CEC 21 Needs Parents’ Help Bringing More Oversight To C4E

After CEC 20 voted unanimously to censure and request more oversight to ensure the NYC Department of Education uses education funding received through a state program to reduce class sizes, CEC 21 is following suit.

The education council is also asking parents to make their opinions on reducing class size heard via e-mail before tomorrow’s deadline.

Below is their call to arms, as well as a sample e-mail:The Community Education Council of District 21 at a Special Meeting has unanimously voted  today, on a Contracts for Excellence Resolution declaring the DOE’s Failure to use Contracts for Excellence Funding to reduce class size. The Resolution is located on our website at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RsV8-Af8YtUFlL3mdffG8VHyKCxmgpE_3SiLIhIR9Ps/edit?hl=en_USThe deadline for submitting  comments on the city’s failure to reduce class size is Nov. 23. Please email them today! A sample message along with the address you can send to DOE is listed below. The  DOE is supposed to send all the comments to the State Education department along with its proposed C4E plan. It is important that the state Commissioner know how dissatisfied parents are with the Bloomberg administration’s dereliction of duty to our children. Please be sure to include your name and address, and/or child’s school.

As a parent, it is unacceptable to me and many other parents that the DOE has repeatedly has cut the budget for schools and in recent years, has refused to allocate a single penny specifically towards class size reduction. This has allowed class sizes to grow even larger than when the state’s highest court said NYC children were denied their constitutional right to an adequate education because of excessive class sizes. Indeed, the city’s refusal to reduce class size has severely undermined my child’s opportunity to learn, in violation of state law .

Since 2007, the city received over $2 billion cumulatively in Contract for Excellence funds, in return for promising to reduce class size in all grades, to no more than 20 on average in K-3, 23 in 4-8th grades, and 25 in core HS classes. This is the fifth year of the city’s class size reduction plan, and instead, class sizes have increased sharply in all grades, and in K-3, are now the largest that they have been in eleven years.

[optional: My child is in [ fill in name] school, in district [fill in number], with a class size of x in [fill in] grade. ]

I urge the state to immediately enforce a co rrective action plan that would require the DOE to start hiring more teachers and reducing class size, instead of wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on more testing, technology, consultants and bureaucrats. Otherwise, the state as well as the city will have failed to do its duty by NYC’s children.

Yours sincerely,

Name

Address [or child’s school]