Please urge the Mayor and Council to use the federal funds to provide our kids with the smaller classes they will need next year!

March 17, 2021

Dear folks —

Please join Class Size Matters and NYC Kids PAC and urge the Mayor and the NYC Council to use one billion dollars of the approximately $2.5 billion in additional funds that NYC schools are due to receive from the federal government next year and the year after to be invested in class size reduction. Our kids will need those smaller classes more than ever before.

This is a chance in a lifetime to ensure that enough funding is spent the right way to make a huge opportunity for NYC children.   Smaller classes will help provide the social distancing they will need for health and safety, and the academic support and close connection they will need to recover from remote learning and all the myriad losses they’ve suffered this year.

More info, including a fact sheet on our proposal, is here. We are also proposing that DOE hire thousands of more school counselors and social workers to achieve a ratio of one for every 250 students – the recommended guidelines for these professions. This would cost another estimated $365 million, which would still leave over $1 billion in federal funds for other uses.

If you agree, please sign our petition here; and then sign up to speak via video at the Council’s Committee on Education preliminary budget hearings next Tuesday, March 23; public testimony starts at noon.

You can sign up here at least 24 hours beforehand and/or send your testimony to testimony@council.nyc.gov up to 72 hours after the close of the hearing. Please copy the testimony to your own City Council member; you can find their emails by filling in your address here. Feel free to copy us at info@classsizematters.org

Here is sample text you can use, but please add or subtract any language you like:

Hello, my name is ____ and I have a child in the ___ grade in [name of public school.]

Please allocate one billion dollars of the federal funds for next year to class size reduction, so that students can have the benefit of smaller classes for both social distancing and stronger academic and social support, which they will need next year more than ever before.   Please make sure that happens, for the sake of my child and the other children in the NYC public schools.

thanks so much, Leonie