Adams 2021: Education - Developing Young Minds, from Pre-Natal to Career
The City’s responsibility for our young people should extend far beyond the years they spend in our schools. In fact, some of the most important help and attention from the City can come at the very beginning of a young person’s life and right before they enter adulthood.
That is why my administration will offer a full continuum of support at every stage of a young person’s life: from prenatal care to childcare to school to professional development to job placement. I will do that by:
- Providing childcare for every parent who needs it.
- Greatly increasing job training in high schools and matching students with internships and employers.
- Creating a mentorship program for youth aging out of foster care.
Move from cradle-to-career to prenatal-to-profession.
It is true that early childhood development is critical and that attention on the 0-3 ages must increase significantly, including expanded and improved options for quality childcare, healthcare, and education. But we need to go even further and recognize that an expectant mother’s health and environment during pregnancy can be just as critical to the health and ability of a child. That is why we will become the global leader in the prenatal-to-career approach, with a much more comprehensive citywide program for expecting moms and families that links them to vital resources such as healthy foods, prenatal classes, and doulas.
Provide every parent who needs it with childcare.
Many working parents simply cannot afford to $200 to $400 weekly for childcare, and there is a lack of adequate space for such programs. We can help by prioritizing space in City-owned buildings for childcare and offering density bonuses to residential building developers who guarantee permanently free or low rent to providers — savings which will be required to be passed on to parents.
We will also expand the city’s earned income tax credit and expand the childcare vouchers program for parents, create a shared inventory of city-contracted and private childcare providers, expedite background checks on workers, drop permit costs for after-school and other childcare programs in City buildings, lock in affordable leases in vacant storefronts for childcare, and install a childcare czar to oversee all childcare in the city.
Create a comprehensive life skills curriculum.
Every adult knows that life skills are just as necessary to live a productive, successful life as academic knowledge. Our schools largely do not teach skills like social interaction and job interview education. We will create a life skills curriculum to prepare every public school student to live and work in the adult world. We will also make internship and externship programming available to every high school student to put those skills to work right away.
Because a financial education curriculum has been demonstrated to improve students’ credit scores and savings rates, and with particular consideration for the financial security challenges facing millennials and members of Generation Z, we will work to make personal financial education a statewide high school graduation requirement.
An Adams Administration will build on Brooklyn Borough Hall’s pioneering efforts to bring participatory budgeting directly into high schools, giving students the opportunity to design and vote on projects to be funded in their own school buildings, as well as new school policies. In the last couple years, students have participated at the Brooklyn Community Arts & Media High School in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Gotham Professional Arts Academy in Crown Heights, the Tilden Educational Campus in East Flatbush, and the John Jay Campus in Park Slope; in the last academic year, students even had the opportunity to vote remotely. A citywide participatory budgeting initiative in high schools is the next natural step.
We will also create school-wide pre-registration initiatives that encourage students to register while demystifying the voting process, as well as introducing them to the systems that taken together make up our democracy, from community boards to elected officials’ offices, our court systems to the press, as well as the activist community. Understanding the mechanics of precinct council meetings and city council hearings makes a young person much more likely to actively participate in our democracy.
Greatly increase job training in high school.
We will expand programs for our high school students like the Career Technical Education Industry Scholars Program and ApprenticeNYC, which teach fundamental skills that almost anyone in manufacturing needs, and then match employers with employees. And we will add and expand STEAM centers like the one at the Brooklyn Navy Yard to every borough and give students the chance to earn certifications in fields that will lead to jobs, not just academic degrees.
Create a strong mentorship program for foster youth.
City youth age-out of foster care at 18 and can only continue to receive support until they are 21, leaving them unprepared to live on their own due to limited work experience, little formal education, and a lack of access to health care. Nearly 90 percent of these young people are Black or Latino. One study found that 20 percent of former foster care youth experience homelessness; another study of 100 former foster care youth found that 41 percent had been arrested and spent time in jail within the first six months.
My administration will develop a strong mentorship program for foster care youth — as well as invest in programs like Fair Futures. Research shows that youth with strong mentors do better as adults and are less likely to take part in unhealthy behavior, like unprotected sex and substance abuse. We also need to expand youth employment programs and provide housing for young people as soon as they leave the foster care system.
Adams 2021: Economy - Lifting Up Working People
Working class New Yorkers are struggling during this financial crisis—and they need direct assistance now and a much stronger safety net for the future. We also must do a much better job of finding jobs for New Yorkers. I will do that by:
- Providing direct cash assistance to New Yorkers through my NYC AID program.
- Offering subsidized or free childcare to any New Yorker needs it.
- Creating an unprecedented effort to place New Yorkers in new jobs.
Enact an NYC AID program to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit.
We will keep precious dollars in the hands of New Yorkers who most need it by boosting the City’s Earned Income Tax Credit amount for frontline workers by increasing their share to 30% of the Federal return. This will significantly help households making up to $50,000 a year.
Provide every parent who needs it with childcare.
Childcare in New York is outrageously expensive—and the lack of affordable childcare harms parents’ ability to work and affects their children’s futures. Children without adequate childcare – especially during the first 1,000 days of life – are much less likely to succeed and are much more likely to be Black and Brown.
It is a moral imperative that we provide childcare for every parent who cannot afford it, starting at birth. This will close a massive gap in care for the youngest New Yorkers at the most critical point of their brain development, and free parents — especially women of color — to power our economy and excel in their careers.
Develop a next-level citywide job training and placement program.
The City has had mixed success in training its workforce and connecting them to better job opportunities for generations. Today’s global marketplace has more competition than ever for labor and the skills needed for emerging, lucrative industries like artificial intelligence, cyber security and life sciences are in demand. We are woefully underprepared for this moment: We had hundreds-of-thousands of jobs that we could not fill before the pandemic. We will go to the next level to prepare our workforce by using metrics and connecting human services nonprofits, the private sector, and the communities that most need jobs to identify skill gaps and focus our training on those areas.
We will implement a data-oriented system with holistic and detailed skills mapping of the labor force by City Council district. Companies looking to hire will then submit a set of jobs and skills profiles. We will then match workers to appropriate providers using local organizations and working with landlords with open storefronts to create service centers and outreach programs. Lastly, we will develop a public-private partnership with large New York companies to develop a talent portal with a centralized system of resumes and hiring information using a tool similar to the college admissions Common App process.
Make it easier for New Yorkers to find jobs.
Our city’s unemployment rate for people of color is far higher than it is for white New Yorkers. But the biggest problem is not a lack of jobs; it’s the lack of access to jobs. It takes an average of nine weeks to find a job in the City. Our digital portal for all agencies will simplify filing for jobs with one-stop shopping by identifying all available city jobs and making it easier to apply. We also should expand the summer youth employment program and make it year-around.
Help the unbanked and under banked build wealth.
New York City has 350,000 households that are unbanked and another 680,000 that are under banked, meaning they must rely on services such as check cashing or payday loans. That means we are sidelining thousands of people from our economy and allowing industries such as payday lending to flourish by profiting off of poverty. Community-based banks in lower-income areas that remove minimum balance requirements and overdraft fees will be granted property tax relief, or their landlords will, in exchange for sharing that relief as a rent break.
Make the Summer Youth Employment Program year-round.
We know summer jobs programs help youth develop crucial skills, which lead to better criminal justice, academic, and employment outcomes. In the immediate term, they also help families make ends meet. We need to make these programs year-round—and we will.
Adams 2021: Economy - Sustaining Our Small Businesses
Our small businesses are the backbone of our economy—and we must provide them with the support to re-open and grow. At the same time, we have to spend New Yorkers’ tax dollars on New Yorkers and their businesses, focusing on minority and women-owned businesses that have historically not been included in economic booms and City spending.
- Prioritizing minority- and women-owned businesses for City contracts.
- Eliminating fees and significantly reducing fines for small business.
- Supporting our bars and restaurants – and their workers – with tax breaks.
Slash the red tape to save small businesses.
Right now, small businesses pay up to $5,000 in fees for small violations like using the wrong type or accidentally listing the wrong phone number due to a lack of education about the laws. The last thing we want to do in an economic crisis is charge people to start a new business and re-start a closed one. We will make the permitting process easier and cheaper through our online portal, and institute a warning system for relatively minor violations so first-time offenders are educated instead of fined. We will provide additional clarity by instituting a three-level warning system signifying the number of days the owner has until the cure must be implemented.
Be the “back office” for our small businesses.
On average, small business owners spend 120 workdays a year on all the administrative tasks that come with owning a business. The City can offer “back office” assistance through local Chambers of Commerce, so our mom-and-pop shops and entrepreneurs can save time and money on accounting and compliance needs and focus on growing their businesses.
Create “Tax-Free Tuesdays.”
Out-of-town tech companies like Amazon have asserted market dominance here at the expense of small business owners—a problem that only deepened during the pandemic. My administration will implement a weekly sales tax holiday, every Tuesday, on services and products that are more likely to be paid for in-person to incentivize New Yorkers to spend locally. We will offset the cost of this weekly holiday by more fairly taxing online transactions such as streaming services, which are not taxed.
Save our hotel industry, bars and restaurants.
Tourism is a key sector of our economy, and we must keep the welcome mat out for visitors who bring billions of dollars into our city every year. The pandemic shuttered 200 hotels – many permanently — and cut the workforce from 50,000 to 10,000. Nearly 100,000 once-occupied rooms are empty in an industry that once raised $3.2 billion a year in tax revenue and added some $22 billion in economic benefits annually. To fix that, we must suspend property tax debt interest for two years so that we do not push financially distressed hotels deeper into debt, forcing closures and layoffs.
Keep businesses open and employees working with tax relief.
Business owners are struggling to stay afloat due to the pandemic, forcing them to lay-off workers and close up shop. The city lost upward of 750,000 payroll and self-employment jobs, and the unemployment rate was 16% in September, twice as high as the rest of the country. To keep New Yorkers working — particularly in the service industries — we will allow businesses that pay the Commercial Rent Tax a break for two years if they demonstrate hardship and commit to certain employment levels.
Expand the City’s M/WBE program.
The City does not do nearly enough to ensure that its M/WBE program is effectively leveling the playing field for business owners of color, who are in a much more dire situation during COVID. For instance, M/WBE companies are often unable to participate in the City contracting process because prime contractors are not aware of how to connect with them. To fix this, we will match M/WBE companies with prime contractors and other agencies. We can do that by developing a Preferred M/WBE questionnaire to determine which companies are qualified to participate in bids and log the survey data in a searchable database.
Ensure diverse, equitable growth.
To ensure we are making our economy fairer as we make it larger, we will hire a Chief Diversity Officer to drive change on equity for minorities and women, and also create a tool to track the share of M/WBE contracts and how much the City is spending on those companies versus others in real-time. We will also much more closely track who these M/WBE employers and contractors are employing. And the Officer will be tasked with tracking gender pay equity and the progress we are making toward closing the gap. First they will focus on pay equity within City agencies and then we will push to track it across private employers in the City.
Create a network of community-based banks to invest in underserved areas.
Locally owned businesses did not get adequate help from the federal aid package because the government funneled money through big banks who were unable or unwilling to provide direct assistance—especially to small businesses in communities of color. We will create a formal local banking network and help these lenders have a more robust equity base. Once these lenders are eligible for state and federal loan programs — like the big banks – our administration will help them determine the best small business owners to lend to.
Remind the world that NYC is still the center of the universe.
We will organize the largest employers in New York to develop, fund and implement a marketing plan for our city to the rest of the world unlike any ad campaign we have ever undertaken. In addition to pitching our city as the place to visit, live and invest, we will showcase our commitment to public health and safety to inspire confidence that this is the place to be.
Allow for more local economic development groups.
To create on-the-ground leadership that will aid local economic growth, we will ease restrictions for communities to form new Business Improvement Districts and merchants’ associations along diverse commercial corridors.
Invest New Yorkers’ taxes in New Yorkers.
We will boost the local economy by prioritizing procurement of locally provided services and city-made products for City contracts, and by adjusting building and zoning rules to speed the growth of local manufacturers and producers. We will also engage in a “Loyal to NY” marketing campaign to remind New Yorkers what great products and services are available to them that are made and provided right in their own city. And we will report quarterly the percentage of City contracts that are held by out-of-state vendors.
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