Julie Zam on language access barriers for immigrant families

Go after the new chair.

Excuse me.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, Chair Dino West and the members of the education committees.

My name is Julie Zam.

I am a program assistant at Home Cross Community Services, Multisocial Services Center.

I am also a mother of two daughters in New York City Public Schools.

Thank you for the opportunity to testify in support of Intel 684 and Intel 853, the education for all bills introduced by Council Member Susan Zhuang.

Home class community services serve low-income, immigrant, and namely English professional families across southern Brooklyn.

Many parents in our community care deeply about their children's educations, but they do not always have equal access to clear information.

They may not know about gifted and talented programs, special education services, eligibility rules, application timelines,

innovations, and where to go for help.

Intel 680

84 will require the city to study how language needs and location affect access to early elementary gifted and talented programs.

Intro 853 will require the city to study how language needs, income, and location affect access to special education programs and services.

A child's opportunity should not depend on whether a parent speaks English fully, understands the school system, or lives in a neighborhood with more resources.

In our borough neighborhoods like Homecraft in Brooklyn, families face many barriers.

This includes namely outreach, lack of translated materials, transportation challenges, and uneven program availability.

These barriers can affect whether a child gets the same educational opportunities as other children or receive the special education support they need.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for your testimony.

And as I said, you can submit the rest in writing.

Okay.

Okay.

Thank you so much for your testimony.

I'd like to thank this panel for their testimony this evening.

And our next panel.

Craig Garrett.

Kaiser, Lainey Hampson.

Kelly Clancy and Liat Olenek.

Yeah?

Okay, so Kaiser and Laney will testify.

Thank you.

Hi, my name's Lainey Hameson.

I'm the co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy.

Thank you for holding these hearings today.

I wanted to start by addressing some of the misinformation that was spread by DOE this morning.

Google Gemini is used in hundreds of elementary school classrooms.

Installed on thousands of young children's Chromebooks and inserted into their education every day.

So I have no idea what the DOE official meant when he said it was only used in a few high schools.

Google Gemini was also cited just this week as one of the most unsafe chatbots.

On the market when it comes to mental health, et cetera.

I also wanted to talk about the PowerSchool and Illuminate breaches, which released the data of many, many thousands of former students.

That data should no longer have been held by the vendor.

The state law requires data minimization and data deletion when that data is no longer needed to carry out services, and yet the

The DOE does not require this.

The PowerSchool, you talked about using vendors.

PowerSchool has been noted over and over of not complying with the most basic security protections, which led to the breaches of millions of students'personal data a few years ago, and yet the DOE allows

schools to still use more than 15 PowerSchool products, including Naviance, which more recently was cited as disclosing data illegally

in violation of state laws and federal wiretapping laws, and a $17.25 million settlement was made by the court.

Which New York City families are eligible for, and yet the DOE has not told any families about this alleged breach or that they're eligible for a piece of the settlement.

I just wanted to go on a little bit more.

My testimony is very lengthy, but the DOE has not been following compliant with the privacy laws.

That's why we recommended strengthening them, and they did not strengthen.

They did not use the recommendations that we proposed on the AI working group.

Thank you very much.

Kaiser?

Good afternoon.

My name is Kaiser, community organizer with the Alliance for Quality Education.

AQE supports Intro 853.

We oppose Intro 684.

All academic programs...

services should be equitably accessible, but there is no evidence that children eight and under can be reliably identified as gifted or that separating them from their peers is educationally sound.

AQE encourages Council to strengthen and pass the pre-considered bills to propose annual reporting and quarterly data breach reporting.

There is no data showing that AI learning tools are effective or safe, except claims provided by the profiteers.

Yet the Chancellor has announced plans to, quote, beta test these products on our children, including in District 75.

The bills should include public disclosure of evidence of efficacy.

Algorithmic tools have been proven to have racial and gender bias.

The bills must require assessments of bias and hallucinations in all AI tools in use.

Our kids'best interests, not profit, must be centered here.

The bills should include public disclosure of the number and positions of all DOE staff who have existing financial or other relationships with the companies that profit off of these products and those companies'involvement in developing trainings and policy.

Unfortunately, reporting is not enough, especially when we can't trust it.

There were many inconsistencies in DOE testimony today, flagging staff either not having thorough understanding of what their department is doing or misrepresenting it entirely.

AQE is grateful that more than half of the council has signed on to the call for a two-year moratorium for all AI in schools.

Right now, kids are losing access to the most essential kinds of learning backed by extensive research, open-ended play,

hands-on inquiry, and culturally responsive teaching differentiated by skilled human teachers to suit their specific population of students and their layered human stories.

Parents don't know what companies have their kids'data or what products are being used directly by their children, used to surveil them, or used to shape their instruction.

And when they ask, they're told DOE either doesn't know or can't say due to NDAs.

Thank you so much.

These unproven, biased, and dangerous products are sucking up valuable classroom time and public funding.

I appreciate your testimony today.

And as I mentioned at the very beginning, two minutes.

If there are further questions, fine.

But I do also want to thank both of you, Eleni.

I know you've been particularly helpful in helping shed a light on some of the issues going on with the DOE.

You're reporting on it, your participation at the roundtable, so I want to thank you.

I want to thank you both for your testimony.

And I remind you again, written testimony can be submitted to the council at testimony at council.nyc.gov.

Thank you so much.

Our next panel, Stephen Stowe.

Beckham Cowley, Lisa Walker,

Jay Edidin and Molly Senak.

I want to mix things up.

Let's start on my right this time.

All right, go ahead, Molly.