As asylum seekers continue arriving in NYC, some face school enrollment delays
As scores of asylum-seeking families continue arriving in New York City, the city’s efforts to quickly enroll their children in public schools are often failing to keep pace, according to families, advocates, and education department staffers. The mammoth task of managing the new arrivals’ school enrollment has been hampered by insufficient staffing, inexperienced shelter operators, […]
As school leaders, we need to create opportunities for our teachers as well as our students
More than a decade ago, while running a high-performing school that I loved, a small moment forever shifted how I lead. As a Black woman who was a teenage mother and had dropped out of high school, I was proud of my career and taking great care to figure out what was next. While at […]
Food fight — the battle for better school lunches
In 1946, President Harry Truman signed the National School Lunch Act. It aimed to “provide nutritionally balanced, low-cost or free lunches to children each school day.” More than 60 years later, Michelle Obama championed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which required schools to provide students with healthier lunches. Since 2017, New York City has provided […]
NYC school bus service will run uninterrupted next week, despite looming strike: union official
New York City’s yellow school bus services will not face disruptions from a bus worker strike next week as the new academic year begins, union officials confirmed Friday. The news comes after weeks of tense negotiations between the Amalgamated Transit Union, which represents about half of New York City’s public school bus drivers and attendants, […]
Help kids’ mental health through their schools
The pandemic only exacerbated rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts among youth that were already on the rise. A recent national poll by Effective School Solutions found that 90% of school administrators say the youth mental health crisis is growing. Derrick was a bright, warm 15-year-old who started experiencing debilitating anxiety and depression, and […]
This Manhattan adult learning center is seeing a surge in African asylum seekers
The case manager’s office at Harlem’s Mid-Manhattan Adult Learning Center was crowded, primarily with Senegalese men in their late 20s and 30s. Fatou Kane, the school’s community coordinator, picked up the student sign-in sheet that February afternoon, and with the aid of Patrick Duff, the case manager, started triaging the students’ problems. Some of the […]
NYC is mandating new reading curriculums. This teacher had a head start.
Second-grade teacher Janina Jarnich was focused on bats. As her students gathered on the classroom rug one June morning, she instructed them to flip through their workbooks and take their “magic finger” to trace the words from an article about the nocturnal pollinators. Her students read aloud in unison about the dangers humans pose, from […]
Only 1 in 3 NYC schools are fully accessible to students with physical disabilities, report says
Fewer than one in three New York City public schools are fully accessible to students with physical disabilities, according to a report released Wednesday by Advocates for Children that calls on the city to ramp up funding for building upgrades. With the city expected to release its initial five-year capital plan for schools in November, […]
