For Immediate Release
Mayor Bloomberg announces plans to help city through recession
Jan 15, 2009 4:48 PM
In his annual State of the City address on Jan. 15, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that good public schools are crucial to protecting the quality of life in New York City, and he praised our educators for their hard work. He also announced plans to build 50 more schools for nearly 15,000 students and said the city would enroll more children – 55,000 students – in pre-K classes than ever before. He also outlined a new initiative for a 311 telephone call-in line to improve communication between schools and parents.
UFT President Randi Weingarten responded with the following statement:
Mayor Bloomberg’s ambitious agenda recognizes the need for all New Yorkers to work together to keep the city moving forward in these tough economic times. The challenge lies in accomplishing that goal without curtailing essential programs and services while preserving the safety net for our most vulnerable New Yorkers, namely children, the elderly and the poor.
The Mayor rightly acknowledges just how crucial good public schools are to protecting the quality of life in New York City, and we thank him for applauding the work of teachers who have contributed to the system’s improvements over the past seven years. We also support his plan to build 50 more schools for nearly 15,000 students to help address school overcrowding and class size concerns. Parental involvement is essential to improving our schools, and we applaud his P311 initiative to keep parents better informed about their children’s schools. But he should also act to ensure that real collaboration between parents, educators and administrators is a critical component of any school governance model moving forward.
Everyone understands that times are going to be tough in the months ahead, but that is all the more reason to be prudent in how we proceed. We cannot repeat the mistakes of the past fiscal crises when disinvestment and budget reductions resulted in cuts in services from which it took us decades to recover. And we must not seek to balance budgets on the backs of the very workers who keep the city running. Municipal unions worked with the city to find solutions to fiscal problems before, and we stand ready to do so again.
