TESTIMONY
Emma Vadehra, COO and Deputy Chancellor for Operations and Finance, New York City Public Schools on Class Size Reduction Compliance Efforts in New York City Public Schools
0:09:42
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15 min
Emma Vadehra, COO and Deputy Chancellor for Operations and Finance at New York City Public Schools, provides an update on efforts to comply with the state's class size caps legislation.
- New York City Public Schools reports full compliance with current class size legislation, with plans to maintain compliance as requirements increase.
- Describes the phased implementation of class size caps, ranging from K-12 education to special groups.
- Outlines challenges such as the need for more space, additional teachers, and the financial impacts of compliance.
- Highlights the class size working group's role in providing recommendations for implementation and the importance of equitable practices and partnerships with teachers' unions.
- Vadehra commits to community engagement and equitable resource distribution in the effort to meet and maintain class size caps.
Emma Vadehra
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Good afternoon, chair Joseph, and all the members of the city council committee on education here today.
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My name is Emma Vadera, and I'm the COO and Deputy Chancellor for Operations And Finance at New York City Public schools.
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I'm joined here by superintendent Kalik Kirkland representing District 23 in Brooklyn.
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1st deputy chancellor, Dan Weissburg, and School Construction Authority President and CEO, Nina Kubada.
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Thank you for the opportunity to update the committee on New York City Public Schools And SCA's work to comply with the state's law establishing new caps on class sizes in New York City.
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This administration supports the goal of lower class sizes for all of our students We know we have communities where this is a real challenge for our educators, our students, and our families.
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We also know that lower class sizes are high priorities for our parents and our teachers.
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In brief, we are currently fully in compliance with the class size legislation.
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Specifically, this year, the law mandate that 20% of our classes are at or below the newly mandated class size caps.
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We are at 40% of our classes.
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In the coming years, however, we do have work to do.
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Will face some difficult choices that will be required to maintain compliance as the laws requirements scale up.
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Today, I'm going to outline some of the work we're doing to stay in compliance with the law.
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As well as how we're thinking about tackling some of the challenges ahead, as well as the work we've done to engage stakeholders through the class size working group.
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We look forward to continuing to work with you as we implement the law, and I wanna thank you for the support and leadership today.
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In September 2022, Governor Hochul signed legislation that established legislative caps on class size in New York City for the first time.
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These caps are set at 20 for grades k through 3, 23 for grades 4 through 8, 25 for the high school grades.
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Additionally, the caps are set at 40 for performing groups, and physical education classes in all grades.
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The caps do not apply to special education classes.
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Under the law, these requirements phase in over 5 years.
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As I said, this year, 20% of classes required to be under those newly mandated caps, 40% next year, and so on.
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Reaching a 100% compliance in 2028.
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The law requires that New York City Public Schools submit a class size reduction plan annually through the life of the phase in, which must be approved by the presidents of the United Federation of Teachers and the Council of School supervisors and administrators.
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If the state education department determines that we are not demonstrating sufficient compliance, New York City Public Schools must submit a corrective action plan.
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State funding is contingent on demonstration of sufficient class size reduction, as well as full implementation of any corrective action plan.
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Our current compliance rates, as you can see on this map, very widely across the city, which is context for how we're thinking about implementation.
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The districts with the greatest percentage of classes at or below these newly mandated caps are district 23 in Brooklyn, 7 in the Bronx, and 16 in Brooklyn.
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Those districts have 73% of their classes, 68% and 67% of their classes respectively, under the newly mandated caps.
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By contrast, the districts with the fewest classes under the caps currently are 26 in Queens, 28 in Queens, 31 Staten Island with 20% of their classes, 23% of their classes, and 24% respectively.
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At or below the caps.
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As I said, we're currently only in year 1 of the implementation phase of the law, and I'm happy to report on the work done so far and the planning we are doing.
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We can be in the class size working group to guide our implementation of the work and grounded in community engagement and diverse perspectives.
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The working group members brought diverse perspective to implementing this law included parents, advocates, union representatives, principals, teachers, panel members, elected officials.
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Thank you very much for your participation and others.
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The group provided over 50 recommendations late last year that have been and will continue to be invaluable.
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I wanna thank you, chair Joseph, for your service once again on this working group.
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Along with council staff and everyone who participated.
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For everyone involved, as well as our communities around the city, we'll continue to engage on this topic.
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The chancellor believes it's critical to get community input as we implement the law.
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Since then, we've been able to complete our needs assessment to determine what resources will be necessary necessary to implement the law as has the school construction authority.
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As directly recommended by the working group, we've also completed an individualized survey of every principle across our system to test our assumption around our needs, including the space, the staffing, and the associated funding that our principals need to implement the law.
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We also worked closely with the UFT and CSA as required to develop our 1st class size reduction plan for this year.
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The New York education department accepted the class size reduction plan this fall.
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In November, we submitted our 1st class size implementation report a separate documentation showing that 40% of our classes were at or below the caps, twice the level required.
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The state ed department approved this as well, and we have received all of the funding contingent on compliance with the law.
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We're currently in the process of developing and finalizing policies for next school year, which we can discuss to ensure we remain in compliance.
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Even with some of the challenges ahead.
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This includes teacher recruitment, school based budgeting and staffing policies, and capital planning.
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As we work to implement the law, we're thinking about 4 key components: space, staffing, costs, and equity.
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In space.
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With fewer students in each classroom, most schools will need to utilize more classrooms.
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To accommodate their current enrollment.
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We've surveyed principles as I said on what they think their needs are to try and nail down how to address those needs, and we've reviewed our own data.
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Many schools may be able to find space within their current buildings by reducing administrative space or reprogramming.
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We estimate there are roughly 500 schools that even with those types of changes will need more classrooms than they currently have.
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Some of these schools just need a few classrooms, of those schools need 78 additional classrooms at their current enrollment.
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A lot of those schools that need just a few classrooms, we think, and president can talk about this more, can make minor adjustments to do this without substantial changes.
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Some will not be able to, and as I said, some have larger needs.
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One way to address this that we are moving forward on is to embark on a substantial capital construction program.
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More space is absolutely required for our students across the system.
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As president Kubada can share, this comes with not just a price tag, but there are also only so many sites available.
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Which both meet our qualifications at the scale required to meet the need for more space and are also located in close proximity to the schools that will need additional class rooms in order to comply without reducing their enrollment.
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Another way to address space is to reduce enrollment at some of these schools.
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Which was recommended by the class size working group.
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We're looking very carefully at this recommendation as we want to ensure we can continue to consider the preferences as families of families.
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We know many families take zone schools into account when choosing where to live, and we know that when students don't get into their schools of choice, they're more likely to leave the system.
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Additionally, the working group recommended relocating 3 k and pre k classrooms out of our school buildings and into local community based organizations with empty seats.
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And establishing multi session models or staggered schedules at more schools, both to help with space.
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These are other recommendations we're looking at, but they also, of course, have trade offs for our families.
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Staffing, we currently employ nearly 77,000 teachers.
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The largest teacher workforce in the nation.
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We estimate that under the new law will require an additional 10 to 12,000 teachers.
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Over 3000 of whom will need to be special education teachers.
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The independent budget offices, office estimates are actually even higher.
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They estimate we will need 17,700 new teachers.
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We're looking into our teacher pipeline to we're looking into how to strengthen our teacher pipeline to meet this need.
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Including considering the continuation and expansion of successful alternative certification programs, as well as working with the state ed department on developing new high quality preparation ways that are lower cost for our participants.
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The working group made several recommendations on staffing that we are looking at, reviewing our recruitment and pipeline programs, expanding opportunities for para professionals to enter the classroom, building relationships between traditional teacher education programs and priority districts to better align with hiring needs.
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Earlier hiring windows in our high need schools with class size needs, financial incentives for recruiting and retaining teachers in our hard step districts, and evaluating the impact of the law on ongoing efforts to recruit more teachers who reflect our student body, which continues to be a priority for us.
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We already hire 4000 to 45100 teachers per year just to keep up with attrition.
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And both nationally and locally, fewer teachers are entering the profession.
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In certain teacher license areas such as STEM bilingual foreign language, CTE, and special education, where we know only a number of teachers, particularly in the secondary grades, the hiring pool is small, limiting our overall choices at this time.
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We will need to continue to strengthen our pipeline in these license areas to meet the mandate, especially in the later years of the plan.
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In terms of costs, New York City Public Schools estimates the costs of hiring these additional teachers at somewhere between $1,400,900,000 in new expense costs annually depending how the funding is distributed.
0:19:04
The IBO also did an estimate of this about 1.6 to $1,900,000,000 annually.
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These costs will, of course, vary based on some of the policy decisions we make such as around enrollment, and we look forward to working with our communities to make those policy decisions.
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To address some of the costs, the working group recommended direct some of our existing state funding state contracts for excellence dollars to class size reduction to class size reduction alone rather than other purposes.
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As is currently under allowed by the state, as well as advocating for new dollars from New York State.
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Earlier this month, the chancellor, first deputy and I were nominee advocating for additional resources for our schools to help meet this mandate and for other purposes.
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I want to be very clear given what we just heard this additional funding is not yet in our budget.
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And we have not identified a new funding source.
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New York State absolutely has provided additional foundation aid to us in the past 3 years, finalizing in this year, that funding is already in our schools and our system.
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So when we talk about the additional cost it's on top of those dollars, many of which are going to our schools.
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We use this funding in a lot of ways, some of which I know will be near and dear here.
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We use this to that additional state funding we've received already used to raise the fair student funding floor for all schools to a 100%.
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We use that money to add our additional new weights that the Fair Student Funding Group recommended and that we put in place this year for some of our neediest communities.
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We use that funding to distribute this year over $215,000,000 in state funding.
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It's just school budgets consistent with the state contracts for excellence legislation.
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Without this funding, fewer of our classes would be below the newly mandated caps today.
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It's been critical to get us here, and we would have more work to do.
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Finally, on equity, I'm proud to say.
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I know many of you are too.
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New York City is a national leader in terms of equitable funding for our schools.
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Our existing funding formula, fair student funding, directs the most resources to our highest needs schools and students.
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This year, with the help of many of you and others, We made our formula even more equating, equitable, adding funding for students in temporary housing and schools with high concentrations of students in need.
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Our data shows that 62% of classes in our schools with the highest rates of economic need are already below the newly mandated cap.
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Compared with 25 percent of classes in schools with the lowest rate of need.
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A variety of independent organizations, including the IBO, the National Urban Institute, and the news organization chalkbeat have found similar trends in terms of equity.
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This means that our lowest needs schools will require the most resources under the law, additional dollars, additional teachers, and additional space.
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Overall, under the law, and there's a there's a map over there of where funding would flow, expense dollars to comply with the law.
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Overall, those lower needs schools within our system will receive roughly twice the amount of new dollars per student under this law as our highest need schools within our system.
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This compares to our fair student funding model where our highest need schools receive more 30% more dollars per student.
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We see similar trends on the capital side in terms of which communities will see new investments.
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We're also, and we can talk more about this concerned about equity as we think about teacher distribution across our system.
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Our data shows that already teaching positions in lower poverty schools are often filled by teachers transferring in from higher poverty schools.
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Given where the additional jobs will be needed, we expect that could be a continuing challenge.
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Finally, the working group recommended staff pay differentials and early application window for higher need schools.
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We are looking at both of these.
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We are really dedicated to finding a way to implement this law to ensure that equity remains at center, and to make sure we're not setting up a transfer of experienced talent away from high poverty schools.
0:23:01
We're working with UFT and CSA closely on how to make sure we can prior size equity while implementing than mandated class size caps.
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I will now briefly talk about the council's proposed legislation.
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Intro 45 and men's current local laws related to the existing class size report and the report on the demographics of students and programs.
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For the class size report, the law aligns the requirements more closely to the state's reporting requirements.
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It also updates the requirements of the diversity report.
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We want to continue to provide a preliminary report of a given school year on November 15th with an opportunity to refresh that data on February 15th.
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We support this bill.
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We appreciate efforts to align reporting between the city and the state.
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Finally, we are planning for next year.
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As required by the law, we're collaborating with the UFT and CSA on the next iteration of our annual class size reduction plan.
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Which we expect to be delivered to the state education department this time, sometime this summer, consistent with the law.
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I want to thank our union partners for conversations of some on some of the questions left open by the law, and their work with us in planning for the future.
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We do expect some policy shifts will be required to maintain compliance with the law for next year.
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We are considering, as recommended by the class size working group, placing new restrictions on the use of contracts for excellence funding.
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We are considering asking schools to prioritize hiring teachers over other positions where they have vacancies and considering asking superintendents to work with principals at an individualized level to ensure compliance levels improve by looking within school budgets and at current teaching staff.
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As the law requires All of these final decisions will be made with UFT and CSA as the law requires.
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Our goal is to communicate any policy changes to schools this spring.
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So our system can be on the same page as schools start thinking about budgeting and staffing for the fall.
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The task before us is substantial and the considerations and trade offs ahead are many, We're committed to continuing to comply with this law in the current years.
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I wanna thank you all again for your advocacy on behalf of New York City Public Schools and on behalf of all your communities.
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Together, I know we can meet the needs of all our students.
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We look forward to answering any questions you may have.
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Thank you.