GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

The basement at P.S. 15 in Red Hook was flooded with between five and seven feet of water during Hurricane Sandy, staff said.

Teachers across the city and region are turning to DonorsChoose, a website that allows educators to solicit funds for small-scale projects, to get their classrooms righted after Hurricane Sandy.

The site set up a dedicated page featuring only projects from schools affected by the powerful storm and so far, according to DonorsChoose’s current statistics, individual donors have given more than $50,000 to projects that will reach more than 19,000 students.

The quick pace of donations means that many projects are completed very soon after they are posted, giving schools an immediate boost at a time when goodwill is running high but coordination to deliver donated supplies to where they are most needed is only now being established.

In one remarkable example, a science teacher at Brooklyn International High School raised $1,080 from a single donor after explaining how his students’ science materials were destroyed when the school building lost power. “Unfortunately, our school cannot afford to replace the several thousands of dollars in chemicals and restriction enzymes we lost due to Sandy,” he wrote.

Other city teachers have gotten money to buy toys for students at P.S. 15 in Red Hook, which was flooded and has been relocated; give supplies to colleagues at a newly co-located school; replace graphing calculators for students at Staten Island’s New Dorp High School.

Some projects to help city schools still need funding. (more…)

Comptroller John Liu proposed hiring more guidance counselors today at a press conference where he was flanked by union officials and education advocates.

The education policy proposal that Comptroller John Liu put forth today sounded strange coming from the man charged with ensuring the city’s financial health: Add $176 million a year to the Department of Education’s payroll.

But Liu said city students so badly need more help applying to college that it would be worth spending the money to bring on more than 1,500 new guidance counselors, even if he didn’t think the funds could be freed up elsewhere within the department’s $23 billion budget.

“Investment in education today is the best economic development policy for tomorrow,” said Liu, a likely mayoral candidate, at a press conference that also featured union officials and education advocates.

“The economic challenges facing our city can best be addressed by educating many more New Yorkers beyond high school,” he added.

The proposal is the first in the comptroller’s “Beyond High School NYC” initiative, which Liu said today would use research to propose “strategic investments in public education” to raise the college-graduation rate for New York City public school students. Liu’s office calculated that just 21 percent of students who enter city high schools later graduate from college, echoing the city’s own determination that just 21 percent of students are college-ready. (more…)

With their discretionary funds eliminated and their schools’ budgets deflated, city teachers are supplicating strangers to fill in the gaps.

There are 1,793 projects posted by city teachers – mostly from high poverty schools – on DonorsChoose, a website that allows teachers across the country to describe small-scale projects that need funding. The requests paint a depressing picture of what many classrooms are lacking.

There are the occasional requests for cutting edge technology, such as iPads, tablets and digital cameras. And many of the more ambitious projects range from the creative (violins, costumes, wireless microphones) to the healthy (soccer balls, juicers, pedometers) to the icky (fetal pigs, butterfly larvae, composting worms). But most teachers seem to be asking for classroom staples such as pens, paper, and glue.

Here’s what we saw when we checked out DonorsChoose today:

• More than half of all NYC projects relate to literacy and language, a focus of the Department of Education’s this year. Many teachers, hoping to make their reading areas more appealing, are asking for beanbag chairs, rugs, library shelves and books. Ms. Coneys, from Thurgood Marshall Academy in Manhattan, is requesting a class set of “Things Fall Apart”  for her students. She writes: “School supplies have become less of a priority, and asking students to go out and buy a book they have never heard of is even more difficult. That being said, it’s apparent that my students have the desire to learn something new.” (more…)