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High school sophomore Samira Barotova is long past preschool age, but she acutely felt the impact of the city’s child care crisis.
When her little brother couldn’t get a spot in the city’s free 3-K program, Samira started getting pressure from her mom to skip afternoon volleyball practice to help look after him.
“Volleyball was my life,” said Samira, a student at Leaders High School in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. “But it was nothing compared to my brother.” Still, when she watched him, she felt ”emptiness in my heart.”
It wasn’t until Samira did some research and helped her mom obtain a voucher that subsidizes the cost of child care for low-income families that she could fully resume her extracurricular activities.
That experience is part of what drove Samira to speak out, alongside dozens of her classmates and members of the People’s Plan, a progressive coalition pushing for additional investments in social services, at the Education Department’s downtown headquarters on Thursday. They demanded additional investments in early childhood education, support for immigrant students, arts education, mental health, and CUNY.
The rally was the culmination of a project in the 10th-grade English classes at Leaders, a member of the city’s consortium of schools that are mostly exempt from Regents exams and prioritize student-driven projects. Students researched the city’s budget and zeroed in on the shortfalls that most directly affected their lives. Several of the students’ specific budget proposals align with recommendations from the People’s Plan.
The city’s budget is due at the end of June, and the City Council recently called on Mayor Eric Adams to add roughly $800 million for education programs he left out of his preliminary budget. The state budget, which is now more than a week late, will also have huge ripple effects on the city’s schools — with hundreds of millions in education dollars and the fate of the child care voucher program hanging in the balance.
Lack of child care forces older siblings to pick up the slack
Samira wasn’t the only student to notice that a lack of child care can increase the burden on older siblings. Malk Elgamal, another Leaders student, remembered that when she was a toddler, she stayed home all day with her mom until her older siblings came home, allowing her mom to leave for work.
“I didn’t understand it then, but behind the scenes, my siblings were rushing to get home from school,” she said. “If I had a place to go, my sister would have been able to go out with her friends after school. My brother could have played sports.”
Malk and Samira joined the chorus of lawmakers and advocates who have called on Adams to restore hundreds of millions of dollars for early childhood education left out of his preliminary budget.
Students want more aid and protections for immigrants
President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrants is top of mind for students at Leaders, who hail from countries including Uzbekistan, China, and Russia.
Rida Noor, an 11th grader who arrived with her family eight months ago from Pakistan, understands how critical it is to have access to legal services, and she urged the city to invest an additional $59 million to subsidize legal support for immigrant families, one of the proposals in the People’s Plan.
She recounted how little her own family knew the process for obtaining necessary documentation.
“Everything felt overwhelming. We didn’t understand the laws, what papers we needed, what rules we had to follow,” she said. “I remember my parents whispering late at night… what if a small mistake meant we could no longer stay?”
Merely Salamanca, another Leaders student and the daughter of Mexican immigrants, recalled the moment in 2022 she found out her dad wouldn’t be able to return to the U.S. after a trip back to Mexico.
“I dropped the [phone] on the [floor]. My heart sank. I couldn’t even breathe. The whole world just stopped in that instant,” she said.
“Thousands of families have been going through the same thing I have gone through, which is not something that should be happening in this world,” she said.
Merely called out Adams for “cooperating with Trump’s administration” and demanded that the city invest more to “protect immigrant New Yorkers” in next year’s budget.
Calls to bolster arts education from students and elected officials
As a kid who struggled to fit in and make friends at school, Mia Ottaviani always found solace in art class.
“I learned to channel my emotions through art, connect with others, stay committed to a project and persevere through problems,” she said. “The smell of wet paint, the sight of colorful artwork covering every inch of the walls and the low hum of creation going on all around me will never not bring me comfort.”
But Mia was dismayed to find as she got older that many of the schools she visited had little to no art offerings.
“Lots of the schools didn’t have a dedicated art room, just a small cart with squeaky wheels holding old, dried up paints collecting dust in a storage room,” she recalled.
Just a stone’s throw away from the Leaders rally, at the New York City Council, lawmakers were grilling city officials on that very topic. More than two-thirds of eighth graders in public schools didn’t receive the state-required two semesters of arts education in two different disciplines last school year, according to the council report.
Both Mia and Council Education Committee Chair Rita Joseph called on the Adams administration to maintain $41 million in arts funding that is set to disappear next year.
Pleas for more mental health services to cut long waits
During the darkest days of COVID, stuck in their house while “insecurities ran through [their] body and swam through [their] mind,” Dee Wood finally worked up the courage to seek out a therapist.
But because of a dire shortage of youth mental health providers, Dee was stuck on a waitlist for a year before they actually spoke to a therapist, they said.
“I was lucky enough to be one of those kids who could wait that long,” Dee said. “Some kids are slowly losing themselves to the pain in their brains.”
Dee called on the city to invest $61 million in “Crisis to Care,” an effort to expand mental health services and reduce waitlists. Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who made an appearance at the rally, echoed that call — and slammed Adams for recently touting a school mental health program that he declined to fund in his preliminary budget.
Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org
