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“Green Schools were actually part of Mayor Mamdani’s campaign platform. They connect so many of the mayor’s priorities: child care, safe work, good jobs, and fixing what’s broken in our day-to-day. But so far, we’ve seen no action.”
Nine months into his term, Mayor Zohran Mamdani is popular. His approval rating is 69 percent among New York City residents, and he’s become known for the novel work of keeping campaign promises, from freezing the rent to delivering a path to universal childcare.
But he’s also doing the less flashy work of making the city run better day to day—fixing a tricky bump at the end of the Williamsburg Bridge bike path, repairing playgrounds, and filling over 200,000 potholes citywide. Reporting on his first 100 days in office back in April, the Mamdani administration gave this competence an apt name: pothole politics.
But there is one area the mayor has surprisingly neglected: our public schools. Nearly 1.2 million New Yorkers step foot in one of the city’s 1,200 school buildings five days a week, for 180 or more days a year. Our schools are also essential community resources, serving as cooling centers, emergency shelters, election poll sites, and meeting spaces for all five boroughs. And yet, they’ve fallen into disrepair. It’s time for pothole politics to mean fixing our schools.
The average New York City public school is 75 years old—nearly double the age of the average school nationwide. That means they have all kinds of problems: mold, lead, and asbestos. Broken and leaking facilities with outdated infrastructure that’s never been replaced. Classrooms, gyms, and cafeterias that overheat in the summer and get drafty in the winter. Buildings filled with stale air and no ventilation that become breeding grounds for sickness and worsening health conditions like asthma. In neighborhoods with higher pollution rates, often in Black, Brown, and immigrant communities, these conditions are far worse due to decades of neglect.
In Gowanus, students have been attending school in a basement contaminated with toxic fumes including the human carcinogen benzene. Long term exposure can have severe health impacts including causing cancer. Just days before the start of the school year, classes were finally moved to a different floor in the same building. In Flatbush, window air conditioners have failed to keep up with record heat waves, leaving teachers and students lethargic and struggling to focus on lessons in sweltering classrooms. And in the Bronx, a child was diagnosed with severe lead poisoning this year when a school was behind on inspections and updates. Are these the conditions our students deserve?
Our schools should be safe and functional, no exceptions. Instead, they’re not only dangerous, but they’re ruining the ability to learn, too—deteriorating conditions are proven to lower test scores, increase absences, and affect student performance.
That’s why ALIGN and the Climate Works for All coalition have been fighting for Green, Healthy Schools. New Yorkers deserve classrooms that are updated for the 21st century, with working facilities that give students, teachers, and school workers the healthy and safe environments they need to thrive. We want classrooms with clean, chemical-free airflow and comfortable temperatures, where kids can focus on their lessons instead of getting sick and missing classes; cafeterias and custodial basements with working air conditioning for hot days in the spring and summer; windows and doors that are properly sealed to keep temperatures comfortable inside; and solar panels across rooftops to power the city with clean energy.
Green Schools were actually part of Mayor Mamdani’s campaign platform. They connect so many of the mayor’s priorities: child care, safe work, good jobs, and fixing what’s broken in our day-to-day. But so far, we’ve seen no action.
Our schools are falling apart and our kids are falling behind. Mamdani’s pothole politics means showing New Yorkers how municipal government can work for them, building trust by making our public services run smoothly. But it’s time for pothole politics to mean more than patching a hole here and a hole there. It’s time to fix our schools.
Scott is the climate director for ALIGN: The Alliance for a Greater New York.