City Limits

(Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY) Veronica Fletcher and her children, from left, Joshua, Maddie and Ziggy, in November. They lost their husband and father, MTA bus maintainer Joseph Trevor Fletcher, early in the pandemic.

Dear friends,

At City Limits, we believe that the most important news stories leave a lasting impact — whether that means holding the powerful accountable or shining a spotlight on injustice.

THE CITY, Columbia Journalism Investigations, Type Investigations and City Limits have spent a year documenting the NYC Department of Education’s response to COVID-bereaved children in public schools. We discovered that decades of underfunding mental health care left schools unprepared to handle the spike in needs during the pandemic. Amid that crisis, grieving students were largely overlooked and often didn’t get the help they needed.

The scarcity of care for grieving students partly stems from an overall shortage of mental health support in New York City schools. Before the pandemic, the DOE employed only one full-time social worker for every 648 students attending public schools, a ratio more than twice as high as what is recommended by the National Association of Social Workers.

You can count on us to keep looking out for New York’s most vulnerable communities and to drive local impact. But, as a nonprofit newsroom, we need your help. Will you help us continue to tell stories like this one that make a difference in our community?

	Thank you for your support and readership. Together we can help make New York a more equitable city. Warm regards, Marjorie Martay Executive Director, City Limits

	Liz Donovan and Fazil Khan produced this story as reporters, respectively, for City Limits and Columbia Journalism Investigations, an investigative reporting unit at the Columbia Journalism School. It was produced in partnership with THE CITY and Type Investigations, two nonprofit newsrooms that provided reporting, editing, fact-checking and other support. City Limits’ series on behavioral health and NYC’s children is supported by the Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York.

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