Please help us win an AI moratorium, and news on the budget & mayoral control

1. Our AI Moratorium Coalition has attracted the attention of the media and the administration, but we need your help to ensure that NYC kids’ safety and privacy are secured and they receive the rigorous, human-centered education they deserve.

Please fill out this brief survey to let us know what schools and districts your children attend and what skills you might be willing to offer, so that together we can achieve the AI moratorium that our children so desperately need.

2. The state education budget was finally resolved almost two months late, and NYC schools will receive an additional $538 million, including supplements for homeless students and English Language Learners. Meanwhile, negotiations to extend the timeline in the class size law are still ongoing. We have no idea what Mayor Mamdani’s plans are to eventually achieve the smaller classes required by law, or whether if he has a real class size plan at all.

Nevertheless, Mayoral control was renewed for another two years unchanged. And though Mamdani promised to be more responsive to parents and community concerns, he and his administration have continued the reckless expansion of AI in the face of fierce opposition, and just announced the adoption of several new packaged curriculums costing $17.3 million with no public input, no independent evidence of positive results, and no discussion of whether they use AI or will require even more screen time.

3. The city also cancelled many contracts with trusted afterschool providers and switched schools to new providers, without consulting parents or principals.   In short, the new Mayor and Chancellor have a long way to go to build trust with the community, because so far we don’t see any significant changes from the top-down policies of the past.

4. On a page on their website, the DOE quietly confirmed that the recent nationwide Canvas breach did affect some NYC public schools but refused to name those schools or identify how many students had their personal data hacked. They also failed to say if the privacy of former NYC students was also affected – which occurred in the case of both the Illuminate and PowerSchool breaches, showing that the DOE has failed to exert the proper oversight by requiring their vendors to minimize and delete data when it is no longer needed, as mandated by state law. In addition, they are apparently allowing schools to continue the use of Canvas, even though the massive hack by cybercriminals revealed that Instructure, which owns Canvas, had not maintained sufficient data security protections.

5. One positive development: District 6 parents led by the dynamic Olympia Kazi have organized a much-needed break from computers and screens this coming week at their 38 elementary and middle schools, serving more than 10,000 students . An article about this is here; and more details are offered at their website here.   Let’s hope this terrific initiative becomes a model for other NYC schools and districts to follow.

But please take a few minutes to fill out our survey here, and thanks!