COMMUNITY ORIENTED EDUCATION PLAN

+ Fully funded and integrated K-12 schools

Shahana is committed to working with and amplifying youth-led organizations like Teens Take Charge, Desis Rising Up & Moving (DRUM), Girls for Gender Equity (GGE), South Asian Youth Action (SAYA), IntegrateNYC, Virus: Racism, Cafeteria Culture, FIERCE, Dignity In Schools Campaign-NY, and others shifting young people politically to take control of the classroom and build student power.

As Council Member Shahana will…

• Provide students with more individualized support by working with the Department of Education to use Foundation Aid funding to create smaller class sizes. This funding is a result of years of organizing to ensure that the school funding formula is applied equitably to schools, and low-income, Black, and Latinx schools are not routinely denied fair funding.
• Create education policy by co-governing with parents, students, teachers, administrators, and staff, and hire an education director in the office to be the bridge between what’s happening in schools and Shahana’s office.
• Fight for police free schools by removing cops from schools and instead hiring racially conscious social workers, trained in restorative justice, and guidance counselors to help de-escalate crises. Move away from zero-tolerance policies like school suspensions and law enforcement referrals. These policies disproportionately impact Black students, who are almost 4 times as likely to be suspended. Instead, we should provide funding for teacher training on de-escalation, crisis intervention, and trauma-informed approaches.
• Invest in community schools and wraparound services that support students and families beyond immediate academics, like flu-shots and breakfast on weekends. Offer halal, kosher, and vegetarian school lunch options to be inclusive of all students. As of 2021, PS 179 is the only school in the district with halal lunch options.
• Increase support for teachers in School District 15. In one of the most segregated school districts in the country, School District 15 hosted a community-based plan to integrate middle schools in Brooklyn. Through listening tours Shahana hosted with middle school teachers in District 15, these updated priorities emerged:
  • Host paid anti-bias and anti-racist workshops outside of the classroom for teachers. Many teachers were excluded from participating in trainings because paying for childcare was a barrier to access.
  • Help D15 schools hire and retain faculty with diverse backgrounds, employing long-term hiring practices like education career pipelines for students of color.
• Encourage creative and evidence-based monitoring on the impacts and best practices of culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP) in D15 schools. This includes soliciting student feedback on the effectiveness and utility of CRP programming.
• Develop a support team to lead CRP at schools and train teachers. Facilitate workshops between school teachers and community members to develop best CRP practices and school wide curriculum resources. Include community members and students as facilitators in the workshops.
• Provide fundraising training and infrastructural support to PTAs in the district with particular attention to resources that meet parents’ language access needs.
• Invest in data collection and infrastructure to explore other techniques PTAs can use to engage parents. Efforts should be planned by the community to encourage parent participation without worsening current inequalities. This includes partnerships between more and less affluent school PTAs. Also, an independent monitoring body should be created to clarify acceptable uses of PTA funds and assess the needs of each school in the district.
• Partner with the Department of Education, youth activists, teachers, and schools to create a culturally competent, inclusive, non-stigmatizing, accessible, and affirming sex education curriculum in New York City’s public schools, including language about:
  • Rights to access reproductive healthcare and the resources schools provide.
  • Boundaries and explicit, affirmative consent.
  • Contraception - including birth control, internal/external condoms, dental dams, IUDs, and diaphragms.
  • STIs/STDs that covers testing, prevention, and access to medical care and support after contracting an STI/STD.
  • Sex that does not center cisgender-heterosexual-monogamous relationships.
  • Intersectionality -- information about sex and sexuality that is thoughtful of how race, ethnicity, religion, size/weight, gender, sexual orientation, and other identities plays into one’s lived experience.
  • Menstruation and periods.
• Continue to fund sex education initiatives that allow students and youth to lead through Participatory Budgeting and discretionary funding.
• Work with school administrations in the district to ensure guardians have translated documents, like Individualized Education Program (IEP), to better advocate for services for their students.
• Help students apply for testing accommodations for statewide and admissions tests (i.e. Regents exams) and provide support for students with disabilities to explore college and career opportunities.
• Hold the NYC School Construction Authority accountable to infrastructural upgrades so that all schools are physically accessible, per the ADA.
• Advocate to increase the State Education Department’s funding for support services for students with disabilities in the city’s K-12 and college campuses.
• Host language-accessible workshops for guardians to understand their rights and options when accessing accommodations and special education services for their students.
• Advocate for Assemblymember Robert Carroll’s Assembly Bill which calls for early detection dyslexia screenings for all elementary school students (A8786A).

+ A New Deal for CUNY

As a CUNY- Brooklyn College alum, Shahana is a proud supporter of the New Deal for CUNY. Ensuring the success of students means providing infrastructural support so that college students have access to housing, meals, and healthcare. There are no CUNY campuses within our district, but the majority of CUNY students are commuter students. Nearly three-quarters of CUNY first-time freshmen come from NYC DOE schools, and half of CUNY students come from households making less than $30,000 a year. CUNY struggles to graduate students, particularly at the community-college level, where just 22 percent of students graduate in three years. 14 percent of CUNY students experience homelessness, and more than half of undergraduates experience food insecurity. Rates of homelessness and food insecurity are higher among older students, student parents, LGBTQ+ students, and Black and Latinx students. Creating a truly free CUNY system means more than covering tuition — it means our city’s college system must be equipped to address students’ housing, food, health, and other basic needs. New York State is financially prepared to cover the cost of ensuring quality education for students through the reallocation of consistent budget surpluses and taxing top earners.

As Council Member Shahana will...

• Invest and expand CUNY food voucher program. Currently, this program only provides students $400 toward food for the entire semester, and is limited to certain campuses.
• Fully fund emergency aid programs.
• Launch a coordinated citywide campaign to enroll all eligible CUNY students in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Nearly half of CUNY students experience food insecurity every year.
• Create an on-campus housing community for students experiencing homelessness. This could be modeled after the Dorm Project, a program that provides guaranteed dorm housing for CUNY students aging out of foster care.
• Expand CUNY ASAP and ACE, which provide free tuition, textbooks, a MetroCard, and individualized counseling for students.
• Expand mental health counseling services for CUNY students. The national recommendation for mental health counselors is one counselor for every 1,500 students. Across CUNY, this ratio averages one counselor for every 1,800 students, and at some campuses, it’s as high as one for every 3,000 or 4,000 students. The city must invest in on-campus mental health services for CUNY students, including teletherapy and peer counseling.
• Expand resources to immigrant and undocumented students, through expanding CUNY’s status as a sanctuary campus. A true sanctuary campus means funding services such as free legal aid to students, regular Know Your Rights workshops, clear administrative messaging, and refusing ICE access to campus or student records. In addition, a sanctuary campus ought to ensure that food vouchers, housing, and mental health counseling are accessible to all students regardless of immigration status.
• Advocate alongside state legislators to pass the New Deal for CUNY legislation, which would provide free tuition, more full-time faculty, urgently needed improvements to campus buildings, and increased mental-health and academic counselors on campus.
• Ensure New York City public school students and CUNY students have access to Know Your Rights workshops on their Title IX protections, including their rights in cases of sexual harassment or assault.
• Work with the Department of Education and the CUNY administration to make inclusive and comprehensive accommodations (ex. leave of absences that won’t interfere with the student’s credits, mental health/counseling support, etc.) available for student survivors of abuse.

+ Expanded early childhood education: Investing in the care economy for a feminist COVID-19 recovery

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the burden of childcare and navigating remote learning has largely fallen on women across the city. Our city’s COVID-19 recovery urgently requires a legislative agenda that values the care economy, and invests in workers, families, and children. Despite the expansion of programs like Pre-K For All, families still struggle to find affordable, high-quality childcare and education for their young children, particularly infants and toddlers. Kensington is one of the NYC neighborhoods with the fewest childcare spots available for infants: just 8 percent of the neighborhood’s children under the age of 2 could be served by available licensed child care spaces. Many of the new infant and toddler spots being created are in childcare centers that serve more affluent families, while centers that contract with the City or serve families with vouchers struggle to create space for infants and toddlers. Meanwhile, early care educators, who are mostly women and often women of color, are one of the lowest paid occupations in the country. The average annual salary for an early care educator in New York State is $28,820. In 2019, the City reached an agreement to ensure educators in community-based organizations are paid as much as educators in the public schools; however, family care centers, which disproportionately serve low-income families, were not included in this deal. We must value caretaking and domestic labor, investing in childcare and childcare providers.

As Council Member Shahana will...

• Expand infant and toddler spots available in District 39. Areas in the district with fewer spots (i.e., Kensington) should be prioritized.
• Ensure early childhood educators who provide subsidized childcare services in their own homes receive fair compensation, compared with educators in childcare centers or in public schools.
• Invest in free professional development and educational opportunities for early childhood educators. For home-based childcare providers, who often work as both the business manager and the teacher, free professional development should include training on business needs, including computer skills, better budgeting practices, and financial goal setting.
• Expand the City Council’s investment in CUNY campus childcare. This will help child care centers serve more children, provide extended hours, and offer evening and weekend programming to students and faculty using the centers.