Mayor Eric Adams: Thank you. Thanks so much, Phil, Deputy Mayor Banks. I really want to thank our school chancellor, David Banks, and our police commissioner, Eddie Caban. You have heard me state over and over again if you don't educate, you will incarcerate.
And the numbers bear that out. 80 percent of the men and women on Rikers Island on my last check don't have a high school diploma or an equivalency diploma, and some of them are there because, I always state, is the betrayal of our education system that has a downstream mindset. Any time you have a system where 30 to 40 percent of those who are incarcerated are experiencing learning disabilities like dyslexia, we create a pathway for imprisonment and not a pathway for careers.
And that's why we are all here together. One of the first things we did was to create a relationship between our police department and the Department of Education. Chancellor Banks and the former police commissioner Keechant Sewell ensured that the commanders had regular meetings and check ins with the principals of schools and superintendents.
That developed an amazing relationship, and it's not lost on me that we have not had one shooting on school property or inside a school building. As we have witnessed mass shootings and shootings across the country inside school buildings, we have not had a shooting in a school building in the City of New York, and I think it has a lot to do with that collaboration. But we've always talked about our upstream approach, and Chancellor Banks will go into some of the upstream approaches that we are implementing, not only last year but during this school year in the development of the full personhood of our children on so many different levels.
He gave me a briefing this morning, and I'm excited as we start the new school year. With all the challenges that we are facing, it is clear to us that we are ready to accept those challenges. If you start a school year hoping everything is going to be smooth without any bumps in the road, you're setting yourself up for disappointment. We must adjust to those bumps, pivot and shift and make sure that we can create a safe environment, we can educate our children and have a productive year in school. We can't fail our schools. It produces negative effects down the line, and it's something that we're going to continue to fight to move our children in the right direction.
New York City school children deserve to learn, just also just to be kids. School should be fun, enjoyable. They should be excited about meeting their friends and introducing themselves to new friends. And when the first day of school is just around the corner, I want to be clear that we are creating a school system where every child cannot just survive but the child could thrive. When we invest upstream, our children will invest in the city's future. And since day one, this administration has believed that, and we'll continue to lean into that.
I was extremely proud when the chancellor instituted the universal dyslexia screening program. Look at the numbers: over a half a million students have gone through a level of some form of screening; and when you identify those 1,500 approximately that were indicators that we need to drill down on, we were catching them upstream to give them the services that they deserve. No child should go through what I went through waiting until college before identifying that I had a learning disability. We need to stop the pipeline, and that's what this chancellor is committed to do in partnership with our police commissioner.
And reading and math are the foundation of everything we do, so we are making a historic shift in the way we teach our young people reading and math through New York City Reads. This is an extremely exciting pivot in what we have been doing for far too long: making literacy, reading and math instruction the core focus of our public schools. But now for some of our children, the breakfast and lunch they eat at school are their only meals. Think about that, breakfast and lunch for many of our children is the most important meal for them, and it is the most stable meal that they receive.
We are taking a giant step forward to making sure our students have access to healthy, nutritious meals that are culturally appropriate is vital to keeping our young people New Yorkers in school. I don't think there's ever been a student in the history of the New York City public school system that did not say that the school meals are terrible. We want to turn that around. We want them to enjoy the meals, to be part of the engagement, looking at the cafeterias, changing the lunchroom experience. And I was really impressed this morning during the briefing when Chancellor Banks talked about how he sat down with students and had lunch with them, engaged in not academic but engaged in just everyday conversation, and he encouraged the principals that we had this morning to do the same.
We want to make sure that every student who graduates from a New York City school will have a clear pathway to the future. That is why we are leading the way with programs like Summer Youth Program, Summer Rising program and Future Ready New York City program. We also want to make sure that recreation is solid and safe with our Saturday Night Lights program, is helping keep them in a safe space and using existing school buildings to do so. Our schools are important, and we are clear that every zip code, every block, every neighborhood, every child should have an opportunity, regardless of their background, regardless of the language they speak, regardless of which culture they have.
And we know the challenge we're facing this year in particular. We're dealing with thousands of students that are part of the migrant and asylum seekers. The chancellor did not sit back and wait. His team spent the entire summer making sure that we can make some of the technical changes within the department, the New York City public schools, to provide the proper instruction, education, language possibilities and translation, all of those services we took into account throughout this entire summer. We did not wait and become reactionary; we spent the summer being proactive, and the results will speak for itself. So, again, thank you, Deputy Mayor Banks, and I look forward to engaging in a lively briefing with the press and with the community. Thank you very much.
