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Looking Back and Looking Ahead
Dear Families and Staff,
It’s hard to believe we’ve reached the end of another school year! This is always an important time to pause and reflect, and we have made so much progress.
Just this week, we announced NYC Solves, our initiative to reimagine math education, which will reach 93 middle schools in eight districts and 420 high schools this fall. We also announced our newly created Division of Inclusive and Accessible Learning (DIAL), which will support students with disabilities and multilingual learners under the leadership of Deputy Chancellor Christina Foti.
These announcements build on an entire year of progress, starting with NYC Reads. In the 2023-2024 school year, literacy took center stage. We rolled out evidence-based curricula, grounded in the science of reading, to elementary schools in nearly half of our districts and across over 90% of our early childhood portfolio. I’m thrilled that our reading initiative will be active in all elementary schools and early childhood classrooms by this fall.
We also made significant strides in our college and career pathways work. Since the start of this administration, our students have earned $8.2M through paid work experiences at top companies like Northwell Health and Google. This year, through our FutureReadyNYC program, we started preparing over 10,000 students for careers in business, technology, education, and healthcare, and for the first time, every high school senior received letters from both SUNY and CUNY confirming there is a place for them at their universities.
But the accomplishments don’t end there. We also:
- Saw our first enrollment increase in eight years, along with a 12% increase in math proficiency and a 3% increase in ELA, outpacing the rest of the state.
- Completed a total of 487 Safer Access door locking installations.
- Announced nine new schools to open this September, including Motion Picture Tech High School in Queens and Bard High School Early College in Brooklyn.
- Launched our first Climate Action Days and scaled curbside composting to 100% of our K-12 schools.
- Grew Project PIVOT to 257 schools.
- Expanded specialized programming for students with disabilities by over 1,000 seats and created over 800 special education Pre-K seats.
- Shifted over 7,000 infant, toddler, 3K and Pre-K early childhood seats across the five boroughs to meet family need.
- Continued to expand our Hidden Voices series to expose students to the diverse perspectives represented in our city, publishing Hidden Voices on the Global African Diaspora and announcing plans to create Hidden Voices on the Muslim and Jewish American communities.
- Offered seats to over 110,000 students for our Summer Rising program, which begins July 2.
- Welcomed approximately 40,000 migrant students into our schools with open arms.
Reflecting on this school year, I’m immensely grateful to our teachers, school leaders, and staff—your commitment and hard work are unmatched. You’ve played a critical role in these accomplishments, not to mention countless other milestones across our 1,600 schools, from teaching a Kindergartener to read their first sentence to guiding a high schooler toward their diploma.
To our families: Thank you for your partnership and for choosing NYC Public Schools for your children. We thank you for your trust in us.
I’m also grateful to our Parent Associations and Parent Teacher Associations, School Leadership Teams, Community and Citywide Education Councils, Title I School and District Parent Advisory Councils, Panel for Educational Policy, and all our parent and community leaders. Please know how much I appreciate the extra time and effort you have dedicated to serving our school communities.
Together, you all build bright starts and bold futures for our students. I hope you enjoy a restful summer. I’m already looking forward to September—the best is yet to come!
Soaring high,
David C. Banks
Chancellor
Our Spotlight Video:
NYC Public Schools | The last two and a half years have been a testament to our commitment to reimagining the student experience. At New York City Public… | Instagram
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