CM Restler on Spanish teachers, hold harmless, 3K seats, and librarians

Thank you, Chairs, Chancellor and team.

Good to see you all.

I know you're all not going to comment on that oddly timed New York Post article, but briefly, could you just elaborate?

We've experienced an extreme shortage in Spanish language teachers over the last few years.

Especially with the migrant crisis, it was exacerbated.

Could you just briefly elaborate in some detail on the breadth of, or the breadth

The shortage that we've been facing across the schools in New York City?

Yeah, we've had significant shortage in Spanish language and

L teachers in general prior to the arrival of New Yorkers and certainly exasperated by that and also continues to be a shortage area that we experience.

And I know we have...

Our Amy Way here who can speak more to that.

In 15 seconds.

I'm not kidding.

Sorry.

Yeah, 15 seconds.

Okay, sorry.

It's so big.

I know, but two sentences.

First, I'll swear to tell the truth, only the truth.

Amy Way, Executive Director for Teacher Recruitment and Quality.

World languages is an extreme shortage area.

What we are doing is on two fronts.

I wasn't asking that.

I appreciate it.

I was just asking for the data on what the shortage was over the last two years.

But if you want to offer that.

I can follow up with you on that.

Yeah, we can send it to you.

Next up, hold harmless funding.

So.

Just to reiterate your testimony, no impacts on hold harmless funding in the budgets that will be released for every school early next week?

In the initial budget, that's correct.

But mid-year adjustments, TBD?

Yes.

Okay.

And any insight that you can offer to your approach on hold harmless funding, a gradual step down or anything to that effect if we do see mid-year adjustments?

Right now, we have held initial...

budget's harmless and we're going to continue to have conversations about the sustainability of schools and you know but no decisions on the mid-year.

I appreciate the the policy I think that you know welcome a conversation on how we navigate this over time.

And I appreciate budgets being released by early next week because I think the council is sometimes put in an impossible situation where we don't know the budgets of our individual schools and are expected to adopt the budget for the city of New York as a whole.

And there's no budget that's more important to me than the 40-odd schools that are in my district.

So we want to make sure that we're doing everything we can to protect them and filling gaps for them.

But we can only do that once we know the budget.

So thank you for getting that out by early next week.

3K pre-K.

Nice to see you, Deputy Chancellor.

Appreciate all your work.

I am very grateful for the significant expansion of 3K and pre-K that we've seen across our district.

We have been told that additional seats are being added in Greenpoint.

Can you quantify beyond the PS110 swap of a classroom there how many additional seats are being added in the 11222 zip code?

I'll get that to you, Councilman.

Because we've heard the number 42, and we'd love to confirm that if and when it's possible to do so.

I also just want to flag at PS31, also in Greenpoint, we've had...

Many families.

We've had families zoned for kindergarten that can't be accommodated into the school, which we're concerned about.

And we've had families that have

applied for pre-K that have been assigned to locations as far as 11 miles away.

And so we can send all, if we haven't already, we'll send you all the details on those families, but we really hope to be able to work together to add a pre-K classroom and a kindergarten classroom at PS31 to try to make sure that local families are accommodated.

And since I've gone over time, my last question is,

Last year we passed a law with then Chair Joseph's help to have the DOE report on the presence of school librarians in our schools.

It showed that only in 47 out of 657 elementary schools did we have a certified librarian, which gosh, that is just far too many.

I'm a big believer in librarians and the impact they have on literacy outcomes.

The first annual report was due on June 1st.

Do we have any status update on that report now that we're a week late?

I believe it was submitted today.

Submitted today.

Great news.

I look forward to reading it.

Thank you very much, Chancellor and team.

Appreciate your partnership and look forward to working together.

Awesome.

Thank you.

Avila is followed by Zhuang.