Sign our petition urging DOE to implement a real class size plan, without exempting as many as half of all schools!

December 4, 2024

Please sign our petition now to the DOE Chancellor and UFT and CSA Presidents, urging them to develop and implement a real, multi-year plan so that all schools will be able to lower class size within the timeframe mandated by the law.

Right now, DOE is proposing to exempt all overcrowded schools from ever having to provide smaller classes, schools which enroll as many as half of all NYC students. DOE has also suggested other exemptions that are not mentioned in the law. Instead, principals should be allowed to cap their enrollments at lower levels to meet the legal class size limits if there are underutilized schools nearby, and the DOE must be required to accelerate school construction in the neighborhoods where nearly all schools are overcrowded.

I will be discussing more of the problems with DOE’s refusal to put forward a realistic, multi-year class size plan at the next CPAC meeting on Thursday, December 12 at 9:30 AM. You can watch by going to the CPAC YouTube page here. You can also invite me or another member of our team to your next meeting, by responding to this email.

2. I didn’t want to overload you with another appeal yesterday that would further flood your inbox; but I really need to ask for your support today. Please consider giving a tax-deductible donation to Class Size Matters, as much as you can afford. We depend on your support more than ever, as other sources of funding have been drying up. We cannot continue our work without your help.

This year has been a productive one in many ways.

We were successful in the privacy arena, as the Attorney General’s office finally stepped in as to stop the College Board from selling student data, as we’d been asking for years. More recently, we persuaded the DOE Chancellor to establish a Working Group to improve the DOE’s privacy regulations before putting them to a vote.

Last week, City Council Education Chair Rita Joseph grilled representatives of the Department of Health about why they are allowing Talkspace, with whom they have a $26 million contract, to share students’ personal information with the same social media companies that the city is suing for undermining children’s mental health. [For a video of CM Joseph questioning, and my testimony that followed, see here. ]

But our first priority, as always, is to fight for NYC students to be provided with the learning conditions they need to succeed, which can only happen if classes are small enough to allow for sustained personal interaction with their teachers . We are leading the effort to ensure that the DOE is not allowed to evade their moral and legal responsibility to come up with an actual comprehensive class size reduction plan to do just that. So please donate however much you can, so that we can keep working towards that important goal.

And please sign our petition here.

Thanks as always, Leonie

Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
124 Waverly Pl.
New York, NY 10011
phone: 917-435-9329
[email protected]
http://www.classsizematters.org/

Follow on twitter @leoniehaimson