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Cheick, an immigrant student from Mali, was told—illegally—that he had to leave high school and transfer to a high school equivalency program.

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Press Releases

New Data Show Thousands of Preschoolers with Disabilities Did Not Receive Needed Services

03.21.2023 | Advocates for Children of New York (AFC) released the following statement in response to the release of the New York City Department of Education (DOE)’s preschool special education data report for the 2021–22 school year:

Today, the DOE posted new data showing that 37% of preschoolers with disabilities—a total 9,800 children—did not receive all their mandated special education services during the 2021–22 school year, a notable increase from the prior year, when 30% of preschoolers were not fully served. For example:

More than 6,500 preschoolers who needed speech therapy did not have a single session of this service before the end of the year, including 33% of all children needing bilingual speech therapy.
26% of preschoolers recommended for physical therapy, and 28% of those needing occupational therapy, never received it.
Almost 1,300 children never received their mandated part-time special education teacher (SEIT) services, representing 19% of all preschoolers with this recommendation.

Importantly, these numbers only reflect those children who had an Individualized Education Program (IEP) in place by the end of the school year—and the data show that many preschoolers who were referred for evaluation due to concerns about their development had to wait months to get an IEP or never even made it that far into the process, with notable disparities by race. For example:

13% of Black preschoolers and 12% of Latinx preschoolers who were referred for the first time in 2021–22 had their cases closed without an IEP meeting ever taking place, compared to 7% of White preschoolers.
20% of Black children and 21% of Latinx children who were found eligible for preschool special education for the first time waited more than 60 days (the legal deadline) after consenting to evaluations for an IEP meeting to be held to determine what services would be appropriate, while 11% of White preschoolers did not have an IEP meeting in a timely manner.

While data for the current school year are not publicly available, we know from our work with families that long delays and legal violations remain common during this critical period in children’s development. Failing to provide these services has long-term ramifications for both individual students and for the City as a whole; when preschoolers with disabilities do not receive the help they need early in life, many will require more intensive—and expensive—interventions once they reach elementary school.

“This winter, AFC has heard the same story from parent after parent: months into the school year, their preschooler is still waiting for mandated services to start, because the DOE has been unable to find a provider,” said Betty Baez Melo, Director of AFC’s Early Childhood Education Project. “In some cases, families are unable to even start the process of getting support in place for their child, because they cannot get an appointment for an evaluation.”

Advocates for Children is urging New York City to invest $50 million in the upcoming budget to increase access to timely preschool special education evaluations and related services. The City should take steps such as launching more DOE evaluation teams; hiring more DOE service providers and teachers, rather than relying on outside agencies; and increasing payment rates for contracted providers to ensure children, including those who need bilingual services and those in underserved communities, receive their services where they go to preschool.

“As policymakers consider next steps for early childhood education in New York City, they can’t forget that truly including children with disabilities in 3-K and pre-K programs means providing them with the support they need to be successful in these programs,” said Kim Sweet, AFC’s Executive Director. “This year’s budget should make the necessary investments to ensure preschoolers are not left waiting for the evaluations and services they have a right to receive.”

“It’s unconscionable that almost 10,000 preschoolers did not receive all of their special education services last year,” said Council Member Rita Joseph, Chair of the New York City Council Committee on Education. “We know this failure to support our youngest learners will only increase costs for the City in the long run, and we must act now. I look forward to partnering with the Administration to make sure there are enough service providers to meet the needs of every student with a disability.”

View statement as a PDF

Newly Released Data Show Troubling Gaps for Students Needing Bilingual Special Education Services

03.20.2023 | Advocates for Children of New York (AFC) issued the following statement in response to the release of the New York City Department of Education (DOE)’s special education data report for the 2021–22 school year:

While the DOE has made notable progress over the past five years towards ensuring that school-aged students with disabilities receive the services mandated by their Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) by the end of the school year, the latest annual report shows that troubling gaps remain. As a key example, the City is frequently out of compliance when it comes to serving students with disabilities who are learning English as a new language:

32% of English Language Learners (ELLs) who were referred and found eligible for special education for the first time last year waited more than two months for an IEP meeting to be held—and thus for additional supports to be put in place to help them learn.
Just 36% of students who needed bilingual special education instruction (e.g., bilingual SETSS or a bilingual class) were fully served in 2021–22, while nearly two-thirds (64%, more than 3,100 students) did not fully receive their special education program. By comparison, 88% of all students with disabilities Citywide fully received their mandated instruction last year, while 12% were not fully served.
13% of students who needed bilingual speech therapy did not have a single session of this service last year, compared to 3% of those recommended for monolingual speech therapy. More than one in five students whose IEP mandated bilingual counseling (21%) never received this service, more than three times the rate for monolingual counseling (6%).

We appreciate that for the first time the DOE reported disaggregated data on bilingual special education instruction, as these statistics provide clear evidence that AFC’s on-the-ground experience reflects systemic problems: we often work with students whose IEPs recommend a bilingual special education class, but who have not been offered such a placement by the DOE.

“With the recent increase in the number of recently-arrived immigrant students, some of whom will be identified as having disabilities and will need bilingual special education services in the months ahead, it is more urgent than ever that the City address the longstanding shortage of bilingual service providers and bilingual special education teachers,” said Rita Rodriguez-Engberg, director of AFC’s Immigrant Students’ Rights Project.

Many of the districts that had particularly low compliance rates for bilingual related services last year are the same districts where asylum-seeking children and families are now concentrated, including district 2 in Manhattan and district 28 in Queens (where 40% and 39%, respectively, of students who needed bilingual speech therapy in 2021–22 never received it). As the City begins to negotiate new contracts for teachers and service providers, the time is ripe to ensure there are incentives in place to attract bilingual special education teachers and bilingual providers to the schools where they are most needed.

View statement as a PDF

New Data Reveal Dire Educational Outcomes for Students in Foster Care

01.25.2023 | January 25, 2023 (New York, NY) — Each year, roughly 7,500 New York City students spend time in foster care. This group has historically been overlooked in school reform efforts, despite having some of the most complex educational needs and bleakest academic outcomes of any student population.

Today, Advocates for Children of New York (AFC) released a new report, Building on Potential: Next Steps to Improve Educational Outcomes for Students in Foster Care, providing an overview of the current — and dire —state of education for students in foster care in New York City. The report, which analyzes City data obtained through a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request, finds:

Over 40% of students in foster care are classified as students with disabilities, more than twice the Citywide rate, and they are over-represented in segregated special education settings.
During each of the 2016–17 through 2020–21 school years, roughly half of all students in foster care were chronically absent; between one in six and one in nine students in care missed more days of school than they attended.
Pre-pandemic, the NYC Department of Education (DOE) issued suspensions to students in foster care at almost four times the rate at which it issued suspensions to City students overall.
Students in foster care in grades 3–8 are more than twice as likely to receive the lowest possible score on the New York State tests—meaning they are performing significantly below grade level—than they are to score proficient. According to the 2017, 2018, and 2019 exams, nearly 85% of students in care are not proficient in math and four out of five are not reading proficiently.
Only 40.2% of students who entered ninth grade in 2017 and spent time in foster care while in high school graduated in four years, less than half the Citywide rate; one in five students with foster care experience during high school dropped out, more than quadruple the Citywide rate.
Academic outcomes for students in foster care who transfer schools during the year are even more alarming: of students who started 9th grade in 2017, spent time in the foster system while in high school, and transferred schools two or more times, a greater percentage dropped out (27.3%) than earned a diploma (only 18.2%) in four years.

“When the City removes a child from their home, the child is separated from parents, siblings, pets, and other loved ones, and often placed in an unfamiliar neighborhood with caregivers who are complete strangers,” said Kim Sweet, Executive Director of Advocates for Children of New York. “No matter the circumstances, this is a deeply disruptive and traumatic event in a young person’s life, making access to a stable, sound education tremendously important."

Even though New York City has legal custody of children in foster care and has assumed responsibility for their well-being, this population has frequently been overlooked. Indeed, until recently, there was not a single staff member at the DOE focused solely on students in the foster system. This past fall, the DOE took the crucial step of hiring a small team of staffers dedicated to supporting students in foster care, representing an important opportunity to begin to turn the tide for how the City educates this group of students. Today's report makes recommendations for how New York City can better support students in foster care now that this new team is up and running.

“If this group of students comprised their own school district, it would be larger than almost 90% of all other districts in New York State,” said Erika Palmer, Supervising Attorney at AFC. “But it would be a district in which barely one in five students is reading proficiently; less than half graduate high school in four years; and 38% of older youth are absent from school more often than they attend.”

As the report shows, a top priority for the DOE’s new Foster Care Team should be providing training for educators and school staff that increases their capacity to understand and address the unique needs of youth in the foster system. Other key recommendations from the report include guaranteeing door-to-door transportation for students in foster care; improving communication between schools, families, and foster care agencies; ensuring parents, foster parents, and agency staff have timely access to education records for students in foster care; ensuring students in foster care can access school-based behavioral and mental health services; and using trauma-informed practices and alternatives to suspension in schools. Given the importance of having accurate data when developing solutions to address the issues raised in this report, the report also recommends amending the City’s education data reporting laws to include students in foster care as a distinct group, as a recently introduced City Council bill would require.

“Having served as a foster parent and as an educator, I know all too well the challenges faced by children in foster care, and I take the troubling findings of this new report very personally,” said Council Member Rita Joseph, Chair of the New York City Council Committee on Education. “It’s clear we need to shine a light on educational outcomes for students in the foster system, and I look forward to moving forward the bill I introduced last month to require the DOE to publicly report data on students in foster care when they report on other student groups.”

“Youth in the foster system have enormous potential that too often goes unrealized because the systems charged with their care and education have failed to meet their needs,” said Erika Palmer. “The dire trends we see in attendance, exclusionary discipline, and academic achievement are by no means inevitable, and we’re excited to work with the DOE’s new Foster Care Team to make NYC’s schools a model of support for students in foster care. Youth in care deserve nothing less.”

Read the report [PDF]
View the press release as a PDF

Sustaining Progress for NYC Students: A Call to Action for Policy Makers

01.19.2023 | Today, Advocates for Children of New York (AFC) released Sustaining Progress for NYC Students: A Call to Action for Policy Makers, highlighting the need for sustained investments to support education initiatives funded with one-time federal COVID-19 stimulus dollars after that funding expires.

Over the last two years, the New York City Department of Education (DOE) received an unprecedented infusion of more than $7 billion in federal stimulus funding, allowing the City to fund a number of critical education priorities. While some of this funding has been used for short-term expenses directly stemming from the pandemic -- such as costs associated with reopening school buildings and accounting for the impact of lost instructional time -- the DOE is also using these stimulus dollars to address student needs that existed long before the pandemic, many of which have historically been underfunded. Although the federal COVID-19 relief funds will run dry in October 2024, these ongoing needs will remain. Among other things, stimulus funding is currently being used to:

Double 3-K enrollment and open new preschool special education classes to help address a longstanding shortage of seats for preschoolers with disabilities;
Increase the number of community schools and expand access to summer enrichment programming;
Hire 500 new school social workers, expand restorative justice practices, and enable every school building to have a nurse;
Bolster supports for students with dyslexia, students with intensive sensory needs, and students living in homeless shelters; and
Open new bilingual programs for English Language Learners and improve access to translation and interpretation services for immigrant families.

It will take more than $700 million per year to sustain new and expanded education initiatives that are making a difference for some of the City’s most marginalized students, and Advocates for Children of New York calls on elected officials at the local, state, and federal levels to start planning right away to identify funding to address this looming threat.

“We can’t turn back on the progress made,” said Kim Sweet, Executive Director of Advocates for Children of New York. “Our school system is all too quickly approaching a steep fiscal cliff, and we need our elected leaders to start planning now so that in fall of 2024, schools are not forced to excess social workers and other critical staff and students who rely on these programs do not have the rug pulled out from under them. New York City students are counting on policy makers at the city, state, and federal levels to work together to ensure our schools have the resources they need to avoid taking a massive step backwards in the instruction and services they provide.”

Read the call to action
View the press release as a PDF

AFC Responds to Release of City’s FY 24 Preliminary Budget

01.12.2023 | Today, Kim Sweet, Executive Director of Advocates for Children of New York (AFC), issued the following statement in response to the release of the City’s Fiscal Year 2024 preliminary budget:

We are relieved that the City is not moving forward with certain planned cuts to school budgets next year at a time when students still need intensive academic and social-emotional support.

However, we are deeply concerned that the Mayor’s Preliminary Budget does not extend funding for a number of initiatives that provide critical support to students and families. The Administration launched these initiatives with city funding that will expire in June, unless extended.

Mental Health Continuum ($5M): This innovative model, recently highlighted in the NYC Speaks Action Plan, is the first-ever cross-agency partnership (DOE, H+H, DOHMH) to help students with significant mental health needs access expedited mental healthcare in person and via video. It supports students at 50 high-needs schools through school partnerships with H+H mental health clinics, adding dedicated staff to provide students with timely access to mental health services, NYC Well hotline to advise school staff with mental health inquiries, Children’s Mobile Crisis Teams to respond to students in crisis, school-based mental health clinicians, Collaborative Problem Solving training to build school staff capacity to better manage student behavior, and culturally-responsive family engagement. At a time when we have a youth mental health crisis, this model is urgently needed.
Multi-Faceted Immigrant Family Communication and Outreach ($4M): This initiative helps the DOE to better communicate with immigrant families through approaches such as using local ethnic media to share updates from the DOE, sending paper notices to families’ homes, reaching families over telephone and text message, and collaborating with immigrant-facing community-based organizations to create and launch information campaigns. Given that more than 329,000 public school students do not have a parent who speaks English fluently and more than 61,000 children of Limited English Proficient parents live in households without broadband internet access, it is critical for this initiative to continue.
Shelter-Based Community Coordinators ($3.3M): Twenty-five of the 100 shelter-based community coordinators the DOE committed to hiring are funded with city funding. With more than 60% of students in shelter chronically absent, these coordinators, who are just beginning their work, can play an important role in helping students in shelter get to school every day and access needed educational support. At a time when the number of students living in shelter has grown and low attendance is a top concern, it is important to ensure the continuity of this new program.
Early Childhood Education and Care for Children who are Undocumented ($10M): No child should be turned away from an early childhood education program due to their immigration status. The City should continue to be a leader in providing early learning opportunities to children, including those who are undocumented, by extending funding for Promise NYC.

With the youth mental health crisis and the recent influx of newly arrived students living in shelter, this is not the time to jeopardize funding for coordinators to help students in shelter, mental health services for students, communication efforts to reach immigrant families, and early childhood education for undocumented children.

As the budget process moves forward, the City should avoid further cuts to education and invest in areas such as reading instruction and intervention and restorative justice practices. Particularly at a time when the City continues to have unspent federal COVID-19 relief funding, schools should receive additional resources to meet these needs and certainly should not lose funding.

View the press release as a PDF

More than 1,200 New Yorkers Call for a New Approach to Graduation Requirements

12.06.2022 | Today, the Coalition for Multiple Pathways to a Diploma released a petition signed by more than 1,200 New Yorkers, calling on State leaders to permanently decouple Regents exams from graduation requirements, a practice which currently makes New York State an outlier in the US. New York is one of only a small number of states—11 before the pandemic with the number having decreased further since then—that require students to pass exit exams in order to earn a diploma. Educators, advocates, elected officials, parents, and students alike are ready to rethink Regents Exams.

When the New York State Education Department and the Board of Regents cancelled Regents exams due to COVID-19, the State provided an opportunity for students who demonstrated mastery in their courses and earned their required credits to receive a diploma without taking high-stakes tests. As the petition notes, this temporary change in policy showed that another way is possible: we do not have to go back to a pre-pandemic system that was keeping far too many students from graduating.

As a comprehensive review of research recently released by the State Education Department noted, most studies have found that exit exams serve as a barrier to high school graduation and increase dropout rates, particularly for students of color, without leading to more positive student outcomes. Furthermore, decoupling exams from graduation requirements does not mean lowering standards; there is no evidence showing that these exams increase achievement or employment outcomes for young adults leaving high school, but they do serve to push students on the margins away from rigorous coursework.

This Fall, the State convened a Blue Ribbon Commission on Graduation Measures to develop recommendations on measures of learning and achievement that could better serve NYS students. “We are excited about this opportunity for the State to expand upon the steps they have already taken to deemphasize high-stakes testing during the pandemic,” said Juliet Eisenstein, staff attorney on the Postsecondary Readiness Project at Advocates for Children of New York, which leads the Coalition for Multiple Pathways to a Diploma.

However, the State does not need to wait to eliminate the passing of Regents exams as a condition for high school graduation, and they should do so as soon as possible.

“While the Commission’s work moves forward, the State should take action now to ensure that students who have passed all their courses are able to graduate from high school and pursue their postsecondary goals,” said Eisenstein.

Read the petition
View the press release as a PDF

Despite a Decrease in Suspensions, New Data Continue to Show Persistent Disparities & an Alarming Increase in Police Involvement

11.17.2022 | Today, Advocates for Children of New York (AFC) issued the following response to the release of the New York City Department of Education (DOE)’s suspension data report for the 2021-22 school year:

The new suspension data released publicly this week indicate a decline in the number of suspensions issued to New York City students, down 23% to 25,117 since the 2018-19 school year, the most recent pre-pandemic year. This number does not capture off-the-books suspensions, in which schools are suspending students—instead of providing them the behavioral support they need—without documenting the suspensions and affording students the due process they are entitled to receive under the law.

Furthermore, when viewed in conjunction with the NYPD school safety data during the same period, the overall number of exclusionary school discipline and police interventions in student behavior is deeply concerning. Indeed, there was the highest ever publicly reported number of “mitigated” incidents where School Safety Agents or police responded to student behavior—which could have and should have been managed appropriately by school staff—and then released the student back to school staff for further action: from 5,102 in 2018-19 to 8,223 in 2021-22, a 61.2% increase.

The City continues to have considerable work to do to address substantial racial disparities in suspensions—which result in students losing valuable instructional time. In 2021-22, over half (51.6%) of superintendent’s (long-term) suspensions, along with 41.7% of principal’s suspensions, went to Black students, who comprised only 20.7% of the public school population (not including charter schools), compared to 52.0% of superintendent’s suspensions and 42.1% of principal’s suspensions in 2018-19.

School discipline disparities by disability status are worse than before the pandemic. Students with disabilities—who are about 21.0% of the student population—received 43.8% of long-term suspensions and 38.9% of principal’s suspensions in 2021-22, compared to 43.0% and 38.5%, respectively, in 2018-19.

Other troubling data indicate that 5,371 students were removed from class or suspended from school two or more times during the 2021-22 school year, resulting in multiple times these students lost crucial instruction time in the classroom. Additionally, there were 2,446 student removals from class or suspension from school where police were contacted last year.

“Many young people in our City experienced unimaginable trauma and are struggling with the return to in-person learning,” said Rohini Singh, Assistant Director of the School Justice Project at Advocates for Children of New York. “Experts have declared a youth mental health crisis, and it is urgent that the City and DOE respond in kind by prioritizing investments to ensure our children have access to and receive effective behavioral and mental health supports in schools.”

“It is critical that the City fully fund supports for students that can actually address the root cause of their behavior and keep them in the classroom learning,” said Dawn Yuster, Director of Advocates for Children’s School Justice Project. “The City and DOE need to expand investments in restorative justice practices, the Mental Health Continuum, school-based mental health clinics, community schools, and other healing-centered school settings and practices instead of squandering money on ineffective and harmful practices that exclude young people from school and treat them more like criminals than students.”

View the press statement as a PDF

For the Seventh Year in a Row, More than 100,000 New York City Students Experienced Homelessness

10.26.2022 | The 2021-2022 school year marked the seventh consecutive year in which more than 100,000 New York City public school students experienced homelessness, a crisis which has now persisted through two Mayoral administrations and four schools Chancellors. Even as total enrollment in City schools fell last year, the number of students identified as homeless increased by 3.3%, rising from 101,000 to 104,000.

Data released today by Advocates for Children of New York show that, of these 104,000 students, more than 29,000 spent time living in City shelters; 69,000 were “doubled up,” or temporarily sharing the housing of others due to loss of housing or economic hardship; and nearly 5,500 were unsheltered, living in cars, parks, or abandoned buildings. While they attended district and charter schools across the five boroughs, students experiencing homelessness were especially concentrated in the Bronx, upper Manhattan, and Brooklyn districts 23 (Brownsville) and 32 (Bushwick). In district 9 in the southwest Bronx, more than one in five students experienced homelessness last year—the highest rate in the city—and one in every 13 spent time in shelter.

In recent months, the total number of students in temporary housing has climbed even higher as an increasing number of families seeking asylum—many of whom have school-age children—have arrived in New York City and entered the shelter system.

“If these 100,000 children made up their own school district, it would be a district larger than 99.5% of all other districts nationwide,” said Kim Sweet, executive director of Advocates for Children of New York. “While the City works to address the underlying issue of homelessness, we also must ensure that students who are homeless get to class every day and receive the targeted supports they need to succeed in school.”

High rates of chronic absenteeism and poor academic outcomes for students who are homeless—and especially for those living in shelter—are as disturbingly consistent as the prevalence of student homelessness itself. In 2020-21, students in shelter dropped out of high school at more than three times the rate of their permanently housed peers; only 60% graduated in four years; and 64% were chronically absent, meaning they missed at least one out of every ten school days.

The City has committed to hiring 100 shelter-based DOE Community Coordinators this year to help families navigate the school system, resolve barriers to regular attendance, and connect students in shelter with needed supports. However, a month and a half into the school year, at a time when the shelter system is at a breaking point, none of these staff have been hired, and there is a leadership vacuum at the DOE Office of Students in Temporary Housing following the departure of its executive director and other key staff. The City should fill these vacancies right away. And since the DOE can’t do this work alone, the City should also bring together City agencies to tackle the multitude of educational issues facing the growing number of students who are homeless, including transportation, chronic absenteeism, and delays in enrollment and service provision.

“The DOE needs to ensure the new migrant students entering the shelter system are enrolled in schools that can meet their needs, while not losing sight of the longstanding issues facing the tens of thousands of students who were already homeless,” said Jennifer Pringle, Director of AFC’s Learners in Temporary Housing Project. “The new Community Coordinators will be critical for helping students in shelter access a quality education and break the cycle of homelessness. Hiring and training all 100 of these staffers so they can support families on day one, along with filling the open leadership roles within the Students in Temporary Housing team, must be an urgent priority for this administration.”

Read the data report [PDF]
View the press release as a PDF

AFC Responds to the Release of 2022 New York State English Language Arts (ELA) Test Scores

09.28.2022 | Today, Kim Sweet, Executive Director of Advocates for Children of New York (AFC), issued the following statement in response to the release of the 2022 New York State English Language Arts (ELA) test scores for New York City, showing that only 36% of Black and Hispanic students, 18% of students with disabilities, and 13% of English Language Learners (ELLs) in grades 3–8 are reading proficiently:

The test results released today drive home the need for a fundamental overhaul of the City’s approach to literacy instruction, as well as the urgency of providing extra support to students whose education was disrupted by the pandemic at an especially critical moment: the years when they were still learning how to read. While the overall ELA proficiency rate ticked upward, relative to 2019, the percentage of third graders scoring proficient fell by four percentage points and the rate for fourth graders fell by six percentage points. These students would have been in first and second grades in March 2020—grades when children are mastering the relationships between sounds and letters and building the foundational literacy skills that will shape their future academic trajectory.

We’re encouraged that this Administration is planning to tackle the issue of literacy instruction, despite the many implementation challenges ahead. Shifting what happens in thousands of classrooms on a day-to-day basis is no small task, and the devil is truly in the details. It will be critical to evaluate and learn from the pilot programs launching this year, with an eye towards scaling success, setting the stage for long-term sustainability, and ensuring support reaches the students with the greatest needs. And as the City develops specialized programs for students with dyslexia and works to improve core instruction in the early elementary grades, it cannot leave behind the thousands of older students—with and without disabilities—who have not yet built a strong foundation in the building blocks of reading.

Read the statement as a PDF

Limited English Proficient Parents Need Additional Assistance to Access Information about their Children’s Education

06.09.2022 | Today, Advocates for Children of New York (AFC) released a new data analysis, More than Translation: Multi-Faceted Solutions for Communicating with NYC’s Immigrant Families, estimating that more than 329,000 public school students do not have a parent who speaks English fluently and calling on Mayor Adams and the City Council to invest $6 million in the FY 2023 budget to establish a permanent, central system for immigrant family communications at the Department of Education (DOE). While the FY 2022 budget included $4 million in one-year funding for targeted outreach and communication to immigrant families, Mayor Adams did not extend it in his Executive Budget; unless the Mayor and Council take action to include it in the adopted budget, set to be finalized as soon as this week, it will expire at the end of June.

Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey (ACS), the analysis illustrates the need for multi-faceted approaches to communication that go beyond making translated documents available online. For example:

An estimated 55,585 students’ parents have no more than an 8th grade education in addition to not being proficient in English. This potentially limits their ability to read and understand translated materials from the DOE explaining complex processes, systems, and regulations—documents that can often be confusing even for native English speakers with college degrees.
An estimated 61,657 children of Limited English Proficient (LEP) parents live in households without broadband internet access, meaning that information communicated to families online or via email is unlikely to reach them in a timely manner, if at all.
An estimated 29,608 students’ parents have limited English proficiency and communicate in a language outside of the top nine (Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, French, Haitian Creole, Korean, Russian, Spanish, and Urdu) into which DOE documents are routinely translated.

“Our on-the-ground experience working with families has shown us that many parents never receive critical information when it is only available via translated documents posted online,” said Diana Aragundi, staff attorney at AFC. “For example, we have worked with immigrant parents who primarily speak languages like Nahuatl or Mixtec and so are forced to rely on their second language, Spanish, in order to communicate with their children’s schools, even though they have limited literacy in Spanish.”

“My child’s school sends me information by email. I don’t know how to use email that well. And the emails are always in English, even though the school knows I do not speak English. I have to ask my children for help to understand what the email says” said Florentina, a Spanish-speaking parent of 10- year-old in a Bronx school.

Ensuring that immigrant parents get needed information and can play a meaningful role in their children’s education requires multi-faceted approaches that take into account their varying levels of literacy and access to digital media. The DOE has been meeting with a work group to determine the most effective uses for the $4 million it received last year, including using local ethnic media to share updates from the DOE, sending paper notices to families’ homes, reaching families over telephone and text message, and collaborating with immigrant-facing community-based organizations (CBOs) to create and launch information campaigns. This important work requires funding to continue.

“We work with so many immigrant families who have felt sidelined in their child’s education or who have been left in the dark because no one from the DOE, including their children’s schools, tried to communicate with them in a way they could actually understand,” said Rita Rodriguez-Engberg, director of AFC’s Immigrant Students’ Rights Project. “If the new administration is serious about its desire to empower parents as true partners, then the City should be increasing—and certainly not cutting—the multi-faceted immigrant family communication and outreach initiative. ”