We danced. We harvested snap peas. We mucked out the chicken coop & gathered the eggs. We talked to recent high school grads volunteering to help 1st graders at their old elementary school. 

This week I had the pleasure of visiting the “Summer Rising” program at the Brooklyn New School in Carroll Gardens with Chancellor Meisha Porter. 

There have been some hiccups as the new universal summer program was rolled out over the past few weeks. It hasn’t been easy for the Department of Education and the Department of Youth & Community Development to integrate “school” and “camp” activities. Schools weren’t sure how many students to expect, and nonprofit vendors haven’t always had clear guidance. 

But you would never know it at BNS. There was dancing in the street thanks to the Brooklyn Arts Exchange and the school advocates who worked so hard last year to make the Outdoor Learning Initiative a reality. We prepared breakfast from the harvested eggs and garden-grown scallions, and every kid washed their dishes afterward. And I loved talking with some of the BNS alums, now high school grads, who have come back as volunteers. 

Really, it felt like exactly what we would want a school to be: high quality experiential learning that is fun, mastery-based, team-building, and in touch with the living environment. 

Of course, what starts out as a long summer stretch of days at Summer Rising, the beach, summer jobs or just hanging out on the stoop, rapidly transforms around late July into the sudden realization that there are only a few precious weeks until school starts again in September. 

Last summer we experienced the anxiety and dysfunction of the DOE's poor planning for school reopening -- remote technology problems, the delayed fall reopening, multiple starts and stops as conflicting city and state school closure policies shifted every few weeks (remember yellow, orange and red zones?), ad hoc standards for remote learning, badly unfulfilled mandates for students with special needs. 

As we approach Fall 2021 -- one of the most consequential starts to a school year in our lifetimes -- what have we learned and are we ready?

Thanks to nearly $7B in federal stimulus funds and a big increase in State aid, finally fulfilling the mandate of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit, this year’s City budget includes large-scale increases in funding to our schools. Some of the highlights: 

• 100% Fair Student Funding for all schools, boosting the budgets principals have to meet the needs of their school communities.

• Over $600 million for academic support and intervention, which will support the Universal Academic Recovery Plan that the Mayor and Chancellor rolled out last week.

• A $251 million investment in special education including 800 new preschool special education seats (although we still need at least 400 more),

• $49 million for early literacy intervention and dyslexia screening. 

• A new $202 million culturally responsive Universal Mosaic Curriculum for math and ELA. 

• $377 million for new 3K programs across the city.

• We should be using some of the ARP funding to pay teachers, counselors, and school staff to be doing outreach now (by phone and in-person) to families of students who were remote, or had low attendance last year, to find out what they need to return with confidence.

• Community members should be participants in the process of planning for reopening and allocating new funding to ensure that money is directed where individual schools need it most.

• Proactive thinking about the safety rules for school in the fall. What will be the trigger for closing a classroom? For closing a school? Will vaccinated staff and students really be required to wear masks? As with other vaccines, will vaccination be required of students who are eligible once full approval is granted? Will field trips, school dances, concerts be allowed? The Mayor has recently suggested that he will wait until a few weeks before school begins to make these decisions -- based on that approach last year, we would hope these policies will be fleshed out now and discussed publicly much sooner.

• Even with DOE’s new investment in social workers, we still don’t have a guidance counselor and nurse for every school. The way to foster a sense of safety and community as students return from this difficult year is to expand support services, not to meet them at the door to their schools with metal detectors and NYPD agents. Yet that’s exactly what thousands of students will face, as the City continues to ignore calls from students to create police-free schools. 

• Especially as students return from the pandemic, we should encourage the type of hands-on experiential learning I witnessed at BNS. That means maintaining and growing the enriching art and science programs that our schools provide to students. 

This is a moment of opportunity to make progress on reopening our schools safely and supportively. We must do all we can to seize it. 

Our future depends on it.

Brad