Kaiser
11:39:17
Good evening, chair Joseph and education council members.
11:39:20
My name is Kaiser.
11:39:22
I am the community organizer for the Alliance for Quality Education.
11:39:26
AQE organizes parents pushing for quality public education for all children regardless of ZIP code.
11:39:32
Chair Joseph, thank you for your ongoing advocacy and your genuine dedication to improving our schools.
11:39:39
You and I are both former teachers, so we know that letting the youth lead is always the way to go.
11:39:43
So I will begin by echoing some of the calls from young people today.
11:39:47
Many young people spoke about the need for more social workers and counselors.
11:39:51
The NASW and the SSWAA recommend a ratio of one social worker for every 250 students or one to 50 for high need students.
11:40:01
As of 2023, the DOE ratio was one to four sixty five.
11:40:07
I echo the call for $80,000,000 directly to schools to hire restorative justice coordinators.
11:40:14
And we need to hire more service providers and improve the system for maintaining services when providers are on leave.
11:40:21
Quality education looks like early education programs, arts programming, community schools, restorative justice, and immigrant support.
11:40:29
But as you've heard here today, these same programs are at risk of being cut.
11:40:33
We urge the council to baseline programs at risk of being rolled back or eliminated.
11:40:38
Acknowledging that the federal budget is not within the purview of this hearing, we can't deny that the current administration is instilling deep fear in our students and their families to the extent that they don't feel safe showing up to school.
11:40:50
To counteract this, we call on the council to further invest in immigrant family communications and outreach, increasing funding for this multifaceted, accessible communication so that we can build trust and empower families.
11:41:03
I've personally seen the tears of children who didn't have access to pre K and struggled throughout their kindergarten years as a result, both in terms of socialization and learning.
11:41:12
I've worked at schools where staff didn't have adequate training or resources to implement restorative justice practices.
11:41:18
And so the root causes of kids' conflicts were never addressed or resolved.
11:41:23
And I've worked with students whose immigrant families were completely disengaged, not because they weren't invested but because DOE's communication, even if it was translated into their language, was just not reaching them.
11:41:34
I have also seen how a funded stocked art studio can have a transformative impact on students' sense of self and school engagement.
11:41:43
I've seen students learn through play and fall in love with learning at just three years old.
11:41:47
I've seen staff and families at a community school stop a deportation in its tracks.
11:41:53
These programs matter, and it does real harm when we destabilize them.
11:41:58
We wanna emphasize the speaker's previous sentiment on rejecting the pattern of fighting for restorations in the budget instead of focusing on expanding things that we know work.
11:42:06
Community schools, restorative justice, smaller class sizes.
11:42:09
As one of the young people said earlier, funding for these essential programs needs to be stable and reliable.
11:42:15
Baseline these programs.
11:42:17
Thank you for your time, your attention, and your compassion.
