Chalkbeat |

Kim Sweet, one of the city’s most prominent education advocates, got into the field by accident.

When she took a job at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest toward the beginning of her career in the late 1990s, she expected to work with adults with disabilities and mental health challenges.

“I showed up and they said, ‘You’re going to do education,’” Sweet recounted. “And from the very first call I had with a parent where I could help them through a difficult situation with their child’s school, I was hooked.”

For the past 18 years, Sweet served as executive director of Advocates for Children, an organization that helps economically disadvantaged families — including immigrants and caregivers of children with disabilities — navigate the school system’s labyrinthine bureaucracy. It also lobbies for policy changes to improve the system, from reducing suspensions to expanding Education Department staff in homeless shelters. And it wages high-profile legal battles when city officials won’t budge.

Sweet, 60, stepped down from her post earlier this month and has not yet determined what she’ll do next. Her replacement, Maria Odom, who helped run an organization that works with unaccompanied migrant children, took the helm last week.

On one of her final days at Advocates for Children, Chalkbeat caught up with Sweet about how much progress the city has made educating vulnerable children over the last 20 years, why the city struggles to provide required preschool seats for students with disabilities, and what she makes of mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani’s vow to end mayoral control of city schools.

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