Councilmember Joseph questions Every Child and Family Is Known initiative and New Visions portal

And we have Councilmember Joseph, followed by Councilmember Epstein.

Thank you both chairs and I'd love to associate with your comments as well.

Welcome Commissioner, how are you?

The Every Child and Family is known initiative, a collaborative between ACS and DOE which received additional funding in the same budget to expand its work with students living in shelters and other families facing crisis relies on the New Visions portal to track and respond to families'needs.

This school year, over 50,000 check-ins have been logged by caring adults in the portable.

Please walk me through how does the city plan on expanding every child and family is known initiative while simultaneously cutting the platform it depends on to do the work.

Can you share if these cuts are sustained?

How will it impact your work at ACS to support our youth who need this initiative the most?

Thank you for the question and thank you for the welcome.

I'm going to turn it over to Deputy Commissioner Mendez to be able to answer some of the specifics that you asked.

But just again, reiterating, you know, our role when we're working with children and families is to ensure that they have their needs met and that we're finding ways to resource

their needs based on what they need and not just what we have.

And look forward to continuing to have conversations with you.

Absolutely.

Our numbers are tremendous in New York City public school students in temporary housing.

It's over 155,000 students.

And you know I know that work.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Morning.

Councilmember Joseph.

So I'm happy to report ACS is working very closely with New York City Public Schools, the foster care office.

As you know, we have a close collaboration with them and new visions to explore how to introduce the access to that portal to foster care agencies.

So as you can imagine, there's a lot of things we have to do on the back end.

We have to formalize an MOU.

Then we have to look at, I'm not the computer person, but I think it's called a cloud service agreement.

So we're going through some of those bureaucratic things to put in place, but we're also starting to talk to the foster care providers.

So we're thinking about doing this as a pilot first, and we're talking to the foster care providers about what should this look like, what makes sense, and all of those things while we're doing the MOU.

pieces.

And so we're hoping that that will continue to move forward so that in the next school year, this can move, you know, it will move forward.

So the timeline is for September this coming, so you'll spend the summer training and transitioning this platform?

Is that what that's looking like?

So that's the timeline.

I think, you know, part of the, and I can get back to you with actual specific milestones, like I mentioned, we have to create this MOU.

So sometimes there's back and forth, I think.

Councilmember Lee talked about back and forth, so there'll be some back and forth.

Until you get it right.

Right, until we get it right.

The cloud service agreement.

I know New York City Public Schools is currently using New Vision, so that should not be a problem for ACS.

They should pass all those cybersecurity tests.

But I don't want to speak.

I don't want to get ahead of myself.

I do know we're trying to launch in the next school year.

So we'll continue to work on that.

We get around to it, right, Shirley?

Okay.

I have more questions.

And I'll just commit that we can follow up as it's evolving with you directly.