PUBLIC TESTIMONY
Testimony by Melinda Andra, Attorney in Charge of Education Advocacy Project at Legal Aid Society
4:17:41
ยท
4 min
Melinda Andra from the Legal Aid Society testified about the challenges faced by children with disabilities in the NYC public school system, particularly those from low-income and court-involved families. She emphasized the need for accessible, effective, and evidence-based programs within non-segregated community settings.
- Called for expansion of innovative programs like ASD, PATH, and ACES across more age groups, especially for older students
- Highlighted concerns about children in alternative settings and juvenile detention not receiving proper IEP services
- Raised issues with remote learning being used to push out students with disabilities from brick-and-mortar schools
- Urged investigation into practices that may disproportionately affect students with disabilities, such as alternating schedules and lack of in-person instruction
Melinda Andra
4:17:41
Hi.
4:17:41
Good evening.
4:17:41
I'm Melinda Andra.
4:17:43
I'm the attorney in charge of the Education Advocacy Project at the Legal Aid Society, And I want to thank you, Chair Joseph, for having this hearing.
4:17:51
And I also want to thank the DOE representatives who have chosen to remain and hear the testimony of the public.
4:17:58
And I want to acknowledge that.
4:18:01
Our clients are overwhelmingly children and families living in poverty and court involved children, children in foster care.
4:18:09
And our clients are receiving very little of that $1,350,000,000 figure that was mentioned earlier.
4:18:16
Our clients need accessible, effective, evidence based programs within our public school system, and we need to keep them in their communities and in non segregated settings where they can flourish.
4:18:28
New York Public Schools has created some innovative programs, both through their ASD programs, but also through the through the PATH program and ACES programs.
4:18:38
We need these programs to be, expanded both in the number of seats, but also across ages.
4:18:46
Because all of these programs that are available, there aren't enough seats as as mentioned earlier, but, also, they are serving children k through 2.
4:18:56
And I have many clients who are middle school, high school students who have never received appropriate reading instruction, who have never received the social and emotional supports they need in order to flourish.
4:19:13
Our children are crying out for engagement and support in their schools, and we need the DOE to step up and provide those services and not throw our older children away as they develop new programs for young children.
4:19:29
Each year, we're losing these children to the street.
4:19:32
And when the schools push children out of school as they are want to do when they find them difficult, that's where they end up is in my office.
4:19:41
So I also want to mention children who are in alternative settings such as alternate learning centers and in juvenile detention who are not 65% of the children in juvenile detention are children with disabilities and their IEPs are not being honored.
4:20:01
And as a last note, I wanna mention remote learning.
4:20:05
We had many clients who had become disengaged with school.
4:20:08
And during the pandemic, many of them were able to reengage through remote learning.
4:20:13
And we very much appreciate the DOE's efforts to expand options through VIA and the School Without Walls.
4:20:20
Those are great options for some of our clients.
4:20:23
However, we're also starting to see brick and mortar schools using the umbrella of remote learning for students as a way to push them out of school.
4:20:34
And I have many of these students are students with disabilities.
4:20:38
We think this practice is disproportionately affecting that number.
4:20:42
While some students may have the academic skills and the motivation and executive functioning to be able to learn independently using these platforms, Many students do not, especially students with disabilities.
4:20:54
Those students require in person instruction.
4:20:57
Google's classrooms just doesn't cut it for them.
4:21:00
As miss Sanchez stated earlier, I believe it was miss Sanchez, if you're not there, you're not learning.
4:21:06
Given the vast evidence of learning loss during the pandemic, we ask that the education committee and DOE staff investigate this practice.
4:21:16
We're seeing it in district 75 programs.
4:21:18
We're seeing it at passages that officially has a a schedule and b schedule where children go to school every other day.
4:21:26
And on the days they're not in school, they are given packets of worksheets that they don't know how to do with no direct instruction and counted as present in school.
4:21:38
So thank you very much for your attention to these matters.
4:21:41
Schools have the opportunity to be places of learning and support and safety for children, and we need our schools.
4:21:48
When the child's not making that progress, we need them to pull children in and not push them out.