Sign up for our Parent Conference this Saturday, DOE’s new non-class size plan, budget hearings and more!

May 8, 2024

Dear all —

1.     Please sign up for our Parent Action Conference that will be held this Saturday, May 11 at 10:30 AM via Zoom. We will have two fantastic keynote speakers: law professor Natalie Gomez-Velez, the co-author of the excellent NYSED report on Mayoral control, and Sen. John Liu, chair of the NYC Education Committee. We will ask them what steps we should take bto make sure that the school governance system is reformed, now that the Governor squeezed two more years of mayoral control in the budget. Then there will also be fascinating workshops on many important issues to parents and teachers. You can check out the flyer and list of workshops here; but please register today.  You won’t want to miss hearing what our keynoters have to say.

2.     One of the workshops will focus on whether DOE is prepared to comply with the class size law, and today they answered that question. They posted what they called a class size plan which is really no plan at all. See our critique here, with comments from Johanna Garcia, co-chair of the DOE Class Size Working Group, and me.

As required by law, hearings on this non-plan will be held by zoom in every borough from May 22-May 30; links are supposed to be here but has not yet been posted. Legally, every CEC is also supposed to hold hearings on the plan no later than June 20, but no information has yet been made available as to where and when this will occur. We will offer talking points very soon for those who want them.

3.     Finally, the City Council will hold hearings at City Hall on the DOE’s proposed budget and capital plan next Wednesday, May 15, starting at 9:30 AM. You can sign up online here, to provide in- person testimony or via Zoom. If people are interested in testifying, let me know. The DOE still intends to cut the teaching force by nearly 1,000 teachers next year, according to the Mayor’s Executive plan, and to cut the capital plan by over $2 billion dollars – despite the need to lower class size. Moreover, many schools are likely to see their budgets slashed next year, because DOE has refused to hold budgets harmless despite enrollment decline, as they did for the last two years.

But you will hear more about this on Saturday, so please sign up for our conference today.

Thanks, Leonie

Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
124 Waverly Pl.
New York, NY 10011
phone: 917-435-9329
leonie@classsizematters.org
www.classsizematters.org
Follow on twitter @leoniehaimson
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