Comptroller Stringer Calls for Expanded Child Care Options and Transparency from DOE in New York City School Reopening Plans

Underscores critical need for innovation in staffing, urges clarity on school schedules and renews call for significant improvements in remote learning

  New York City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer sent a letter to Mayor Bill de Blasio and Department of Education Chancellor Richard Carranza demanding more clarity and transparency around the City’s plans to reopen schools for the 2020-2021 academic year. Comptroller Stringer’s letter underscores the DOE’s responsibility to significantly expand child care options for working families, improve remote learning prior to the beginning of the school year, and outlines concerns about school staffing and scheduling issues that are still lacking sufficient detail. The Comptroller stressed in his letter that addressing these challenges is particularly vital for communities of color, who are disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, more likely to work in frontline industries, and desperately need quality school and child care options in order to survive the economic fallout of this crisis.

The full letter is available below and can be found here.

Dear Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Carranza:

There is no more critical task facing our city right now than re-opening our schools in a manner that is safe for students and staff alike, and that effectively addresses the enormous learning needs of our 1.1 million students. To that end, I was heartened to hear the Administration begin to discuss this week in broad outlines your plans for the fall – a conversation that so many school families, including my own, remain eager to engage in with the hope of bringing more clarity to what school will look like in the fall, and to think through challenges that could be more fully addressed in the near term, before school starts, so that our children and parents can be better served. My office detailed many relevant ideas in our latest report, Strong Schools for All: A Plan Forward for New York City. My hope is that the Administration can continue to answer questions and engage with parents in a manner that is open and transparent.

My purpose in writing today is two-fold: to underscore the DOE’s responsibility to significantly improve remote learning prior to the beginning of the 2020-21 school year, and to outline some core concerns – specifically around the need for expanded childcare options, and school staffing issues – that to date seem lacking in sufficient detail. While I recognize the need to defer certain decisions until closer to the start of school, when the state of the COVID-19 pandemic will be more fully known, these are all issues that we know now will be critical to the success of any back-to-school model, and that can and should be more fully built out as soon as possible. Addressing these issues is particularly vital for our communities of color, who today are confronting not just the pain and loss inflicted by COVID-19 at significantly higher rates than other communities, but are much more likely to work in frontline industries and desperately need quality school and child care options in order to economically survive this period.

Critical need for expanded child care options

A core challenge posed by the DOE’s outlined scheduling options is the need for greatly expanded child care options for working families. And yet information released to date fails to address where children are supposed to go during off days – or even present families with options. Identifying this piece of the puzzle should not be an afterthought or second-tier priority, especially given the dire financial situation many of our city’s child care providers are facing. Like schools, child care programs will have to limit the number of children in each classroom (though State guidelines set that number, inexplicably, higher at 15). But unlike our City schools, child care programs are overwhelmingly privately-run, relying on tuition fees and limited government subsidies to cover expenses, so fewer children means less revenue.

Without access to child care, parents with children in elementary and middle school in particular cannot feasibly return to work and provide for their families and our fragile economy faces enormous threat. The need is especially great for parents with lower incomes who have not been able to transition to remote work and whose jobs – in fields such as construction, retail, home health and domestic work – afford the least flexibility. And as we have seen with all of the impacts of COVID-19, communities of color will again be disproportionately impacted. Indeed, a full 75 percent of our frontline workers are people of color, including 82 percent of cleaning services employees. More than 40 percent of transit employees are Black, while over 60 percent of cleaning workers are Latinx. For these and so many other families, any back-to-school plan that does not acknowledge the absolute necessity of full-day care for children – in addition to shoring up care during “non-traditional” hours – is no plan at all. It is rather inequity and economic disaster on a massive scale.

Already, forced closures and low enrollment due to COVID-19, combined with scant financial aid, has brought the child care sector to a breaking point, and providers alone cannot be expected to make up the lost capacity in schools. We need a real plan to sustain the sector, while also building capacity for safe, out-of-school care across other human service organizations. And we need to provide these options to parents for free. History tells us that it will be women – who comprise the majority of single-parent households and secondary earners and have shouldered the most unpaid care work during the pandemic – who will suffer the most if we don’t.

One promising avenue could be partnering with our many educational- and youth non-profits who have traditionally provided both after-school and summer programming. To help accommodate family schedules, DOE should engage their educational partners in providing off-hour care, homework help, or enrichment programming in available spaces to help families manage staggered school schedules.

To that end, I ask that you provide my office with responses to the following questions:

1. Has the City conducted a needs assessment to identify the capacity for out-of-school weekday care that will be needed, given the different limits on classroom sizes in child care and school?

2. What steps, if any, has DOE taken to engage child care programs, including those not currently publicly-contracted, for their feedback and to assess what capacity may be available to care for children during the days in which they are not scheduled for school-based instruction?

3. Is the DOE planning to issue an RFP for organizations interested in providing programming during non-school days? If so, when should organizations expect for that to be released, how much funding will be allocated, and what training and resources will be provided to support providers in facilitating remote learning?

4. What plans, if any, does the City have to provide additional financial assistance to families and providers for child care, beyond the federal funds the State is drawing down from the CARES Act?

5. What plans, if any, does the City have to require employers to provide accommodations for employees who have a need to schedule shifts around the proposed school hours and/or need time off to pick up or drop off their children?

Schedules and Remote Learning

What’s clear from the proposed schedules that the DOE has released to date is that all of them will require students to engage in significant amounts of remote learning. Indeed, under the three-cohort model, students could be in school as little as one day per week, which in and of itself is a serious concern – both for parents and children. How parents are supposed to work with so little in-school time for their children, and how students are supposed to stay engaged with school when so many of their days will be spent learning remotely, remain critical challenges that the DOE has done little to make easier with its choice of options to date. It’s one reason why I hope the DOE can still consider the possibility of double sessions each day, as the City has successfully done in its past. By splitting the school day in half and allowing some children to attend school in the morning and the rest in the afternoon, students would have some in-school time every day, and parents would have some predictable hours that they could devote to work on a daily basis.

Putting aside that conversation around schedules, there are still very few details about how remote learning will be improved in the fall. Because we are asking families to rely on this method of instruction, we must ensure that it is implemented effectively and consistently across schools, and that families and teachers are given the resources they need to succeed. Given the plans that have been released so far concerning schools in the fall, the educational focus must now be on improving remote instruction, including professional development for teachers, and closing the digital divide for families. Please provide responses to my office, pursuant to my office’s authority under Chapter 5 of the City Charter, to all numbered questions laid out below:

1. What citywide standards for remote learning have been considered or adopted to date? Please include remote learning standards and practices related to, but not limited to, daily attendance, synchronous instruction, and proving feedback on students’ work.

2. Please describe the ways in which you plan to incorporate regular, synchronous instruction for all students who are learning remotely.

3. Please describe the use of any standardized learning platform for remote instruction. Specifically, how will content be created, and how will teachers be trained in using the content for their instruction?

4. Will classroom teachers be responsible for providing live remote instruction each day, in addition to instruction provided in classrooms? If not, who will be leading remote learning, including monitoring attendance, engagement, and feedback for student work?

Need for innovation in staffing

The scheduling options you have presented provide a necessary baseline to a very complex problem. I appreciate that in weighing these options the Department of Education is clearly prioritizing small class sizes in order to maintain safe distances between students and staff. We all agree that the health and safety of every person inside a school building must be our top concern.

However, I also believe that the plans presented this week lack the innovation and vision necessary to meet this moment in our City’s trajectory. It does not have to be this way. The scale of the problem we are facing requires a great deal of investment and creative planning. Ultimately, to adequately meet the needs in classrooms this fall, we need more staff.

There are two primary categories of staffing needed: in-classroom support, and afterschool or child care. By ignoring the needs in either of these areas there will be long-term costs. In addition to my concerns about addressing afterschool child care needs which are documented above, more in-classroom support is necessary for obvious reasons. In the precious few hours students will spend in classrooms each week, there must be a robust level of individualized support to identify and address students’ academic and social-emotional needs. Moreover, many students will spend more time learning at home than they do in classrooms. For these reasons, there must be dedicated staff who can guide remote instruction in tandem with the learning happening in classrooms each day.

I urge you to consider the ideas to build additional capacity in schools that I have laid out in my recent report. While the need for action here is urgent, I believe it remains feasible if we begin the process of recruitment immediately and ask that you provide my office with responses to the options outlined below:

1. Has any thought been given to establishing a large-scale hiring pipeline through a CUNY professional training program for classroom paraprofessionals? CUNY’s community colleges are especially well-positioned to become large-scale job training providers with capacity to quickly develop and offer training for in-classroom assistant positions, based on skills and competencies identified by DOE. To support this, the City should immediately convene instructional leaders to liaise with CUNY, identify existing training programs and work to scale new programs.

2. Has the DOE engaged existing teacher training programs to expand in-classroom experience for teacher candidates? Many current graduate programs already place student teachers in classrooms to gain practical experience. These programs could be adjusted to extend the length of time student teachers are working in classrooms. Teaching residency programs – where aspiring teachers are placed in classrooms for a full year prior to being certified – should be immediately expanded.

3. Have steps been taken to leverage educational non-profit partners to provide in-classroom supports? DOE works with numerous educational non-profits that provide afterschool and extracurricular programming. It is critical that these partnerships are preserved and that high-quality afterschool programming continues to be available for students. Where possible, some non-profit partnerships may also be able to provide in classroom support during the school day.

School Nurses

A public health crisis is no time to allow a long-standing school nursing shortage to continue. This circumstance is wholly unacceptable, and we must assure every family that their child attends a school with a full-time nurse on staff. For far too long, the City has relied on temporary staffing to cover gaps in school nursing positions, but this is an unsatisfactory solution. Temporary nurses cannot access a student’s medical history, an essential tool in providing adequate care in a school setting. To better understand the scope of the need, please provide my office with the following information:

1. A detailed breakdown, by school, of full-time nursing staff available, and the primary agency (for example, Department of Education or Department of Health and Mental Hygiene) responsible for hiring.

2. A description of any plans currently underway to recruit and/or train school nursing staff.

Lastly, it is my understanding that the City is conducting an inventory of schools for all available spaces that could be used as classrooms. To maximize the benefit of all available areas, it is my strong recommendation that your search includes non-DOE sites. City-owned properties, such as libraries and community centers, may be easier to convert into weekday child care centers or even classroom spaces. Private spaces, such as theaters or shared office spaces, and outdoor areas such as parks or streets blocked off from traffic surrounding schools, could also be considered for possible retrofitting and temporary space for classrooms, afterschool, or childcare. Recent news of the closure of 11 Catholic schools in the New York Archdiocese across the five boroughs presents a further opportunity of valuable space for the 2020-21 school year.

Again, I appreciate the complexity of these issues and recognize there is no perfect plan for re-opening schools. But that should not prevent a robust and public discussion of ideas, as well as the transparent release of data that can help to inform the road ahead. Parents, teachers and students alike must all be part of this conversation if the city is going to succeed in re-opening schools, and the time to have that conversation is now. Thank for your attention to these matters and I look forward to your responses.

Sincerely,

Scott M. Stringer

New York City Comptroller