new semester and now is the time for us to lay a functional groundwork for the rest of the year as well as be prepared for next year.

Once the text was approved, my daughter sent it to her teacher.

The teacher did not respond during midwinter break. That was to be expected. But there was no response after classes resumed, either.

My daughter returned to her guidance counselor, this time with student representatives from every section this teacher taught.

The guidance counselor spoke to the teacher. The teacher’s response was to show Khan Academy videos during classtime. That wasn’t enough for the students.

My daughter reached out to a member of her school’s newspaper staff who had a strong relationship with the principal. This student escalated their concerns up the administrative chain of command.

The principal sat in on the teacher’s next class. According to my daughter, he looked “disgruntled.”

The following week, there was a new teacher for all the sections. One who, as my daughter delightedly exclaimed, “Makes sense when he talks!”

I supported my daughter in her campaign even though I didn’t expect it to yield results. It never crossed my mind that students might be able to pull off such a coup. 

As an immigrant to the United States, I grew up with two conflicting attitudes toward authority: Those in charge didn’t give a damn about what happened to you … but you should obey them, anyway. They may not have cared if you sank or swam, but rocking the boat guaranteed you’d be thrown overboard. In other words, it’s best to put up with a bad teacher/boss/circumstance, because if you speak up, you’re definitely going to be punished. You can’t fight City Hall!

That fatalist attitude was one of the reasons I allowed my younger son to drop out of high school. He may have, after many, many arguments, convinced me that it was OK to quit an untenable situation. But it took my daughter and her friends to teach me that you could fight back – and win!

I am in awe of what these young people accomplished. They identified their problem, advocated for their position, stuck to their guns and refused to back down until they were presented with a solution that was acceptable to them.

When I told my husband I’d be writing about it, he said, “You’re going to make people angry. They’re going to expect their own schools to be equally as responsive.”

Good. I want them to expect it. I want them to demand it.

I want all American students to know they can challenge their teachers, their principals, the entire education system. They won’t always win. They won’t always be right. But they can and should make their voices heard.

I didn’t believe that. Until some NYC 11th-graders showed me how it’s done.

In a move condemned by advocates and lawmakers as an attack on trans students who fear any change to could also increase bullying and violence, passed 8-3 Wednesday evening. 

“We know sports build self confidence and a sense of belonging, which is especially critical for this group of students. Rather than excluding our trans students we ought to be working together to wrap our arms around them. They need love, encouragement and support, not political attacks,” said NYC Schools Chancellor David Banks Wednesday evening. 

After citing statistics that one in three trans youth are suicidal and one in three are survivors of abuse, Banks called the resolution “despicable” and, in an exasperated tone, posed a question: “Would you just leave the kids alone?” 

At a packed District 2 community education council meeting, ACLU civil rights lawyer and District 2 parent Chase Strangio pointed out the current gender guidelines align with state law. “So this resolution does nothing but target trans young people,” Santiago said. 

“I will not sit idly by and see the same misinformed efforts be pushed in my own school district. I will not let NYC, the birthplace and home of some of the most powerful trans people in history, be yet another testing ground for rhetoric that expels my community,” said Strangio, who is trans.

The resolution urges that a reevaluation committee be formed to include female athletes, parents, coaches, medical professionals and evolutionary biology experts, and claims current guidelines “present challenges” particularly to girls. The resolution’s primary sponsor, Maud Maron, said the resolution is in essence asking to hear from all “impacted voices,” according to . 

Given the Chancellor’s condemnation and that community education councils are advisory, it is unlikely DOE leaders will follow the council’s recommendation. 

In December, Banks also used the word “despicable” to describe comments made by Maron in a private chat, which included “trans kids don’t exist.” Parents and advocates have grown increasingly frustrated with the Chancellor’ broken promise to “take action,” made more than three months ago. 

In the time since Banks made his pledge, Community Board 2 issued a resolution demanding the DOE acknowledge and require parent leaders adhere to respective guidelines on bullying and fostering a safe learning environment for all students, particularly LGBTQ students. The late February resolution also encouraged penalties for parents found in violation of Chancellor regulations, including verbal and written warnings and/or suspension of involvement.

Separately, several District 2 CEC members wrote in a February email to Banks that went unanswered that parents’ and students’ rights and protections “continue to be unabashedly violated.” 

In the district which includes hyper-liberal neighborhoods like Chelsea and Greenwich Village, the resolution and restricting LGBTQ student rights doesn’t hold broad public support, parents say. 

“There really wasn’t a debate in our community,” said district 2 parent and CEC member Gavin Healy. “It was very much like ‘we don’t like this, we don’t want this.’”

Dozens of community members spoke out against the gender resolution with only one expressing support. All but two of 175 emails received by the council in advance of its vote were against its passage. 

At least 25 states, concentrated in the south and midwest, have introduced consistent with their gender identity. 

But the resolution’s introduction and passage in New York City is unsurprising, given parent leaders with conservative-leaning education desires endorsed by Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum make up . The group, known as PLACE, was co-founded by Maron. 

“I think they really want something that they can take back to Moms for Liberty and use it as a PR stunt — look, even in Manhattan there’s this concern,” said Healy. “It has to do with that national, moral panic that they are fueling. It’s fodder.”

Conservative parent voices have been rising in the city. Moms for Liberty, which advocates for parental rights and is categorized as an extremist hate organization by the Southern Poverty Law Center, opened its first chapter in NYC last year. Maron spoke on a the group held in January. 

This particular gender resolution is “legally unenforceable and dangerous,” said David Bloomfield, Brooklyn College education, law and public policy professor. A is currently underway in suburban Nassau County, New York, where a attempted to ban trans women and girls from public athletic facilities. 

Bloomfield said Maron was “…exercising her rights as an individual and as an elected official to state her policy preferences, which have been no secret. She’s following through essentially on what her voters asked for,” adding in the past, chancellors such as Richard Carranza have

The gender resolution passed on the same night the council passed another seemingly at odds, one affirming support of LGBTQ students and families. Maron was the only council member to abstain from voting on the resolution in support of LGBTQ students. 

Since December, a petition to have Maron removed from the Stuyvesant High School leadership team has . It circulated after she was quoted in a NY Post article calling an anonymous student author a “coward,” accusing them of “Jew hatred,” calling for their name to be public for their op-ed in the student newspaper.

Many parents and students feel her actions constituted bullying and threaten free speech at the school.

“The mission is the kids. Getting through the classes. Keeping them safe … They just don’t need this added pressure,” said one parent speaking on condition of anonymity. “[Maron] politicizes every situation she can and I feel like any statement she makes is for her own personal gain. It’s not for the school, it’s not for the students.” 

Reem Khalifa, a junior at Stuyvesant, said recent events have been disheartening and made her “fearful for the people around me. Do they recognize and hold the same beliefs?” 

Maron did not return a request for comment. 

“The DOE is trying to shield themselves from liability,” said Healy, “even if that means leaving people in the community vulnerable.” 

At the concurrent , teachers, parents and community members called for Maron and Egorov’s removal, citing the Chancellor’s promise, loss of “trust,” and high risk of suicide among LGBTQ youth. Maron was not present.

An elected member of a prominent New York City education council said “there is no such thing as trans kids,” while another claimed the social justice movement is “destroying the country,” in a private parent group chat.�� 

In the same set of exchanges dating back to June 2022, Andrew Gutmann, a former New York City parent and current Florida congressional candidate, accused LGBTQ people and social justice advocates of being “anti-children,” and trans and nonbinary kids as “indoctrinated” in a “really dangerous cult.” 

Responding to one Brooklyn parent’s concern about the number of LGBTQ children in her child’s school, Manhattan District 2 Community Education Council member Maud Maron responded “the social contagion is undeniable” and called hormone blocking drugs “an abomination.” 

On the same day in another exchange about LGBTQ kids, Maron said, “There is no such thing as trans kids [because] there is no such thing as transition i.e. changing your sex.” 

The “social contagion” phrase, equating an aspect of a child’s identity to disease, was used by a northern California school board member earlier this year who . 

In a statement, a NYC Department of Education spokesperson called the remarks “despicable and not in line with our values.”    

In WhatsApp logs obtained by ����Ӱ��, an additional parent leader made crude remarks levied at a state senator, while another shared a worksheet that defined hate speech as “usually constitutionally protected” and an “expression of opinion.” 

Maron also hormone therapy causes permanent, harmful effects for teens taking the drugs. “Some of these kids never develop adult genitalia and will never have full sexual function. It’s an abomination,” she wrote on November 11, 2022. 

When asked for comment on the remarks, Maron asserted her position by stating, “Radical trans ideology as taught in our public schools is regressive, homophobic and often deeply misogynistic.” She added telling gender expansive kids they need to be “fixed” by transitioning “leads to grave, irreversible harm for so many young people.” 

The  has supported access to , as have all leading medical associations in the country, according to the , who also cited research that  improves long-term physical and mental health, and reduces suicidal ideation.

Local leaders and advocates have called for Maron and fellow CEC member Danyela Souza Egorov to resign or be removed by NYC Schools Chancellor David Banks. Elected members, serving two-year terms, advise education officials on 32 CECs throughout the city. 

“If they’re not going to be removed, they have to engage in training … There has to be a level of accountability when grownups are the ones that are harming children,” said Panel for Education Policy member Kaliris Salas-Ramirez, a CUNY school of medicine neurology professor appointed by Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine. “My heart breaks.”

In addition to calling the comments “despicable,” a DOE spokesperson said the department “does not condone the opinions expressed” in the log and added “all children deserve protection, including LGBTQ+ children.”

“Our educators work every day to make New York City public schools safe and supportive environments for LGBTQ+ youth,” the DOE spokesperson said.

Chancellor’s regulation prohibits discrimination or harassment based on gender and other protected classes, stating “the DOE does not tolerate disrespect towards children.” The regulation also states that, after an investigation, the chancellor may remove or suspend members if conduct poses a “danger to the safety or welfare of students” or “is contrary to the best interest” of the district. 

The department receives complaints against CEC members who are thought to be in violation of the chancellor’s regulations by email. 

Manhattan City Councilmember Erik Bottcher, who represents families and children in School District 2, also denounced the remarks and encouraged disciplinary action. 

“It is deeply troubling that CEC members are engaging in demeaning, transphobic smears that are reminiscent of playground bullies rather than responsible adults tasked with advocating for the well-being of our kids,” Bottcher said. “Our students deserve better.” 

The chat also revealed some members believe hate speech, racism, white supremacy and other “social justice” jargon are fraught terms used to “discriminate against” white and Asian people. “The anti-racists are so racist,” said Maron.

That parents with these views have gained power locally is unsurprising to scholars who study conservative parent rights movements like Moms for Liberty. The groups and rhetoric are most frequently found in politically purple or liberal areas where parents feel their voices are sidelined for more liberal agendas. 

Pushing back on diversity trainings they find divisive, for example, one parent asked: “So you can pay to become a racist?” in reference to a , voluntary workshop hosted by the teacher’s union entitled, “Holding the Weight of Whiteness.”

Maron replied: “For the bargain price of $25.” 

In an exchange critiquing the United Federation of Teachers training on power dynamics in the classroom, Egorov said “this is poisonous and it is destroying the country.” She did not respond to requests for comment. 

Experts who study civil rights and freedom of speech in the U.S. have witnessed rhetoric throughout the country, but say there’s a key distinction at play here. 

“I think the most dangerous thing about these messages is who they’re coming from,” said Maya Henson Carey, a researcher with the Southern Poverty Law Center, “because these people have power to make change.”  

On November 20, 2022, Egorov sent the WhatsApp group an explainer to help push back on social justice terms. The one pager defined diversity as “an attack on merit and a form of soft bigotry,” adding that accountability is “bullying” and “mob rule.” A parent immediately responded, “this is good.”

The Responding to Social Justice Rhetoric sheet was created in 2021 by a group of academics with the Oregon Association of Scholars, a chapter of the National Association of Scholars, known as a conservative group that has lobbied against diversity policies.

The worksheet serves as a “translation guide,” for anyone “hoodwinked by language” said Peter Boghossian, one of its authors. 

The guide also defined inclusion as “restricted speech and justification for purges,” and a way to make “people feel welcomed by banning anything they find offensive.”

But inclusion for LGBTQ students is top of mind for many educators and families nationwide as the youth mental health crisis worsens. Queer kids, often ostracized from their homes or communities, are and foster care. They are also four times as likely than their peers to contemplate suicide, according to .

New York recently passed a safe haven law legally protecting trans students and their doctors introduced by state Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal. 

In the WhatsApp chat, both the law and Hoylman-Sigal were subject to explicit vitriol by prominent parent leaders. 

Chien Kwok, former District 2 CEC member and president of local nonprofit Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum and Education, wrote, “I would imagine Hoylman would have cut off his penis to transition if he was allowed to run away from his home state of West Virginia to NY. Do you think Hoylman or his husband would have regretted Hoylman being a eunuch?”

Kwok responded to requests for comment by reiterating his question for the state senator and adding “the radical transgender ideologies that [Hoylman-Sigal] supports and turned into law have harmed countless children and teens in the US and around the world.” 

A few hours after Kwok’s original comment, Gutmann, a former NYC private school parent who denounced his , chimed in: what LGBTQ people and social justice “ideologues” have in common is “not wanting children, which has made them anti-children (hence anti-family).” 

Gutmann later told ����Ӱ�� that while the private messages were written “quickly” and “in a casual tone,” he stands by “everything I have written in this and any other private chat group in which I have participated.” 

Hoylman-Sigal said the “cruel and frankly outrageous” chat history makes clear that, locally, the CEC members are not able “to safeguard learning for students. The disrespect and intolerance that is evident in these chats shows just the opposite. To them, LGBTQ kids, specifically transgender children, are second class.” 

The logs are a “call to action,” he added, for CEC leaders, Banks, and parents to vote them out of office. 

Though the outcomes of recent school board elections nationwide show many parents disagree with conservative parent leaders’ emphasis on limiting classroom discussion of sex and gender, parent leaders like Gutmann, Kwok, Maron and Egorov have been hoping to expand their reach. 

“We need to organize ourselves to recruit CEC candidates so we can expand our influence and keep it where we have [a] majority,” Egorov wrote to the group on January 1, 2022. 

They came close.  

Forty percent of Community Education Council members endorsed by PLACE, the conservative parent advocacy group co-founded by Maron and Kwok, .

Lawmakers and experts at local LGBTQ nonprofit are advocating for a new , sponsored by Hoylman-Sigal, requiring that all New York school districts establish policies to protect nonbinary and transgender students.

Thousands of miles from home, the group of new New Yorkers walks a few hundred steps.

Attached to a trilingual church and food bank, the campus of VOICE, a K-8 charter school, has become a refuge for newcomer families seeking asylum and new lives from mostly Spanish-speaking countries including Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Peru, as well as Pakistan and Egypt, among others.

“Many of them are living in temporary housing and struggling to find work. The families are under a lot of pressure … It’s just a huge amount of change,” said VOICE social worker Kim Moglia.

Through the Long Island City school’s proximity to temporary housing and a growing reputation among families, the school is serving 267 migrant students this year, the most of any charter school in New York state, according to federal Title III funding. 

Today, the population comprises nearly a third of VOICE’s student body, and staff are urgently finding ways to support the students and their families living in eight neighborhood shelters and others in Manhattan and parts of Queens.

But legal experts and child advocates warn a new city policy after 60 days will jeopardize the types of connections being built at schools like VOICE, the most stable place in their lives right now.

“The idea that in the middle of the school year, they would be transitioning housing and then having to start all over again — it worries us,” principal Franklin Headley said. 

“They would have to make new friends, new relationships with the teachers … We have the momentum, even in these first two months, to continue with the children that have come to us,” he added. 

Throughout New York City, an estimated 21,000 migrant students have joined the public school system since last summer, according to the Department of Education. In the latest waves, nearly all children have been younger, in K-3 grades or not yet school aged, educators and social service staffers told ����Ӱ��.

While there is room — DOE school enrollment declined by more than 120,000 students in the last five years — the newcomers are experiencing some of the highest levels of need.��

Even with the housing concern mounting, VOICE staff has continued to look for ways to work with the new students. To learn from schools serving similar populations, staff traveled cross-country to San Diego over the summer, and are now finishing installation of large washer-dryers for families to use to encourage attendance and remove the financial burden.

School-wide, required music classes help with language acquisition. Newcomers who are struggling are paired with a buddy who speaks their native language. In hallways, it’s not uncommon to hear whispered Urdu and Portuguese. Teachers regularly use keywords, explanations and translated materials in Spanish. 

Staff have also taken to small innovations — altering seating charts so newcomers build friendships and teachers can spot if anyone is struggling; bringing in a led by retired players; using the app Language Line to translate messages to families about progress; hiring an art therapist full time.

At VOICE, some students are getting their first introduction to the classroom. 

“You hear with your eyes” 

Noticing that many are starting without prior schooling or written literacy in their native languages, ELL teacher Jasmine Calderon leads small groups to build on foundations.

Here, a group of 10 first graders practice saying and writing the letter “p,” as they work through the alphabet to begin phonics, how letters interact with each other to make sound.  

Because many newcomers aren’t yet used to school life, she gently reminds them to tune in, singing their names and instructing them to pat their heads as they watch and listen for the sound of “puh” in her sentences. 

“We’re moving our bodies in a certain way, there’s visuals there for you … You’re going to start to connect what you hear with what you see,” Calderon said, explaining how she helps students see the importance of watching her closely, especially if they don’t understand the words.

 “I tell them all the time, ‘you hear with your eyes.’” 

Building blocks for new language

Across the hall, in a second-grade classroom, a row of books greets students as they walk in, including Dear Primo: A Letter to My Cousin, about two boys growing up in the U.S. and Mexico.

Settling into desks for a career planning activity, students dream of being rock stars and astronauts. When language feels out of reach, they draw.

Posters and tools to support reading and writing acquisition deck the walls: sentence starters, strategies that can help make sense of vowel sounds.  

In third grade, students break down plots into beginning, middle and end in graphic organizers, a tool teachers have utilized more frequently to help build fluency.

“Even if they’re not at the point where they’re reading the words,” Calderon said, “at least they’re engaged in some type of work. We found that having them draw something was more engaging than just giving them the book and taking observational notes.” 

The power of music 

The new population has pushed VOICE, founded in 2008, to emphasize music, singing and social-emotional learning, to find a renewed purpose in its mission.��

In required music classes, which supports language acquisition, students shed the nerves that can accompany things like reading aloud.

“You don’t have to be thinking about producing language, you’re just singing along, and then work on pronunciation and things like that there. You’re not taking the same kind of risk as constructing a sentence,” Headley said. 

In a room brimming with guitars and laughter, students sing a good morning song featuring at least six languages. Alongside a refrain from their teacher’s guitar, they collectively sing out a common greeting:
“Valentina, Valentina, Valentina, how are you?” 

In a rhyming solo, Valentina responds: “I’m tired, I’m happy, and I hope that you are, too.” 

Soccer: A language of its own 

From choir to soccer practice, the school’s newcomer students are building social connections that transcend language barriers and help their ability to show up in the classroom.

For Jah, a seventh grader who speaks seven languages originally from Burkina Faso in West Africa, playing soccer brings him back to some of his favorite memories. VOICE helped him with the largest barrier: buying turf shoes.

Migrant student athletes perform better in-season than out, according to Matt Coleman, middle school and athletic director. Eighth-grade leaders help translate plays for their teammates. The 15-minute walk back from the park is never silent.��

“They’re talking and that’s what I’m trying to get them to do, just communicate with each other,” he said. “If it’s in Spanish or English, it doesn’t really matter.”

To support alum that go on to play soccer in high school, athletic staff juggle calendars to make good on a promise to attend one of each of their games. 

The soccer program, open to students of any gender, and its connection to local parks and people is one way students find “opportunity within the community, which can get overlooked,” in brainstorming ways to support migrant students, said soccer coach Dominic Van Bussell.

Keeping culture in the room 

To Genesis Bolanos, who teaches at least 10 newcomers across two periods of seventh-grade math, using students’ home languages in the classroom is what makes all the difference, especially for kids who are sometimes only weeks into living in a new country.��

In her classes, students work with translated materials provided by the school, allowing them to focus on math without being penalized for their budding English literacy.��

Bolanos said the approach is too-often resisted. Her last Queens charter school wouldn’t allow students and staff to speak Spanish, which contributes to a “loss of shared culture.” 

Because VOICE encouraged teachers to try out ideas to support the newcomer population, like hosting a Hall of Nations to get to know foods and traditions from students’ home countries, Bolanos switched up the seating arrangements to lessen isolation. 

“In seating them together, they build their own friendships and have their own communities apart from adults, which is obviously what we want,” said Bolanos, a first-generation Ecuadorian-American.

Some newcomers, just a few weeks in, have started to ask to follow along with English materials, keeping their Spanish sheets as a reference point as they learn integers and foundational arithmetic. 

“This is just what newcomers deserve,” Bolanos said. 

“Something we couldn’t predict” 

Some newly enrolled VOICE charter families, after beginning a relationship with the school over the summer, were moved without warning cross-city to shelters in Jamaica, Queens just days before classes started, forced to find other schools.

“That’s something we couldn’t predict, that the city made a decision to start moving people,” principal Headley said. “… I didn’t understand why families would [be ordered to] leave this housing, which is close to the subway and close to facilities.” 

The practice of moving families with little notice has continued into the school year, according to . 

Mayor Eric Adams’s administration has limited migrant family stays in Manhattan hotel shelters run by Humanitarian Resource and Relief centers, home to about 15,000 students, to 60 days. The majority of families, staying in shelters run by the city’s Department of Homelessness Services, .

City officials did not return requests for comment.

, threatening to uproot them from their one place of stability.

That stability was so important to one VOICE family with four children, that they commuted to the school two hours each way after being moved to a Coney Island shelter, the southernmost tip of Brooklyn. 

“Those kids, including a kindergartner, wouldn’t give up,” Headley said tearfully. He and other staff ultimately traveled to Coney Island to help the family find a nearby school. 

The city’s 60-day policy stance, he added, will require schools to take on that kind of “placement work” after moves.

“If that’s what it takes, that’s the reality,” Headley said. “… We have to make sure that they’re OK — that they’re going to be some place where they feel comfortable and safe.”

All photos by Marianna McMurdock

By searching for district communications and media coverage in each state from fall 2022 through summer 2023, CRPE identified districts publicly responding to AI last school year. We conducted more thorough research on these districts and .

Most of the reactions have revolved around ChatGPT, the large language learning model-based chatbot . 

Many large districts were initially wary of the new technology, with , and issuing , largely because of concerns over cheating. 

But many are adapting. New York City Public Schools , with Chancellor David Banks acknowledging a and a determination to “embrace its potential.” 

in Washington State reported that while it blocked ChatGPT to “get out ahead of it,” the district doesn’t plan to stop it long-term. In April, the district established a committee of teachers learning how to use ChatGPT to work on related policies.

In California’s , Superintendent Don Austin embraced ChatGPT’s potential to enhance learning and improve efficiency. Likening AI pushback to early resistance to calculators and the internet, the superintendent this spring to start using the technology. 

Supporting learning and emotional well-being

While most districts CRPE reviewed have not released precise plans for using AI, some are exploring opportunities. 

The introduced a tool called that functions like a literacy tutor that listens to students read and corrects mistakes in real time. The district piloted the tool at four schools last spring and had a small group of teachers experimenting with a tool to help create unit and lesson plans.

is piloting , an AI-powered “tutorbot” created by Khan Academy to give students individualized support across core subjects. The program , offering personalized prompts, diagnosing errors and helping students develop deeper reasoning skills, and gives teachers .

in Arizona and in Texas are piloting AI-enabled “early warning” programs that track student performance and send alerts if kids are off track. Mesa’s program collects academic, social and emotional data from teachers and students to predict up to three months in advance whether a student will pass or fail coursework. 

Creating new AI courses and standards

Other districts are designing curriculum to build students’ AI literacy. Most are in states creating conditions to help steward the advancement of AI curriculum. 

Baltimore County Public Schools an AI program at three high schools this year that will feature . The program is a byproduct of a 2020 state innovation grant, which funded district staff to develop curriculum and lead an advisory council.

In Georgia, the district is opening up a K-12, AI-themed that will provide progressively more sophisticated study of AI . This will in core subjects, and Gwinnett hopes that piloted lessons will spread across the entire district. The Georgia Department of Education worked with Gwinnett to write new academic standards so all schools in the state can launch their own AI courses.

A dozen districts in Florida, including those in the , are rolling out AI and data science programs this year in partnership with the , part of the university’s broader goal to infuse AI into K-12 curriculum across the state. The state is also providing funding to train teachers. 

Supporting teacher development

A small number of districts reviewed are using AI to strengthen teacher practice or generally orient educators to the technology as a teaching tool. 

This year, Spokane Public Schools in Washington, St. Vrain Valley School District in Colorado and Keller Independent School District in Texas an instructional coaching platform called that films classroom instruction and uses AI to offer teachers feedback and in developing an “action plan” to implement suggestions.

in Maryland launched training sessions this summer to help teachers learn how to incorporate AI into their lessons as part of a three-year agreement with nonprofit training partner aiEDU, which provides curricula and learning resources. 

Improving communications and operational efficiency

Districts are using AI to provide individualized guidance to students and parents. In April, the announced a chatbot to answer parents’ and guardians’ questions online and track whether issues were resolved. In August, unveiled a chatbot “student adviser” that provides parents real-time access to grades, test results, and attendance and assists its “” program. is one of many Arizona districts using , a chatbot digital assistant that helps students navigate the federal student financial aid — FAFSA — application. 

Districts are also using AI-powered technology to support safety and operational efficiency. in Florida uses AI to . uses AI-powered, self-driving floor cleaners, and in North Carolina uses AI to detect student illnesses as part of their pandemic response. 

Districts face essential questions about AI in 2023-24

A year ago, few districts or stakeholders were paying much attention to AI. Now, it’s clear that this technology will evolve faster than districts can develop formal training and guidance for staff. Leaders need to respond by thinking through how they train their workforce to responsibly use AI, and prepare for fundamental shifts in teachers’ roles and students’ opportunities in the coming years.

We suggest that districts:

• engage early adopter educators to discuss strategies and guidelines;
  
• communicate regularly and transparently with parents;
  
• train teachers on responsibly using AI; and
  
• partner with organizations, industry and higher education institutions who have AI expertise and can weigh in on best practices. 

We also urge state departments of education and regional associations to provide guidance and tools to help districts navigate AI. Students, parents, teachers and employers are looking to districts to do this well and to provide a learning environment that is both safe and reflective of the 21st century and beyond.

Parents and the public are represented by superintendents and school boards, but at school sites they rely on principals and other supervisors. However, in many of the largest districts, these school managers are also union members.

Having seen the gains teachers unions made for their members both in salary and working conditions, administrators unions would like to copy that success.

There are 92,000 principals working in the public schools, and another 100,000 assistant principals. The vast majority have long backgrounds in teaching. The average principal had 12 years in the classroom before moving to an administrative role.

In many states, public school teachers are banned or restricted from bargaining collectively, and the hurdles are even higher for administrators, who can be viewed as both labor and management.

Principals unions were originally formed along with teachers unions in the 1960s and 1970s, but it wasn’t just superintendents and other district managers who found the event problematic. The passed a resolution in 1977 demanding the ouster of school administrators from the AFL-CIO, with which both are affiliated, citing their managerial responsibilities. AFT also claimed the administrators would “subvert collective bargaining achievements of organized teachers” and “cast teachers in an anti-union role.”

Despite these differences, principals unions mirrored AFT in policies, structure and composition. is the national umbrella union for five state chapters and 85 local affiliates. It’s small, with a budget of just $1.5 million, and acts primarily as a federal lobbying arm. The union’s priorities are very similar to those of the teachers unions.

Last month, union President Leonard Pugliese , calling on him to “develop and implement a Marshall Plan for public education.” This is something both and have advocated.

supported legislation to mandate an assistant principal in every public school and to integrate social-emotional learning concepts into pre-K-12 education.

Naturally, it wants to expand its membership as well. “In districts without school leader unions, the workload has increased, but the compensation hasn’t moved accordingly. We need to help organize the unorganized school leaders, so they can protect themselves, too,” said Pugliese.

As with the AFT, by far the largest portion of federation membership works in the New York City Public Schools, represented by the . The New York City administrators account for more than 63% of the national union’s 22,000 members.

The council has an additional quirk that may be unique among all labor unions: More than 53% of its total membership are retirees. While the national union operates on a shoestring, the New York City branch collects $18.4 million in dues, and its president was paid more than $287,000 in 2022.

Principals unions tend to form in large cities. AFSA has locals in Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis, Oakland, San Diego, Denver, Seattle, Portland and Washington, D.C. Los Angeles also has an administrators union, but it is independent.

While some of these unions have existed for many years, they can’t all bargain collectively. The Chicago Principals and Administrators Association

Acting alone, administrators unions have no more power or influence than any other small advocacy group. But when they act in concert with teachers unions, they can leave school sites with all labor and no management. Without it, parents and the public lose much of their influence over their schools.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

NYC has attempted to combat that inequity in a variety of ways. Former Mayor Bill de Blasio implemented initiatives ranging from , which cost the city almost , to universal pre-K, while current Mayor Eric Adams has called for and a mandatory .

Such initiatives are expensive and can take years to fully implement, not to mention properly evaluate. Their success rate is also spotty. Universal pre-K ended up than those in the middle class. The Renewal Schools were dubbed a , an African-American publication, which noted that “only a quarter of the 100 schools targeted by the program were reported to have seen any improvement at all.”

There is, however, a cost-effective and immediate tweak that has proven effective in raising grades and test scores, as well as reducing suspensions for middle and high school students, especially those who are low-income: Starting the school day after 8:30 a.m. 

A study from :

We find robust evidence linking later start times to increased test scores for middle school students. A one-hour delay in middle school start times predicts math scores 8% of a standard deviation higher and reading scores 4% of a standard deviation higher. … These results are particularly large for economically disadvantaged students.

confirms these results for both middle and high school students: 

In the wealthier school, there wasn’t much change in missed school hours. But at the school with more low-income kids, the new start time boosted attendance. During the academic year, the school recorded an average of 13.6 absences and 4.3 tardies for the first period. Before the schedule change, those yearly numbers were 15.5 and 6.2. … Lower-income kids sometimes get worse grades than their wealthier peers … (T)here are many reasons why this might happen. Anything that helps reduce this achievement gap is a good thing. That includes better class attendance.

The average NYC public middle or high school starts between 8 and 8:20 a.m. A in 2018 shifted the start time to 8:30 at five schools. Seeing positive results in attendance and discipline, 14 more were added to the initiative in 2019.

Assemblyman Harvey Epstein has submitted a , co-sponsored by state Sen. Robert Jackson, to make 8:30 a.m. the earliest permitted school starting time. Any school that chose to begin earlier would risk losing state aid.

Still, the majority of NYC schools start before 8:30, and, in fact — due to the newly negotiated teachers contract — several have recently announced they’ll be .

Notable exceptions include the Bard High School Early College schools, which are some of the highest-performing in the city. The Queens campus sets aside for students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, while, at the Manhattan campus, that number is . Both schools .

At the other end of the admissions spectrum is Essex Academy, which accepts students at all academic levels, with 65% qualifying for free lunch, and has an . There, at 9:25 a.m..

Starting middle and high schools later would not only improve attendance and cut down on suspensions, leading to higher grades and test scores, but it is a fix that can be implemented with minimal cost. And here is the most important aspect: The worst thing that will happen with moving to a later school start time is… nothing. No change for the better, but also no change for the worse.

At a price point of nearly zero, an equal amount of risk and no evidence of unforeseen consequences, what excuse does any school have for not giving a post-8:30 a.m. start time a try?

That wasn’t a surprise. For ninth-grade Spanish 1, she had six teachers over the course of the year. (One teacher came back, so it was seven transitions.) She entered the course knowing no Spanish. She exited the course knowing no Spanish. Nevertheless, she was promoted to Spanish 2. There, she had three teachers over the course of the year, and each one assumed the students had mastered Spanish 1. They taught accordingly. So my daughter and her classmates fell further behind. 

In New York City, students take a state exam in order to earn a . My daughter is on track to earn that diploma in all her other subjects. But she is nowhere near ready to take, much less pass, the Spanish Regents.

It’s no big deal, well-meaning fellow parents assure me. Just hire a tutor.

I could do that. I’m fortunate enough to have the resources to do that. 

But I refuse, and here’s why: because that would let her school — and the entire public education system — off the hook.

New York state has spelled out, in the form of the Regents exam, what it believes to be an appropriate level of Spanish mastery necessary to graduate from high school. Is it not, then, the responsibility of the public education system to make sure every student reaches that level? What’s the point of graduation requirements otherwise? 

I have written in the past about “high-performing” schools that rely on well-off parents to prep their children outside the classroom, then happily take credit for their successful test scores. 

I’ve written about my engineer husband tutoring our daughter in math when her teacher failed to get the job done.

I have also written about how the Specialized High School Admissions Test, which keeps Black and Hispanic students out of New York City’s top schools, is not the problem but is, instead, evidence of what a terrible job the city is doing educating those students.

I can’t keep being part of the problem. If I were to hire a Spanish tutor for my daughter, if I were to prepare her outside of class to take and pass the Spanish Regents, I would be perpetuating the lie that her public school education was adequate. And that’s damaging to the students who come after us, who don’t have the resources for tutoring, who are exclusively counting on their schools to get the job done.

Aren’t you biting off your nose to spite your face, my well-meaning fellow parents continue to ask. How will sabotaging your daughter’s college admissions chances benefit anybody?

I’ve talked to her about this. She says she understands my decision. That this issue is bigger than her. It’s bigger than our family. It’s bigger than just the students in her class who’ve been subjected to a Spanish teacher merry-go-round.

Students were promised they would know the material. But they weren’t taught it. How is this acceptable? 

I understand and even sympathize with families who see that their children are not learning in the classroom and hire tutors to fill the gaps. But when we do that, we are letting the schools and the entire system slide on providing the education they owe our children.

We’ve all had a rough three years. Teachers are struggling to support students performing at wildly different academic levels. I’m not saying it’s easy. But I am saying that it needs to be done. And by the schools, not the families.

Perhaps small-group tutoring is the answer. In his 2022 State of the Union address, President Joe Biden urged schools to use federal COVID relief aid for such programs and called on parents to “make sure your school does just that.”

Perhaps it’s paying teachers better, so students aren’t faced with the kind of constant turnover my daughter and her classmates endured. Perhaps it’s putting students into classes based on their performance level, rather than their age, so all kids can get the precise instruction they need.

Meanwhile, it’s up to parents to hold their schools responsible for imparting the education they promised. One way to do that is by exposing every single time they fall short. Even if it means letting your own child fail. 

If enough families do that, schools will no longer be able to sweep their negligence under the rug. They’ll be forced to admit there’s a problem. And finally be pressured — or, if necessary, shamed — into fixing it. For everyone.

Previously, kids in kindergarten through second grade took a standardized exam — a combination and the . Those who scored above the 97th percentile were eligible to apply to all five of the citywide accelerated schools. Those who scored above the 90th percentile could apply to their local district’s enriched programs. An algorithm first placed all 99th percentile students, then the 98th and so forth down the line. (Siblings received admissions priority and could jump the queue.) So many students qualified that, usually, about three-fourths of those who applied were left without a spot. 

For 2023, Mayor Eric Adams claimed that “this administration is fully committed to listening to parents.” Instead of a test, grades would be used for assessment. Students who earned all 4’s (“exceeds expectations”) would be entered into a G&T lottery, with no differentiation between those who could apply for citywide accelerated schools and enriched district programs. Adams also added a “Top Performers” category, where all students who were in the top 10% of their schools could apply to transfer to newly created district G&T programs starting in third grade. However, students in different types of schools — district, charter and private — were evaluated differently, leading to a new set of frustrations.

Adams’s predecessor, Mayor Bill de Blasio, had been determined to do away with G&T altogether, unhappy with its lack of racial and socioeconomic diversity. Adams took the opposite approach, making it easier for students from all groups to qualify. But in the process, he is on track to nullify what made the programming beneficial, particularly for those underserved kids in whose interests he is supposedly making these changes.

For 2024, all students who earned 4’s or 3’s (“meets expectations”) are eligible for the G&T lottery, which now extends to fourth grade to accommodate seats created by the “Top Performers” program. Under this system, about two-thirds of all students — roughly 45,000 per grade level — are eligible, with no distinction made between those who earned all 4’s across the three core subjects of reading, writing and mathematics and those who scored all 3’s.

This turns the process into a glorified lottery. As I tell NYC parents, “Don’t worry if your kids are smart. All kids are smart. Worry if your kids are lucky.” Because that’s what determines whether they receive an adequate education.

In light of these changes, I cannot help wondering: Why is NYC going through the time, resources and, most importantly, expense (amid ) to create the charade of a G&T program that goes against relevant research on the topic?

For instance:

• The most highly advocates looking at multiple factors. Schools in New Jersey, for example, emailed parents of first and second graders advising that “to ensure equitable opportunities for all students … the results of [IQ] tests will be utilized as one of several data points” that will also include classroom observation and teacher nominations.

• Based on NYC’s 2023 screening technique, the majority of students currently attending kindergarten through third grade now qualify for first through fourth grade G&T. Yet, the Department of Education is not opening any new programs to accommodate them all. How can the department, on the one hand, claim these students require special services while providing such services for only those lucky enough to win a lottery? If the district tried the same approach with special-needs kids it would be in violation of state and federal law!

• Several of the citywide, accelerated schools have already indicated they don’t have the room to accept new students for 2024. As a result, the majority of those who qualify for G&T will be placed not in accelerated classes, but in . This is the opposite of what’s been proven beneficial. A 2021 study summarized: Enrollment in a self-contained accelerated class exposed Black and Hispanic students to higher teacher expectations than they would experience in a traditional classroom setting. The report concluded that: Acceleration is an effective and cost-effective way to supplement the learning needs of exceptionally talented students.

• Conversely, the study continued, “enrichment” has been shown to be: Not sufficiently intensive. … As national evidence shows that a majority of elementary school gifted programs include four hours or less gifted education services a week, the educational dose of gifted programs may be too slight to yield positive effects.

Earlier this month, NYC launched an initiative to bring the to elementary school classrooms, employing rigorously tested best practices alongside “consistent, research-based materials.”

Why, then, has this administration chosen to swing in the opposite direction when it comes to G&T?

Between August 2019 and January 2022, only 24% of investigations prompted by calls from school staff found evidence of abuse or neglect compared to a citywide rate of in 2020 — meaning K-12 workers make allegations that do not get substantiated far more often than most other professions.

Teachers, with whom children spend most of their day, misreport more than any other school staff: Two thirds of their calls to the state hotline are unfounded, according to data obtained by ����Ӱ�� through a public records request.

Meanwhile, families say the investigations plunge their lives into deep uncertainty and inflict lasting traumas on their kids. Parents describe children with recurring nightmares, fearing every knock on the door may be a caseworker looking to snatch them from their home.

Darcey Merritt, associate professor of social work at New York University, regularly engages with families impacted by the child welfare system in her work and research. She also serves on the Child Maltreatment Prevention Committee of the .

Over the years, Merritt has come to see the system as overly punitive toward poor families who love their children but may struggle to meet their basic needs due to lack of resources. 

The expert believes it’s time to reimagine child welfare to better support those families: “We need to start the whole thing over,” she said.

����Ӱ�� spoke to Merritt to learn what issues she sees in child protective services — and what can be done.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

����Ӱ��: What should people who work in schools understand about the child welfare system?

Darcey Merritt: We can’t disentangle neglect from poverty, it’s inappropriate to do so. 

On any given day, 76% of the children and families that are exposed to child welfare are there because of some form of neglect. And neglect is tethered to poverty: supervisory neglect, physical neglect, which refers to people not having appropriate food, clothing and housing. 

A lot of these issues related to neglect are structural issues that are outside the control of parents. Yet [child protective services] is blaming parents for their unfortunate, involuntary socio-economic statuses. So that’s a problem. 

Teachers are mandated to report out of an abundance of caution if they feel like a child is unsafe for whatever reason. But there’s got to be a way where mandated reporters first figure out how to be more useful in addressing the actual problem. If a child has dirty clothes consistently every day, let’s figure out what to do about that without getting CPS involved. 

I think there needs to be changes in state mandating laws, so [reporters] are encouraged, maybe even required, to first figure out how to address the problem. If they don’t have enough child care, well, then let’s find child care. If they don’t have enough food, let’s find food. Laundry machine is broken and they can’t go to the landlord because they’re behind on their rent? Let’s figure that out. These are all things that are happening. 

What might those changes look like?

We need to start the whole thing over and reserve child protective services for those kids who have been physically and sexually abused. We need to have a separate institution, a separate agency or organization, working with communities and neighborhoods to provide support for all the other kids so that the go-to response isn’t to report a child who’s poor. It all comes down to money and what our society is willing to do to make sure that people have a standard level of resources and support to be able to raise their families.

We need to really have more respect for these parents because they love their children and they are victims of an inequitable society.

To make sure I’m understanding correctly, are you saying child protective services should not be the ones responding to neglect charges?

I do not think they should be handling neglect charges. I think that some other agency that’s not connected to the stigma of having a CPS case should respond. Whatever support we put in place, it needs to be untethered from the institution of child protective services.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t help these families. I’m saying the child protective services is not the agency to handle neglect cases that have to do with poverty.

New York State law, as of 2021, requires implicit bias training for mandatory reporters. Does that rule go far enough to mitigate some of these problems?

I don’t think it goes far enough. You can’t just do a training and call it a day. You have to have something in place so that when people are making decisions, you can check whether or not this decision was made because of some unseen bias. For example, ‘Oh, this child’s parent has been involved with the carceral system. Go ahead and report this one.’ That’s how people continue to cycle in between these harmful punitive systems. 

We have our own Western idea of what safety and family well-being means and it’s all from a deficit lens. Rarely do we look at family dynamics and functioning from a strength-based perspective. I interview a lot of moms for my research and all of them say, ‘We love our children, but we needed help.’ 

It’s a really serious problem and the racial disproportionality is going to continue (because impoverished parents have no choice but to rely on the government for welfare). Black children are highly disproportionately involved with the child welfare system and before Black children, Native kids have the highest disproportionality of involvement. People don’t even pay attention to that.

Interesting. I didn’t know that.

The highest is Native American children, then Black children, then Latino children. White children are not overly represented in the system.

Some parents have told me they can’t help but know about child protective services, or, in New York City, the Administration for Children’s Services, because either they’re personally impacted or they know someone who is. Meanwhile, other families are completely oblivious. Have you seen that difference between communities?

It’s true. Once you’re involved, you know what that looks like. Parents’ language is even institutionalized. Have you heard people who are involved with the carceral system say, ‘Oh, somebody caught a case.’ These ACS-impacted moms literally say, ‘Well, I caught an ACS case.’ That language is a thing. 

And another group doesn’t have any idea what ACS is.

What are the harms of overreporting and what are the harms of underreporting [to child protective services]? 

The obvious harm of underreporting is that we may miss children who are in actual danger from parents that abuse their children. 

This whole issue of, ‘out of an abundance of caution, we need to report anything that we suspect might be problematic,’ that’s where the rub lies. We have to figure out how to pull out those issues that are related to poverty. 

The harm of overreporting is that when CPS comes knocking at your door, you are immediately traumatized. The very minute a child is taken from your home for any amount of time, you are immediately traumatized. They then have workers coming in on a regular basis, they’re being mandated to do certain groups and therapy, all kinds of things that don’t relate to the fact that maybe they need some money.

I personally renamed CPS the ‘child poverty surveillance.’ That’s my own little term I’ve made up for them.

You have to be subjective when you’re making a decision about whether or not a child is in danger. And one needs to be really, really reflective about their implicit biases, because [the worry is] a poor Black child will be treated differently than a poor white child. 

You live and work in New York City. Do mandated reporters, like school staff, lean more toward over or underreporting? 

They lean more towards overreporting. 

What messages are those people receiving when they get trained? Is it ‘When in doubt, report?’ Is it, ‘Take every precaution before you do?’ What are folks hearing?

I think they’re hearing, ‘When in doubt, report.’ I think that’s what they’re hearing. 

For the most part, folks are afraid because if you don’t report something and the child ends up really harmed, then the liability is on the mandated reporter. I think they’re being given a double message: ‘When in doubt, report,’ but on the back end, ‘Be careful, because there might not be a need for CPS to be involved.’ 

In schools, especially those that are under-resourced, they don’t have the means to help a family with their basic needs and their financial needs. [Instead], teachers are by law required to report to child protective services. It just makes no sense. The solution does not match the problem. And it causes harm in the meanwhile.

Given the system as it stands, if you are a mandated reporter in a school setting, how do you respond in a way that both protects a child in real danger, but also won’t jeopardize a family for no reason? How do you weigh that judgment call?

It’s hard. 

I had this conversation with my partner who teaches in Philadelphia. He’s not a social worker. I’m a social worker. But he [has to play the role of] a social worker, because he has to do social work as a teacher. 

When something’s going on with a child, my recommendation is to find out what’s happening from the family first. I recommend taking more caution before making a phone call [to the state hotline]. See if you can come up with a solution first. 

That puts a greater burden on teachers because then they end up being social workers as well. So it’s a very fine line, finding out what resources one has at the school, if the nurses or the climate officers or whoever the people are at the school [can help]. 

I’m only speaking about cases where neglect is related to poverty. Now, there are other cases of neglect where a parent intentionally left the child with a child abuser. All the neglect I’m talking about is unintentional. 

Child protective services should not be the go-to for cases of unintentional neglect related to poverty. That phone call should not be made to CPS but to another agency that we just don’t have yet.��