Though total enrollment in city schools fell by 3.2 percent, the number of homeless-identifying students increased by 3.3 percent. Those 104,000 students include 29,000 who spent time in shelters, 69,000 temporarily sharing housing with others, and approximately 5,500 who were unsheltered—living in cars, parks, or abandoned buildings.
“Though outdoors strategies are a great and necessary option, there remains a serious need for innovation and creativity to generate excellent air quality in spaces that are enclosed, covered, or conventionally ‘indoors’ and hold more than groups of 10. From elevators to heated tents, indoor air quality will be a significant factor in our society’s health care.”
“There is a looming youth mental health crisis that must be addressed, and the professionals who educate our children have the knowledge and skills to help our young people. Suspending struggling youth only compounds the crisis, and we must reimagine school discipline to ensure that all students, regardless of race or ability, can thrive in their schools.”
The Fair Student Funding Formula, used to distribute the majority of New York City’s education budget to each of its 1,600 public schools, has been criticized for failing to provide enough funds to students who need it most, including those in temporary housing and in the foster care system. A working group has until the end of October to recommend changes.
A bill that would require high school students across the state to take a personal finance course has been introduced a number of times in the Albany legislature dating back to 2009, but has yet to pass. “This is something that every kid kind of needs to do, and we are kind of thrown into doing it on our own time, without any guidance,” said Anisha Singhal, a senior at Stuyvesant High School who’s pushing more schools to teach financial skills.
“The story of public housing has been engulfed by stereotypes and misconceptions. Facts have been distorted. Nuance has been lost. Residents’ real-life accounts have been reduced to tropes of exceptionalism or tragedy—or forgotten altogether.”
City Limits, a nonprofit news organization that’s been covering New York for 46 years, is now accepting applications from high school students for CLARIFY, its paid youth journalism training program for the fall of 2022.
El Departamento de Educación comenzará un programa para ampliar el tipo de ayuda que reciben los estudiantes de de hogares no angloparlantes que están aprendiendo inglés (English Language Learners o ELL por sus siglas en inglés) en las escuelas de transferencia existentes, que atienden a los estudiantes que están atrasados en los cursos o necesitan un apoyo adicional para el aprendizaje.
The Department of Education will kick off a program to expand the type of aid ELL students receive at existing transfer schools, which serve students who are behind on credits or need additional learning support. But the agency has yet to specify which schools will get those extra resources this school year, which starts next week.
At a virtual rally on Sunday, parents, young people and advocates in the city and across the state shared stories about the impact of the pandemic and renewed calls for elected officials to invest more in behavioral health programs and services for children and teens, which experts say have been underfunded for years and are now at a breaking point, with increased demand spurred by the coronavirus crisis.
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