One recent summer morning two different groups held back-to-back news conferences at City Hall on issues related to children – one about lunches (or the lack of them) during summer school, and the other about air-quality standards (or the lack of them) for diesel-fueled school buses.
Summer Meals
The Coalition To Take Back Our Schools supporting community groups were at City Hall to protest the decision by the Department of Education to cut breakfast and lunch programs from summer schools with fewer than 200 students in attendance. These meals, part of the summer food service program, are federally funded and designed not only to feed children in mandatory summer school programs but also low-income children in the vicinity of the schools whose families cannot afford to feed them.
Posters and brochures encouraging families to bring children to local schools for FREE breakfast and lunch were widely circulated on subways, buses, and in food stamp offices. Many parents of students attending summer school found out only after putting them on the school bus for the first day of summer school that their children would not be provided with the meals.
"It’s false advertising," said Carmen Santana, one of the organizers of the rally from the Coalition to Take Back Our Schools. Santana’s own children are attending a summer program in Queens where the meals were eliminated without notifying parents.
In the past, the cutoff for serving meals in the summer program was for schools with 100 or fewer children. As a result of the minimum being raised to 200 students, 44 elementary and middle schools, and 26 high schools, were not serving breakfast or lunch, affecting about 10,000 children, according to Santana. (An official from the Department of Education was not able to confirm the number of children affected, but disputed that it was that many.)
Milda Romalez, a member of the community group Make the Road by Walking, spoke softly in Spanish through an interpreter about her reasons for being present at the rally: "I represent the parents of the children of Bushwick, Brooklyn. So many parents cannot afford feeding their children before school. If they are not fed in summer school, they go hungry. How can children learn on an empty stomach?"
Funds for the Summer Food Service Program are paid for by the federal government and schools are reimbursed, per child, per meal, with higher reimbursements in the summer than during the school year.
"The summer food service program is a win-win situation for children and the city," said Deena Kolbert of Community Food Resource Center. "Families don’t have to fill out forms, there are no application procedures. People are hired to serve the meals at the schools over the summer so it provides jobs to the community; it’s win-win."
But the Department of Education didn’t see it this way. Reportedly, it wasn’t economically viable to operate cafeterias and staff them to service small numbers of children. Even though funds are eventually reimbursed, the Department of Education must lay out the money first and, in this economic climate, even meals for children are no longer sacred.
"Denying these children free lunch is a violation of their rights," explained Elizabeth Sullivan from the Center for Economic and Social Rights, an international human rights organization. "It violates the right of students to a quality education (they are not receiving the food they need to learn), the right of parents and community members to participate in decision making regarding that education (they were not notified or consulted about the decision), and the right to food."
According to Paul Rose, a spokesperson for the Department of Education, "at no time were students deprived of the opportunity to enjoy a school meal." Children from the cutoff schools were just required to walk or take public transportation to schools that did offer breakfast and lunch. But families, uncomfortable with having their kids traveling a half mile away for meals, found this plan unsatisfactory.
In response to parent feedback, three weeks into the summer program, and a few days after the rally, the Department of Education did begin delivering meals to the schools that had their kitchens shut down: cereal, milk, orange juice, and a blueberry muffin for breakfast; a slice of cheese on a roll with lettuce and tomato, three-bean salad, a fruit, and milk for lunch.
"I’m very happy we were successful in getting something for these kids," said Carmen Santana. "A lot of these children are the neediest in the city."
Protecting Kids from Diesel Emissions on School Buses
State Senator David A. Paterson assembled a press conference at City Hall in July to announce his intention to introduce legislation to protect kids from the dangerous diesel fumes on school buses. "There are over 5,000 school buses transporting our children back and forth to school in the city," said Paterson. "My children ride on them. And we now know that the air quality inside these buses is worse than the air quality outside. With the skyrocketing rates of asthma, this puts the health of these students in jeopardy."
Paterson distributed copies of "No Breathing in the Aisles," a report conducted by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Clean Air Coalition, and the University of California at Berkeley, that monitored the air on diesel-fueled school buses in California and found levels on the buses to be four times greater than in the air outside the bus, and up to 46 times higher than the Environmental Protection Agency’s cancer risk level. Many of these same types of school buses, without pollution control devices, are on the road in New York, spewing diesel particulate matter into the buses, the majority of which are fine particles, especially harmful to children.
Paterson expressed sympathy for the hardships private bus companies face in finding the resources to retrofit their buses with filters and switch to low sulfur diesel fuel. He also spoke encouragingly about negotiations currently taking place between bus operators and the New York Power Authority who offered last year to retrofit 1000 city school buses with diesel particulate filters which would reduce emissions significantly.
But despite his sympathies, Paterson was issuing an ultimatum: School bus companies must retrofit their engines and purchase lower quality of sulfur fuel. “If that is not the case, we don’t want any of our young people on their buses."
The state bill would mandate that buses transporting New York City school children must be retrofitted with either diesel particulate filters which, combined with a switch to using ultra-low sulfur diesel fuel, would reduce emissions by 90 percent, or diesel oxidation catalysts which would reduce emissions on older buses by up to 30 percent.
"I understand that there are costs involved for the bus companies," said Senator Paterson, "but the costs to treat children with asthma are higher than costs to retrofit."
Paterson was joined by Councilmember David Yassky from Brooklyn, who said he was going to introduce legislation through the City Council in support of Paterson’s bill. "One in ten New York City school kids has asthma" said Yassky. (That number is one in four in Harlem) "When you put a child with asthma on one of these buses, it can pose a serious health risk. We must have these retrofits with low sulfur diesel fuel by September. If it is not in place by September, it will be a shameful thing."
"There is no reason why New York City school children have to breathe so much diesel soot, given that cleaner fuels and engines are available," said Rich Kassel, Senior Attorney from the Natural Resources Defense Council, who also took the podium in support of Senator Paterson’s bill.
"It’s a really simple issue," explained Kassel. "Diesel exhaust triggers asthma attacks, cancer, and premature death. But the problem can be fixed by doing four things:
(1) retire the oldest, dirtiest buses;
(2) replace them with the cleanest available bus fuels and technologies;
(3) retrofit remaining diesel buses using low sulfur diesel fuel and particulate matter filters or traps;
(4) reduce idling of all buses so kids aren’t exposed while waiting to board the bus."
The issue of idling was also underscored by Rebecca Kalin, director and founder of the Asthma Free School Zone. "Until we get through this quagmire," said Kalin, "there is only one solution and that is to make asthma free zones around our schools where idling is not permitted.
"There is currently a NO IDLING law on the books, said Kalin, "but it is routinely ignored." In fact, in a Yale study on school bus emissions, levels of fine particulate matter were very high inside an idling bus that was loading and unloading students, and highest when the bus was idling with the windows open, particularly if more than one school bus was lined up, allowing exhaust from one bus to enter another.
Attempts were made to speak with school bus company representatives, but they were not available at press time. We were informed a few weeks ago, however, that the delays in retrofitting New York City school buses have nothing to do with cost but instead have to do with a failure of the exhaust systems to meet the required temperatures on the buses tested.
Recently, the New York Association for Pupil Transportation, a New York State school bus organization that does not include New York City bus companies, announced that they would voluntarily retrofit at least 5,000 school buses a year over the next three years. This agreement between the Environmental Protection Agency and New York Association for Pupil Transportation is part of the EPA's Clean School Bus USA program and also includes a pledge from the bus association to reduce idling by at least 50 percent. These initiatives will affect approximately 2.3 million school children.
Unfortunately, none of them in New York City. The state agreement is "an important first step in ramping up voluntary commitments for dirty yellow school buses to clean up their act," said Kizzy
Charles-Guzmán from the West Harlem Environmental Action, Inc. But now, suggests Charles-Guzmán, the Department of Education needs to "stop signing contracts with school bus fleets that refuse to provide clean and safe transportation for our children."
"It is our children suffering from these respiratory diseases," said L. Ann Rocker from the North River Community Environmental Review Board, Inc. "It’s not right for us to be continually forgotten."
Lynda Crawford wrote the social services topic page for Gotham Gazette, and has written for City Limits, New York Woman, The New York Observer, and The New York Daily News.
When Maria Rosario's daughter, a first grader in the Bronx, was left back this June, Rosario wanted the girl to get extra help. But the Department of Education was not offering free summer school for first graders. And so Rosario, who receives public assistance, had to pay $220 for private summer school for the girl.
Two years after thousands of New York City parents received automated phone calls from schools Chancellor Harold Levy urging them to make sure their children attended classes in July and August, the Department of Education has apparently lost interest in summer school. About 255,000 students were given the chance to attend summer school this year, down from the Levy era, when more than 300,000 students were allowed to attend. Some 145,000 showed up for July and August classes this year.
Summer school's move to the back burner has had a real cost for the thousands of students who failed to make the grade during the regular school year and who are now either out of summer school or in half-hearted programs. Vincent Caneles, an 11th grader taking summer classes at Kennedy High School in the Bronx, says that in his un-air-conditioned classroom of 60 students, "the heat is unbearable. It's like child abuse."
Teachers such as Adam Bronstein, who has a class of third graders in Washington Heights this summer, say there is a shortage of the necessary books and materials.
Such woes have plagued summer school for years. But this year they have been exacerbated by bureaucratic confusion and budget cuts. The Department of Education has $18 million less than it had last year to educate students during the summer. Most importantly, summer school, like many an educational reform before it, seems to have lost its chic. During his time as chancellor, Levy told New Yorkers that summer school was essential to some students' educational success and key to ending social promotion -- the unofficial policy that moves students up a grade regardless of their academic achievement. Klein, though, has other things on his mind -- most notably instituting a uniform curriculum in the schools.
THE DIFFERENCE A YEAR MAKES
Summer school's popularity has always been linked to notions about promotion, with the pendulum swinging back and forth. Under Chancellor Frank Macchiarola in 1978, New York kicked off "Promotional Gates," a program that required fourth and seventh graders to pass citywide tests in order to be promoted, and mandated summer school for those students who failed the exam.
But after a decade, the Board of Education realized the program was not working: A third of students who were held over were still not able to meet standards at the end of the next year, and children who had been held back were not more likely to meet testing requirements three years later. Instead, according to the Board of Education, they had a greater chance than other children of having social and emotional difficulties.
In 1991, the system instituted "Promotional Success." It put the focus on providing students with extra help during the school year so that they would not have to go to summer school. Summer school enrollment began to ebb.
Another decade and another pendulum swing later, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Chancellor Rudy Crew tightened the policy on promotion. They made attendance one of the three promotion criteria, along with standardized tests and classroom performance, and had many students wait until summer to get extra help.
This culminated in 2000 when Levy gave students who did not meet the requirement for promotion the choice of attending summer school -- and doing better -- or repeating their grade.
But Levy could not make summer school live up to its promises. Each year only half of students required to attend summer school showed up for class, and only half of those who did attend passed the end of the summer exams. This, however, did not keep students from being promoted, according to reports by Metis Associates, a consulting firm.
SUMMER SCHOOL 2003
This year, 178,000 students in third through twelfth grades had to attend summer schools if they wanted to be promoted, while another 77,000 struggling students were given the chance to attend on a voluntary basis. But some students who would have been invited to summer school in the past were not able to attend this year. By far the biggest cutback was the elimination of summer programs for kindergarteners, first and second graders, such as Maria Rosario's daughter. No citywide promotion policy exists for the early grades, but districts can choose to keep those students back.
The reorganization of the school system has added to the complications. For one, no one really knows who is running summer school. The first day of summer school, July 1, happened to be the day the school system was reorganized from 32 school districts to 10 school divisions. It was also the day after the director of summer school, Brian Morrow, retired.
Summer school was left to the old districts, but because the district offices have all but disappeared, each district has one lone liaison overseeing summer school. "No one thought about this -- who was going to run summer school," says Fran Lawler, summer liaison for District 9, who is working out of an elementary school so she can have access to a phone and fax.
Jane Canner, of Classroom Inc., which provides summer curricula for the public schools, says, "If summer school is going to have an effect it has to be carefully thought out and there has to be an energy behind it." But this year, she says, "Regions were not focused on summer school."
THE NEXT WAVE
The chancellor's office has set no deadlines for reviewing promotion and summer school policies, but perhaps by next year summer school will have a clearer connection with the chancellor's reforms.
There are some indications that Klein will return to the model of Promotional Success and provide struggling students with additional help during the school year.
Kevin Ortiz, a spokesperson for the Department of Education, says that the chancellor is looking to revamp summer school under the direction of Deputy Chancellor Diana Lam, but the hope is to improve instruction during the regular school year so that no one will have to attend summer school. And, in a recent letter to parents, Klein wrote, "Summer school has never been the answer for preparing students to move on to the next level of work."
Jackie Kamin, a member of the Panel on Education Policy, for one would welcome such a change. "Kids are better off getting tutoring during the year," she says.
Whatever changes are made, parents like Robin Brown, chair of the Chancellor's Parent Advisory Council, hope that there will be "some process to see if summer school is effective," a hope certainly shared by students sweating it out in classes across the city.
Julia Kamin is a reporter with Inside Schools, a web site published by Advocates for Children.
School is out for most New York City students, yet many of the city's educators and school officials are still cramming. They will be hard at work all summer to try to get the newly reorganized school system up and running by the time students return in September.
Over the past month, the sketchy outlines of this new system have been filled in a bit. For starters, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein officially settled a lawsuit, brought by Senator Carl Kruger, Assemblyman Steve Sanders, and others, that threatened to stall reorganization plans. The suit charged that the restructuring was illegal because it eliminated community school district superintendents without permission of the legislature.
However, the terms of the settlement changed the new administrative structure of the schools very little. The old high school superintendencies and community school districts will still be subsumed into ten new instructional divisions run by regional superintendents. As planned, 113 “local instructional supervisors” will oversee instruction in clusters of schools within the divisions. Thirty-two of these "LIS's" (rhymes with kisses), as they are called by the Department of Education, will also be designated as community school district superintendents, will maintain a small district office, and will work with the parent and community members who will sit on the "district education councils,” which are the groups that will replace the community school boards.
All of the local instructional supervisors have now been appointed. Former principals, district instructional personnel, staff developers, and superintendents are among those who were tapped for the new positions. Each supervisor has charge of a network of ten or so schools.
The groups of schools that make up each new network have also been announced. In composing the networks, as well as in assigning local instructional supervisors to them, the regional superintendents were given broad discretion. Chancellor Klein and the Department of Education asked only that the groupings ease the transition to a system that runs more seamlessly from kindergarten through twelfth grade.
The ten regional superintendents interpreted this in different ways and took a variety of approaches to creating the networks. As a result, some networks mix elementary, middle and high schools under the same local instructional supervisor. Others consist mostly of same-level schools. Some mix schools from different community school districts or mix high- and low-performing schools. Other networks consist of similar schools or schools that are geographically close.
Many parents, educators, and advocates support the principle behind the new networks. They like the idea of having administrators responsible for a manageable number of schools and focused on instruction. They saw potential in networking neighborhood elementary, middle, and high schools, as well as in clustering schools with similar philosophies so they could support one another. But, in the weeks since the networks have been created, some have expressed skepticism about the methods used to cluster schools and disappointment with the results. They worry that some schools' special qualities, once supported by their district offices, will be neglected or get homogenized within the new structure.
The official role of parents and community members in the governance of school system has also been determined. On July 9, Governor George Pataki signed legislation replacing community school boards with community district education councils. The new district councils will each have nine parent members selected by the parents associations from that district. Each council will also have two community members who are to be appointed by the borough presidents and a nonvoting student member, appointed by the district superintendent.
As with the boards they replaced, the councils' duties are largely advisory. They will hold monthly meetings with the superintendent to discuss the district's educational progress, submit an annual performance evaluation of the district's leadership to the chancellor, hold a hearing on the district's annual capacity needs and review the districts' educational programs and their impact on student achievement. No one is yet sure how (or how well) the councils' district-defined responsibilities will relate to the new network structure.
Parents with questions about how all these changes may affect their children's schooling can go to the Department of Education's Learning Support Centers for a full range of information and service or they can visit their district office. They can also call the Chancellor's Parent Hotline, 718-482-3777. Parents of high school students should call the Chancellor's Parent Hotline or go to their Web site to find the instructional division in which their high school is located.
Jessica Wolff is a public school parent and Director of Policy Development at the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, a not-for-profit coalition working to reform New York State's education finance system to ensure adequate resources and the opportunity for a sound basic education for all students in New York City. The views expressed are her own.