Gov. Kathy Hochul said a preliminary budget agreement would allocate roughly $35.9 billion to New York schools — a record high — as state lawmakers closed in on a deal on Monday. Though Hochul announced “the parameters of a conceptual agreement” on a $237 billion state budget, she said that Albany leaders had not yet finalized negotiations over mayoral control. Hochul told reporters she was pushing to extend New York City’s 20-year-old governance model — a move that would keep Mayor Eric Adams at the helm of the nation’s largest school system. “There’s still time to see if we can get this work ..read more

In late 2022, New York City’s Public Schools Athletic League made a bold promise: By the following spring, every public high school student would have access to all 25 sports the league offers. To reach that goal, officials proposed expanding a program called “individual access” that allows students without a particular sports team at their school to try out for that team at a nearby campus. The expansion was a game-changer for schools like the Urban Assembly Bronx Academy of Letters that don’t have enough students to reliably field a wide variety of sports teams, said David Garcia-Rosen, the ..read more

T’Kai Harvey, a sophomore at the City University of New York’s Hunter College, didn’t see college as an option for most of her life. “I come from a very low-income community in the Bronx,” she said. “So I wasn’t going to go to college and financially burden my family.” But in her senior year of high school, Harvey learned about the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, through her school, working with a counselor at her school who helped her complete the forms and secure the financial support she needed to fund her education. Now, Harvey, along with other advocates and some lawma ..read more

Mayor Eric Adams is cobbling together more than $500 million in city and state funding to plug a hole in the Education Department’s budget left by the federal COVID relief funding that’s expiring this year, he announced on Friday. The money will prop up a range of education programs that were set to be cut because of the disappearing federal dollars, including hundreds of social workers, an expansion of free preschool for 3-year-olds, and new staffers working in homeless shelters. By far, this marks the city’s largest commitment to date to replace the dwindling pandemic aid. Adams previously f ..read more

Katelynn Seetaram, a junior at Pace High School in Manhattan, never had much interest in journalism. But when she was placed in a journalism class her freshman year, she was stunned at just how much the course could teach her. She learned to question narratives that spread on social media. She developed a stronger sense of media literacy. And she became more skeptical and curious about the stories unfolding around her. Now, it’s a potential career path that Seetaram hopes to pursue after graduation. “That one class really led me to what I want to do with the rest of my life,” she said. Seetara ..read more

A top Education Department official said on Thursday that schools would not have leeway to skirt a new reading curriculum mandate based on student demographics. “There’s no difference in how we’re implementing based on demographics of kids,” First Deputy Chancellor Dan Weisberg said after a Brooklyn superintendent suggested otherwise. “That’s actually a pretty disturbing suggestion.” New York City is requiring all of its elementary schools to begin using one of three reading curriculums, Chancellor David Banks’ signature education initiative to improve literacy rates. But Chalkbeat report ..read more

A Brooklyn state senator’s push for universal after-school programs is gaining traction among his Albany colleagues. After Zellnor Myrie’s monthslong effort discussing the importance of expanding after-school programs, the state senate tucked a line into its recent spending proposal: “The Senate is interested in exploring pathways to achieving universal coverage for afterschool programming.” Though the senate’s proposal — released in advance of finalizing Gov. Kathy Hochul’s budget due April 1 — is largely symbolic and sets no price tag for such a program, the nod is significant. It ..read more

With the number of adolescents struggling with mental health rising, student-led clubs have come to provide support amid a dearth of resources. Last October, to commemorate Mental Health Awareness Week, a group of students at Sacopee Valley High School in Hiram, Maine, created the annual Hope Board. Shaped like an enormous tulip and displayed in the lobby, the board was covered with anonymous teenage aspirations. Some students hoped to pass driver’s education or have a successful playoff season. Others expressed more complicated desires. “To be more happy than angry,” wrote one student. Ano ..read more

Twelve-year-old Carlo Murray perched on his tiptoes to reach the microphone as he addressed education officials last month. He then unleashed a withering critique of his school’s reading curriculum. “I love to read all sorts of books,” Carlo told the city’s Panel for Educational Policy, a group that approves contracts and other school policies. But this year, his teachers are focusing on short passages, leaving him frustrated and bored. “It feels like I’m getting half an ELA sixth grade experience, half the story, half a piece of writing, only half a curriculum,” Carlo, who attends the Brookly ..read more

Nine new schools will open this fall in New York City, aiming to provide families with more choices on where they enroll their children, schools Chancellor David Banks said Thursday. The new schools will offer a mix of elementary, middle, and high school programs across three of the city’s boroughs. They include a Brooklyn outpost of the successful Bard Early College High School, a Queens high school for careers in film and television, a project-based elementary school modeled on the progressive Brooklyn New School, and the city’s first Montessori-inspired public school. Banks said the ne ..read more