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Gallery: New York City Debuts Nation’s First K-12 Black Studies Curriculum

Marianna McMurdock — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 13:30:00 +0000

Veronica and Odyssey, both six, didn’t get to know their grandparents.

So when their first grade teacher at an Harlem elementary school introduced an activity to learn about their ancestors, the two girls knew immediately who to choose.

Taking turns giggling in a P.S. 125 hallway this fall, they wondered about their grandparents’ lives: where were you born, what is it like? How did you fall in love?

The pair are two of close to one million students being introduced to the nation’s first K-12 Black studies curriculum, rolled out across New York City’s public schools this academic year after a pilot at 120 schools.

Rather than relegating Black history to one month, one self-selected elective course, or one passionate educator, the curricula exposes young people year-round to the stories, lived experiences, and contributions of Black people across the world.

After a concerted push from advocates, educators, and the City Council, schools across New York City, where students are Black, are expanding lessons at each grade level.

“We’re here to tell the truth and to teach the truth,” former New York City Schools Chancellor chancellor David Banks said earlier this year. “Black history is American history. Period. Full stop.”

Its unveiling comes at a pivotal moment in American history, as states like , Florida, and Texas look to limit the inclusion of Black history in the classroom, attempting to dismiss it as teaching kids race or to hate the country that subjected Black families to violence for centuries.

But the words students and educators used in association with New York’s Black studies were consistently positive: joyous, exciting, fun, engaging. For the first time, students are seeing themselves and their perspective of the world in the material.

Sera Mugeta (Marianna McMurdock)

The ancestry lesson at P.S. 125, for instance, built upon a book students had read by Jacqueline Woodson, Show Way, which explains how one person descends from generations of others, and how quilts were one way Black families catalogued that history.

“They really thought about what their ancestors would be like during that time. Not ‘what do you do’ but ‘what are you like? What’s it like back where you were?’ ” said their teacher Sera Mugeta. “They really enjoyed that.”

“It feels really good,” she added, smiling, to be able to bring in the “specific parts of African American history and Black history that are not highlighted in history books and in history classes otherwise.”

After three years of development, the guides and reading lists that comprise Black Studies as the Study of the World are now intended to be a model for schools nationwide.

Developed by a coalition of six organizations, including the City Council’s Black, Latino Asian caucuses, United Way, and Columbia Teacher College’s Black Educator Research Center, “our hope is that it will provide an opportunity to affirm the racial identity of Black children, which I don’t think is happening in a lot of places,” said Sonya Douglass, founding director of Columbia’s BERC.

Teaching Black history allows students “to be able to better understand and celebrate and appreciate the contributions of individuals who came before,” Douglass added.

The work was in part inspired by, “the movement of social justice and reform during the COVID-19 Pandemic and civil unrest of this time,” the coalition said in a press release.

Without the representation, students start to question,“ ‘Oh, why am I not as valuable in the same way?’ ” said P.S. 125 principal Yael Leopold.

Now eighth graders, for instance, can do a three day lesson on investigative journalism, protest, and resistance to lynching as they learn about . The lesson plan starts with prompting small group discussions on her famed quote: “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”

One Brooklyn high school teacher told Douglass a group of black boys, the subset , used to skip class to play basketball regularly.

After incorporating a few lessons, she saw higher attendance and engagement, an overall “desire to be in class and see what was going to be taught the next day.” It is bringing back a curiosity and “joy of learning that I think unfortunately doesn’t exist for far too many Black students.”

Illustration of investigative journalist and activist Ida B. Wells from a TED Ed video resource cited in NYC’s Black Studies curricula.

Lorraine Hansberry’s work A Raisin in the Sun makes an appearance in recommended reading lists for the eighth grade. (Getty Images)

The impact is being felt by young people and educators across the city.

In Queen’s District 28, one eighth grade teacher said, “students were more engaged than ever and even those who usually do not participate had a lot to share and make connections to today.”

A fifth grade teacher in the same district said, “my Haitian students were delighted and were very active in the activity, they had a great sense of pride. Some of my parents offered to come to class to speak about Haiti.”

The impact is unsurprising to scholars familiar with identity development and school engagement: research has long shown students perform better when they feel their experiences are acknowledged in the classroom.

Sonya Douglass

“It is important for us to be able to have that type of education in order to create the type of country that I think many Americans would like to see going forward,” Douglass said, “which is inclusive and diverse.”

A Harlem student giggles while clapping during gospel choir class. (Marianna McMurdock)

Schools across District 5, one of a few New York City districts that’ve been vocal in their commitment to integrating the lessons at each grade, have found ways to incorporate the contributions of Black leaders, visionaries and families for years.

Home to the , the area’s schools like P.S. 125 have been “unapologetic,” said Leopold, in incorporating world histories by default, reflecting the families they serve better than pre-existing social studies curricula.

“What made it an easy transition for us is we were doing so much of that work already that it didn’t feel like an add-on,” she added. “…Our teachers and our educators were yearning for more.”

P.S. 125 principal Yael Leopold (Marianna McMurdock)

The school already adopts monthly themes like Black joy and liberation. They introduce their elementary schoolers to jazz, gospel choir, and African drumming.

“We’re trying to build all of our children to be advocates and agents for social change,” Leopold said. “That will only happen if they have the opportunity to be exposed to those things – all children.”

Deicy Solis’ classroom in P.S. 125 features colorful papel picado banners, a tribute to her Mexican heritage. (Marianna McMurdock)

The culture of change trickles down into small decisions, like ensuring the skintones of cartoon hands to use for classroom posters used for counting or storytelling aren’t always white by default.

And at the end of each lesson plan in the city’s curriculum, a question prompts educators to reflect on their own biases: “how will you maintain high expectations for all students?”

Through monthly professional development sessions at their school and separate offerings through BERC, educators like Sera and kindergarten teachers Michelle Allen have become more confident in both the subject matter and how to facilitate the classroom conversations in ways that are developmentally appropriate.

Daniel Calvert (Marianna McMurdock)

“It’s something I wish I had as a kid,” said Assistant Principal Daniel Calvert. “I wish I had the tools and the license as a teacher to figure out how to apply things that matter to me, as an educator and as a person, into my teaching.”

Allen, for instance, starts first by introducing, what is Africa? Breaking down what students already have heard or think they know about a place, showing them maps and how maps can be distorted, is a helpful starting point before they go deeper into particular cultures or traditions.

One family, from Eritrea, after witnessing the activities happening throughout the school asked if they could come in and do a tea ceremony for the students.

“In that way, respecting the families’ cultures creates a stronger community that maybe had the Black curriculum not been here, it might have not fostered that same thing,” said Allen. “It does give you something to lean back on.”

The work is being noticed in other parts of the country. California’s Long Beach School District is now in talks with BERC to develop a summer program. Columbia University’s Gordon Institute has received half a million dollars to work on what will ultimately be a Latino curriculum. And the City Council recently freed up $750,000 in additional funding for educators’ training.

“The heavy lift is really going to be the training and professional development because this is content and information that I would say a majority of educators have not had access to because it’s not required in our K-12 education system,” Douglass said.

Odyssey, photo taken by Veronica

For now, in Harlem, the rollout feels like an honoring — of the place, its people, and the work of its educators.

“The best part has been it feels like we’re rebuilding trust with the community that really had been in some ways lied to and bamboozled for many generations in terms of public education,” principal Leopold said, adding that Black studies is, “allowing our children to find joy in their learning and in themselves.”

Scenes From a NYC School Serving 267 Migrant Children

Marianna McMurdock — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 11:15:00 +0000

Each morning within a three-block radius of Queens, hundreds of newly arrived migrant families prepare their children for school in hotel rooms without kitchens.

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.

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“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.

Last spring, VOICE hosted a “Parade of Nations” night celebrating foods and traditions from families’ home countries. (Courtesy of VOICE Charter School)

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 ��.

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

No More Cops in Schools: How the Pandemic Delayed Push to Rethink Student Safety

Eileen Grench — Sun, 05 Sep 2021 18:01:00 +0000

This story was August 22 by .

The restart of fully in-person public school classes in less than a month will bring the return of nearly a million students — along with more than 4,000 school safety agents.

That’s reignited a raging debate over what role, if any, cops should have in classrooms, at a time when many children are especially vulnerable and anxious as the city slowly emerged from the COVID crisis.

Last summer, following mass protests against over-policing, Mayor Bill de Blasio promised to shift oversight of school safety agents from the NYPD to the Department of Education by June 2022 — a move by the agents and decried by advocates who want them removed altogether.

Now, two years since the last “normal” first day of school, the argument over what keeps kids safe is being heated by physical-distancing and pandemic-related mental-health concerns, a historic reckoning on police brutality and a spike in shootings as the economy and social programs falter.

“We’re really concerned about the emphasis on return to ‘normal,’ because what was considered normal really wasn’t working well for a lot of kids,” said Johanna Miller, director of the New York Civil Liberties Union’s Educational Policy Center, which has long fought to remove police from schools.

“We’re really worried that there’s not enough energy spent on thinking about how to make the system safer, better, kinder for every kid,” said Miller.

Disparities in Who Gets Policed

According to the NYCLU, Black and Hispanic children were the subject of nearly 90% of police interventions at schools in the 2018-19 school year, the last full pre-pandemic academic year, and 90% of arrests in 2019. Black and Hispanic students, meanwhile, made up .

Overall, arrests and restraints of schoolchildren had been falling before the pandemic, according to and .

Much of that can be attributed to Mayor Bill de Blasio, who despite his to completely disband the school police force, has supported a few reforms.

In 2019, City Hall, the DOE and the NYPD signed to limit the circumstances under which school staff should call safety agents or when those agents could make arrests. The mayor and previous Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza also pushed for limiting and taking a “restorative justice” approach to discipline.

Social justice advocates note that, despite these reforms, use of force by school safety agents continues to be disproportionately leveled against children of color. The NYCLU’s analysis of the NYPD data points out that “since the implementation of the new MOU in summer 2019, the proportion of [school safety agent] incidents involving Black and Latinx students actually slightly increased.”

And this past June, a of city policing data by the nonprofit Advocates for Children showed that police involvement in “child in crisis” incidents — where students are taken to hospitals in response to emotional distress — were on the rise pre-pandemic. They’d risen from 2,700 incidents in the 2016-2017 school year to about 3,500 incidents in the 2017-2018 school year, the Daily News first reported.

There were particularly high rates for Black students and for those in schools that serve youth with special needs.

But proponents of school policing still say that safety agents are necessary to protect students from harm.

‘Walking Into a Jail’

to a particularly terrifying moment of violence in April when 17-year-old Devonte Lewis was and killed outside Urban Dove Charter School in Midwood, Brooklyn. As a charter school, it does not employ NYPD safety agents.

Jai Nanda, the executive director of Urban Dove, contends that the shooting should not be a part of the school safety debate.

“Because the people who shot the student were not students in our school, it didn’t happen in our school, it didn’t happen during school. So it’s a little bit misleading,” Nanda told THE CITY. “We could have had five police officers in our building and they wouldn’t have been at the scene of this.“

Urban Dove does bag checks, and uses metal-detecting wands, but only employs one outside security guard, according to the school.

Liyah Rivera, 19, a senior who was there the day of shooting, initially appreciated the lack of NYPD safety agents.

When the Brownsville teen first transferred to Urban Dove, it was a relief not to feel “like walking into a jail,” she said.

Rivera previously attended Brooklyn’s Franklin K. Lane High School, which has a heavy presence of police officers at its Cypress Hills campus.

There, Rivera and her peers had to constantly “check your back” because they believed safety agents played favorites, even “allowing children to fight, kind of amping it up,” she told THE CITY.

Since the shooting, Rivera said she’s “50/50” in terms of whether safety agents should be present in schools, but she’d like to see a more community-oriented strategy toward stemming violence.

‘A Sanctuary of the Mind’

In a June survey of city youth by the nonprofit Citizens’ Committee for Children, nearly 45% of young New Yorkers surveyed said police made them feel safer — a sign that despite protests, students’ opinions on school cops .

Still, another of New Yorkers 21 and under in April by the Urban Youth Collaborative found that 76% of respondents ranked security officers as the last area they would invest in at school, and nearly two-thirds wanted school cops removed.

In that same survey, 78% of Black students reported having or knowing someone who had a negative experience with school police.

Dariel Infante, a 17-year-old high school student in Queens, told THE CITY in Spanish that his own experiences as an immigrant in a heavily policed high school made him decide that safety agents are more harmful than helpful.

“When we immigrants see the police, we get scared, sometimes we panic … if we do something and the police don’t like it, if we disrespect them, our immigration status in this country could be at risk,” the Dominican Republic-born teen said.

Infante said he’s seen incidents where calm students were driven to panic by gruff treatment from school safety agents at his school. He wishes there were more counselors than cops.

“School should be a sanctuary, a sanctuary for the mind,” he said, adding that’s why he’s participated in multiple protests against school policing.

De Blasio Refunds the Police

After the city exploded into protests against police brutality in May 2020 following the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis cop, from protesters like Infante grew louder than de Blasio could ignore.

Unlike some other major cities like and , which disbanded their school safety programs in the wake of the Floyd protests, de Blasio left New York’s safety agent budget, staffing numbers and limited oversight largely untouched.

But the mayor did pledge to move the oversight of school safety agents from the NYPD back to the city’s Department of Education for the first time since 1999.

He also promised to fund an additional 500 social workers at city schools in his new budget unveiled in July, as well as create 100 new so-called for high-needs children, where students would have direct access to social services by local nonprofits. De Blasio also used federal dollars to boost tutoring programs.

But the mayor has been criticized for making the transition slowly — and the program’s ultimate fate will with Democratic mayoral candidate Eric Adams, a former police captain.

The mayor’s office did not respond to requests for comment, but a DOE spokesperson said the moves are in progress.

“We are well on our way to hiring over 500 new social workers and adding over 100 more community schools to ensure every student has a caring adult to go to when in crisis,” the spokesperson, Nathaniel Styer, wrote in a statement to THE CITY.

Styer did not say whether the social workers would be in place by Sept. 13, the first day of school.

“Our years of focus on the social, emotional, and mental health of our students means a safe and welcoming reopening for all students,” he said.

School safety agents themselves have already seen some changes since the mayor’s announcement: They were required to undergo training in conflict resolution, restorative justice and implicit bias last spring — part of the eventual transition, according to the education department.

But the coming new school year presents “many challenges,” said Gregory Floyd, president Teamsters Local 237, the union that represents safety agents.

He pointed to a shortage of 650 agents compared to the last full school year and uncertainty over coronavirus mandates that “are viewed as inadequate by some,” he told THE CITY.

His members are dealing with “critics who contend that they have no place in those buildings,” fueling mental stress in an already demanding job, he added.

“School safety agents will try to ignore the critics and meet the challenges to help recover, return, and restore a sense of normalcy to the more than one million public school students,” said Floyd.

The NYPD said it’s “working with City Hall and the Department of Education regarding staffing vacancies of school safety agents,” but referred questions on the logistics of school safety work in the time of COVID to the Mayor’s Office, which did not respond.

Opting Out

At least one young Brooklynite won’t be present on the first day of school because of the policing question. His mother felt that the way school cops harshly interacted with her second-grader in a local public school was enough to remove him from the public school system completely.

“I used tovolunteer in a prison, and it’s a horrible place, and the schools really, in a lot of ways are not so different,” said Camille Acey, 40, the director of a tech company who has now joined a Brooklyn homeschooling resource center.

She said while friends’ children in private school reported getting a warm reception and bagels when starting school, her son’s experience was starkly different.

“These children just [are] getting normalized about someone sort of barking orders at them and making demands of them, that sometimes even defy the wishes of their parents,” she told THE CITY. “It’s just really scary to me, so I just wanted to keep my kid close and away from people like that.”

How the Fight Over Reopening Schools Is Shaping the New York City Race for Mayor

Yoav Gonen — Tue, 18 May 2021 15:01:00 +0000

This story was May 12 by THE CITY.

With many public schools still offering part-time in-person learning or no live instruction at all, some mayoral candidates are casting for votes from frustrated parents — and finding a tricky test that’s not so easy to pass.

At the head of the class: Democrat Andrew Yang, who has been advocating for schools to fully reopen for all students, five days per week come September — making it among his campaign priorities.

Yang set course in March, when he complained a return to in-person learning following a pandemic move to remote instruction was happening too slowly. He — only to later when unsuccessfully seeking the United Federation of Teachers’ endorsement.

Rival Maya Wiley followed with a call for every school to immediately open “in person, five days a week.”

Along with candidate Kathryn Garcia, Yang joined parents rallying on May 1 to fully reopen schools.

They were countered by protesters who demanded reforms for safety and equity before more children return to classrooms, noting that families of a majority of city public school students — about 60% — have chosen remote learning.

And last week, Yang held his own campaign event in front of Department of Education headquarters at the Tweed Courthouse on Chambers Street to highlight his commitment to reopening.

“Our kids deserve a very clear vision of reopened schools five days per week, and then a plan to get us there,” Yang said in criticizing de Blasio.

But he acknowledged under questioning from reporters that he, too, hasn’t created a plan.

Like de Blasio, he wants to fully reopen schools five days per week, but is not offering details for how to do it.

Also like de Blasio, he won’t say whether students — including those in communities ravaged and traumatized by the coronavirus pandemic — should continue to be offered the option of fully remote instruction come the fall, as they have for the past year.

“My focus is on getting kids back into the classroom,” Yang said. “I can guarantee that if I am the next mayor, we’ll have a plan well before I take office.”

Two Tracks

Some mayoral candidates have angled to keep both pro-school-opening and opening-concerned parents happy: They say reopen school buildings fully — but keep a remote-learning option available.

At least four top mayoral candidates — Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, former mayoral counsel Wiley, former U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan and Comptroller Scott Stringer — are in that camp.

“While we hope all our students come back in-person, and the mayor should be rebuilding trust with families to make this possible, the city should also be developing a high-quality, well-planned, well-supported remote school option for students and families who so choose, so we do not yet again end up in a scramble at the beginning of next school year,” said Yuridia Pena, a Donovan campaign spokesperson.

The heads of the teachers and principals’ unions also say that providing a remote-learning option will be a necessity.

Garcia, a former Sanitation commissioner, backs remote learning as a possibility for high school students and in other “limited circumstances,” according to officials with her campaign. They declined to elaborate.

The campaign of former Citibank executive Ray McGuire said accommodations should be made for students with medical conditions and “other factors as necessary,” but that the default would be in-person learning.

The campaign of Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive, didn’t respond to inquiries.

Where’s the Remote?

But while many candidates have demanded continued remote learning even as virus infection rates , de Blasio has begun to back away.

The mayor initially said in March that he expected virtual instruction to be offered for some students come fall. Since then, however, he and Department of Education officials whether fully remote learning will actually happen.

On May 7, he declined to answer again when asked on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show.

“We’re planning for every child to be back. We will pay attention in the meantime to what happens with the health care situation, what our health care team says, we’ll certainly be engaging parents, but it’s plan A,” the mayor said. “Plan A is every single child back in school.”

A full return to school buildings would resolve a pile of remote-learning problems.

Last year’s bumpy transition to remote learning suffered from a host of problems that included and . also emerged as schools had to find enough teachers to cover different groups of students coming to classrooms on different days during hybrid learning, on top of the remote option.

Some parents and students were also upset to learn that many middle and high schools were teaching remotely even when students were in classrooms — an approach derided as “.” One reason: 28% of teachers have received pandemic medical accommodations to teach remotely through June 30.

But a full return to in-person learning will also require newly recalibrated safety measures that have yet to be determined. Disruptions to in-person learning were a for parents and students until the city last month stopped in the building. With a threshold now at four cases, no schools are currently closed.

No Confidence

City Councilmember Mark Treyger (D-Brooklyn), a former educator, said that while schools have been relatively safe when it comes to COVID cases, the city bungled the current school year to such an extent that many families have no confidence in declarations of safety.

“The reality is, New York City parents and families should not be punished for lacking trust in a system that was not very collaborative and transparent — certainly at the rollout of the multiple starts to the school year,” said Treyger, who chairs the Council’s education committee.

East Harlem mom Kaliris Salas said that reality — combined with the disproportionate impact of COVID on Black and brown communities like hers — is getting overlooked by those most ardently pushing for schools to reopen.

Salas, the Community Education Council president of District 4 in Manhattan, helped organize the counter-protest that greeted Yang and Garcia at the May 1 rally. The candidates were invited by a group called Keep NYC Schools Open and the Harlem Jets, a local student sports organization.

Salas noted that her neighborhood had higher than average rates of COVID-related deaths than the rest of the borough, while it has among the lowest vaccination rates.

She said the families need to hear more about safety protocols before they’ll consider sending their kids back to school.

“We have a lot of kids that were OK and now they’ve lost nine, 10 family members and are anxious about going into school buildings,” said Salas, who has a son in fourth grade at Central Park East 1 elementary school.

“A lot of Black and mixed families, a lot of immigrant families, have chosen to stay remote because that’s the safest option for them,” she added.

‘The Hardest Year’

Daniela Jampel, 37, helped found Keep NYC Schools Open after all schools shuttered in November as COVID rates rose. She said her now 7-year-old daughter was traumatized by the challenges of learning remotely largely on her own, and by the uncertainty of whether school would be open for in-person instruction.

She said her daughter attended just two days of school in January after elementary buildings reopened — but is finally flourishing since returning to school full time in late April.

“This year has been for me and for my children and for many parents and many children the hardest year of our lives,” said Jampel, who lives in Washington Heights.

She said it makes sense for remote learning to continue to be available for students with medical needs. But she added she believes children affected by the fear surrounding COVID could be supported at schools by mental health professionals, social workers and guidance counselors.

“By having an on-demand remote option, the city is reinforcing the idea that our schools are unsafe, and I don’t think that’s true,” said Jampel. “I think it’s important for as many children as possible to have an in-person learning experience.”

Meanwhile, a group of over two dozen public school parents sought a last week against the city, de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Meisha Ross Porter seeking to compel them to resume in-person instruction for all students five days per week.

The parents say city officials are depriving their kids of the right to a sound, basic education that’s guaranteed in New York’s constitution.

Comfort Level Sought

United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew is among those who say the biggest obstacle to a return to in-person learning is the reluctance of families. He added that the issue isn’t getting enough attention from de Blasio — nor from some of the mayoral candidates pushing to fully reopen schools.

“An idea is one thing — how do you actually make it work? How do you help people get to that comfort level with so much fear and anxiety built into what we’ve been through?” said Mulgrew. “That’s what we need to hear about. Not ‘I want to open the schools fully.’”

He urged the city to host open houses at schools in the coming weeks to begin to address the anxiety of families and teachers, and he’s advocating for a public campaign to help convince families the schools are safe.

Mulgrew said remote learning should be offered by application rather than by opting in, with criteria such as medical necessity. He suggests a goal of capping enrollment at 10% of students. And he wants such a program run centrally rather than by individual schools.

Principals union president Mark Cannizzaro said most of his membership would prefer to program their own virtual instruction, except when it makes sense to combine resources because of a shortage of teachers in certain subjects.

He’d like to see all students return in person come the fall, but he understands why some families would choose remote learning.

“I would love for us to get to a point where that’s not an option, because I think kids belong in school,” he said. “I just don’t see the ability right now to not have that option.”

Both he and Mulgrew emphasized that no matter what de Blasio decides, he needs to pull the trigger soon — or else the that plagued the opening of the 2020 school year would repeat again this September.

“The key is we can’t wait — we can’t wait for this decision to be made,” said Cannizzaro. “You’d think the lessons of the past would have informed them going forward. But apparently they haven’t.”

Awkward: Families at Top NYC HS Outraged as Bill Cosby Featured in Comedy Lesson

Reuven Blau — Mon, 10 May 2021 20:30:00 +0000

Get essential education news and commentary delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up here for ��’s daily newsletter. This story was May 5 by THE CITY.

On May 3, Brooklyn Technical High School offered a “social and emotional learning day,” an opportunity for students and teachers alike to share offbeat lessons.

One chemistry teacher offered a “classic comedy” Zoom class.

The focus? Bill Cosby.

Some parents of teens who signed up for the 45-minute remote session offered by at the top selective public high school were furious after they found out about the lesson hours later.

Cosby is “a convicted sex offender,” one parent wrote on the Brooklyn Tech Parents Facebook group. “My son says that was not mentioned at all. Head exploding.”

‘What Were You Thinking?’

Janessa Wilson, whose daughter attends the Fort Greene school but did not sign up for the elective class, was so upset she alerted the assistant principal for Parent and Student Engagement.

“I am the parent of an outgoing senior, and am beyond appalled at your idea of ‘social and emotional learning,’” Wilson emailed on May 3.

“What were you thinking?” she asked. “What precisely will be done to rectify this stunning abdication of any moral responsibility on the administration’s part?”

Nottingham dismissed her questions and suggested that she reach out directly to Harkavy.

“I’m sorry but to whom are you speaking?” Nottingham responded, according to emails obtained by THE CITY. “I do not speak to anyone this way nor do I accept it from anyone.”

She added: “Feel free to ask clarifying questions when ready or ask the teacher that chose the session.”

On May 5, Katie O’Hanlon, a Department of Education spokesperson, told THE CITY the lesson — titled “Classic Comedy: Bill Cosby” — was a “clear lapse of judgement” and “should never have been offered.”

She noted the class, extolling the comedy of a once-beloved entertainer now serving a three- to 10-year sentence on conviction of sexually assaulting a woman in his home, was an optional virtual session.

The principal will meet with Harkavy and this incident will be recorded in the teacher’s file, she added.

Harkavy, who has taught at the school for 18 years, defended the class, noting it was voluntary. He said he hasn’t heard from any supervisor.

“I did mention at the beginning of the session that he’s a reprehensible man but his work was funny and clean,” Harkavy said, adding 34 students signed up for the class.

“The man may be foul but his comedy is not,” he said.

Art and Artist

The social and emotional learning day is normally a way for teachers to highlight usually lighter, non-academic subjects.

Another Brooklyn Tech teacher held a Zoom session on the show “The Office” during which kids watched “appropriate” scenes to “lighten up our day,” according to the curriculum posted for students.

Brooklyn Tech in Fort Greene (Ben Fractenberg / THE CITY)

As for the Cosby class, one academic noted it can be difficult to separate the art — in this case comedy — from the artist.

“I don’t think there’s an answer,” said Erica Chito Childs, chair and professor of sociology at Hunter College.

“There’s always going to be a debate about that,” she added. “Can we appreciate someone’s art?”

In the case of Cosby, it’s important to think about how angry his sexual assault victims would feel about the class, she said.

In April 2018, Cosby was convicted by a jury of drugging and sexually assaulting a woman who came to his home. The 83-year-old creator of the Brooklyn-set “Cosby Show” has been accused of sexual misconduct by dozens of women.

One education academic saw an opportunity for a “teachable moment.”

“When we look back at any art, it now becomes fraught,” said David Bloomfield, a professor of education leadership, law and policy at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

“We ask all the time now: Can we look at art without it being tainted by the artist’s personal life?”

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