Brooklyn Laboratory Charter High School can most certainly be counted among the borough’s hidden gems for its innovative approaches to challenges that now plague schools nationwide.

Getting students back on track to graduate. Decreasing absenteeism. Supporting students’ and teachers’ well-being, all while preparing for the end of pandemic relief funds next year.   

Two Brooklyn-raised Black women, who reflect much of the student body at the small 9th to 12th grade college prep school, are leading into a new era coming out of the pandemic, revamping the status quo that left many educators exhausted and students dissatisfied.

Leaders and staff went to the drawing board, mining for solutions that filled gaps and brought joy back into school. 

Brooklyn Lab Charter’s social workers visited nearly 100 homes to find students, as absenteeism soared post-pandemic. Each student has a personal advocate both at school and with their families, an advisor who starts each day with a non-academic meeting to build relationships and discuss health or current events over free breakfast. Free photobooths, music, dinner, sports and games await those who show up on-time at weekly “No-Tardy Parties.”

Two teachers now lead each class, at least one of whom is special education certified, as the school adopts an all-inclusion-model. Morning office hours and a 6-week night school offer more chances for students to bridge academic gaps made worse by the pandemic. Teachers are now paid to lead and attend professional development sessions. 

In early March, Schools Chancellor David Banks announced he would eliminate the executive superintendent role from the Department of Education’s internal structure and require district superintendents to re-apply for their jobs. The shifts received a in The New York Times story covering the chancellor’s remarks, his first major address as head of the DOE.

But to Bronx parent Ilka Rios, the news hit like a thunderbolt.

“Initially, when [the chancellor] made the announcement, at that point, I didn’t hear nothing else that came out of his mouth,” she said.

To her, the update meant only one thing: Her borough, which suffers the city’s highest poverty rates and lowest high school graduation rates, would lose a leader who had finally started to turn around the area’s schools, Erika Tobia.

“Dr. Tobia has been a godsend to the Bronx,” Rios told The 74. “Every time the Bronx finds someone to help them get better, it’s like someone from downtown swoops in and removes them.”

A 30-year education veteran in the borough, Tobia had only assumed her post as executive superintendent 11 months prior. The position itself was created just three years earlier in 2018 under former Chancellor Richard Carranza, who to increase oversight and support for district superintendents.��

With a total of eight positions, one or two per borough, eliminating the posts will save millions of dollars, said Chancellor Banks, who founded a Bronx high school early in his career.��

“We want to push those dollars closer to schools,” the chancellor later said. “That’s all this is about.”

The idea that parents would rally to preserve an additional layer of bureaucracy is hardly typical and, indeed, not all parents are equally enamored with their executive superintendent. In Brooklyn, Yuli Hsu praised the chancellor’s move.

“​​When the previous chancellor added the executive level of superintendents, to me it just added another level of expense and bureaucracy,” she told The 74. “I haven’t really noticed any impactful change since [Executive Superintendent Karen Watts] arrived” in her role in North Brooklyn.

The 74 reached out directly to each of the city’s eight executive superintendents. None responded.

In the Bronx, Tobia’s parent-first style won families over.

The leader ran food drives, held sessions to build trust between campus police and families and launched a series of “” for adult education that regularly drew dozens of participants. Every month, Tobia held gatherings — dubbed “just us” meetings because she honored parents’ request that no other district officials attend — for families to share their education concerns, said Rios, who was president of the Community Education Council in the borough’s District  12 for nearly a decade.

“For us in the Bronx, it’s really important because we never had that voice before,” said Farah Despeignes, District 8’s CEC president. “That is why parents are so upset… that they would eliminate that position.”

With parents and school leaders across the city looking to get a handle on the new administration’s education agenda, they say how the chancellor moves forward with his planned shakeup will be an early test of his priorities and willingness to incorporate community voices.

So far, Rios remains unsatisfied.

“The chancellor nor the mayor, neither one of them brought us to the table to ask us parent leaders how it was working with [Tobia],” she said. “They just made the decision, ‘We’re eliminating the position.’ And I get it, eliminate the position, but then tell us, you’re going to put her somewhere else in the district.”

Despeignes penned a December letter on behalf of her parent organization, , to then Mayor-elect Eric Adams urging him to consider the Bronx executive superintendent for a post where she could engage with and uplift families across the city.

Banks has dropped indicators that he may still heed their advice. While the executive superintendent role will be going away at the end of this school year, some of those leaders “may reappear in other positions” in the DOE, he said.

During a two days after the chancellor’s announcement, Bronx Assemblywoman Chantel Jackson pressed Banks on his choice to get rid of the position prized by many of her constituents.

The chancellor empathized: “I’ve heard from a lot of parents in the Bronx who are really supportive of the Executive Superintendent Tobia,” he said. “I’ve become very fond of her myself in the two months that I’ve been here and I’ve seen her work — so stay tuned.”

“We are working diligently to finalize the execution of [the chancellor’s] announcement and additional details are forthcoming,” a DOE spokesperson wrote in a March 14 email to The 74.

The Power of Community! When we come together…we can achieve anything!

— Erika Tobia (@BxSuptTobia)

Experts agreed with that, structurally, the role “adds a level of bureaucracy without adding enough value to schools and students.” According to David Bloomfield, the extra layer actually restricts the authority of local leaders.

“The executive superintendents handcuffed the superintendents, and now the superintendents will be freer,” said the Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center education professor. 

“This is a win-win,” he added. Because there will now be 46 superintendents — presumably some of them new faces after the reapplication process — reporting to the chancellor rather than eight executive superintendents, “the chancellor’s office is going to have more information to assess its policies and the principals and superintendents will be able to act with more discretion.”

Since taking office in January, Banks has repeatedly vowed to improve the city’s schools “” by giving principals more autonomy, an agenda item reminiscent of the Bloomberg era.

Parent leaders like Kaliris Salas-Ramirez, of Harlem, say their schools became more responsive to the community once the executive superintendent role was introduced.

“There was a systemic issue in my district where parents were not empowered and parents didn’t have a voice,” Salas-Ramirez told The 74. “When the executive superintendents were put in place, Marisol [Rosales, the Manhattan leader at the time,] was incredibly responsive to parents on the ground.”

That indicates, said Andrea Gabor, author of , not that another layer of bureaucracy was necessary, but that perhaps Salas-Ramirez’s district superintendents weren’t properly doing their job.

“In an ideal world, teachers and principals should be the ones who are responsive to parents,” the Baruch College professor told The 74. “You should not have to go through a four-layer cake in order to get some kind of a response.”

The DOE took a similar stance: “[School] leaders will be successful when they work closely with families. … There are phenomenal schools in every neighborhood across the city, and it is our responsibility to cut bureaucracy and grow what is working at the school-level,” said Press Secretary Nathaniel Styer.

Still, based on her experience in the Bronx, Despeignes pushed back. 

“Yes, it is another layer of bureaucracy… but it’s a layer of bureaucracy that is needed because it brings all the schools and all the superintendents under one tent,” she said.

“It’s not outlandish,” noted Bloomfield, to eliminate executive superintendents in most boroughs, but keep them on a case-by-case basis in areas where they’re making a positive impact, perhaps like the Bronx.

Back in Brooklyn, District 14 Community Education Council President Tajh Sutton said the bulk of the Adams’s administration’s work building families’ trust is still to come.

“I’m happy to see one layer of the bureaucracy go, but what does that look like in practice? And how does it improve the lives and interactions between families and districts on the ground?” she wonders. “Are we talking to the most marginalized members of each district community to really try to get a sense of, ‘Is this superintendent effective? Is this principal effective?’”

Hsu, also on the District 14 CEC, agrees. She’s been frustrated by the lack of action after she raised concerns over anti-Asian racism her kids and others have experienced in school, she said. To her, re-ordering the DOE’s organizational chart is not enough.

“You’re just kind of shuffling pieces of a broken system around,” she said. “What I really want to hear is about meaningful change from the ground up and meaningful engagement with parents.”

Like all other public school parents, Plowden faced a choice: On the day New York City’s school mask mandate was lifted, should his son keep his on or take it off in the classroom. 

“I’m going to send him with it, but he can take it off if he wants to,” said the father, explaining that the family has taken COVID seriously, but feels that K-12 masking can’t go on forever. His son contracted the virus and recovered, which gives Plowden a level of confidence that Zayin will be OK, even if he chooses to bare his face.

“I just want him to have a normal school experience again,” said the Brooklyn dad.

On Friday, in an address held in Times Square, Mayor Eric Adams declared that the nation’s largest district would officially be doing away with its face-covering requirement and also rolling back proof-of-vaccination requirements in restaurants, gyms and movie theaters. 

It’s a move that comes on the heels of a tremendous shift away from school mask mandates nationwide in recent weeks, with only of the largest 500 districts now requiring that students cover up compared to 60 percent a month ago, according to data from Burbio, which has tracked school policy through the pandemic. 

In late February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed its guidance, now allowing schools to go mask-optional in areas where transmission is moderate or low.

New York City’s quick pivot — done with the support of the teachers union — breaks from the pattern of other top districts, which have been slower to adjust. Chicago Public Schools will wait another week before going mask-optional March 14, the district Monday, in a move the Chicago Teachers Union said violates a safety agreement requiring masking through the end of the school year. A similar agreement to appears to still be in effect in Los Angeles Unified School District, even as the state plans to lift its mandate March 11.

The change in policy is dividing New Yorkers, many of whom believe it’s too early to roll back pandemic precautions while others are embracing the change.

“I don’t think anyone is comfortable with it,” said Ebonee Smith, a special education teacher at Restoration Academy in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. She entered school on Monday clad with her mask. “It hasn’t been a gradual release.”

Justin Spiro, a social worker in a Queens high school, chose to drop his mask on Monday. “I feel very protected by my three shots,” he said, adding that at times, masks have made his job more difficult.

“Counseling behind a mask is definitely challenging,” he told The 74. “We rely, subconsciously, on so many facial expressions for showing empathy and showing understanding and expressing emotion.”

Similarly, Park Slope dad Dan Kurfist, whose daughter is in kindergarten, said he was “thrilled” when the city lifted its mandate. 

As for his daughter, she ran into school screaming, “No mask today,” when he dropped her off Monday morning, Kurfist said, estimating that about three-quarters of students were unmasked.

Face coverings will still be required for NYC kids younger than 5 in pre-K and child care, the mayor stipulated on Friday. That age group is not yet eligible for vaccination and has been overrepresented among all pediatric hospitalizations, according to a from the New York State Department of Health. 

About 75 people  gathered in City Hall Park Monday demanding that the mask rules be lifted for 2- to 4-year-olds, holding signs that read “#UnmaskOurToddlers.” One parent, attorney Michael Chessa, said he planned to sue and to seek an injunction lifting the ongoing mask mandate for preschoolers.

“I’m done with the mayor forcing my kid to wear a mask while he spends all day in preschool chewing on it anyway,” said Renana Teplitsky.

“Mask mandates have been lifted everywhere else, so it doesn’t make sense to punish kids 2 to 4,” said Liz Bernstein. “We’re super pro-mask,” the mother-of-two added, but because her 12-year-old child will now be exposed at school, she doesn’t see the use of continuing to mask her toddler. “Kids have siblings,” she pointed out.

Meanwhile, a group rallying under the hashtag #MaskingForAFriend gathered last week, imploring Adams pre-emptively to reconsider his plan to scrap the school mandate.

To Lupe Hernandez, a Tribeca parent of two who is immunocompromised, the mask-optional policy makes her fear for her family’s safety. She herself had COVID twice and is still suffering from long-term side effects, she said. She’s concerned that NYC schools serving low-income students of color than whiter, more affluent schools. Citywide, just over half of students are fully vaccinated.

“I think this is way too early” to drop masks, she told The 74. If it weren’t for the fact that her 8-year-old has a paraeducator who works with him at school, she would have considered keeping him home on Monday to avoid sitting next to unmasked classmates. The Department of Education reported that attendance was Monday.

“Masks haven’t prevented my child from developing,” she added, saying her son learned to read while attending school wearing one.

Adams on Friday acknowledged the wide-ranging viewpoints on how to navigate this current stage of the pandemic, joking that the city has “8.8 million people, 30 million opinions.”

“It’s reasonable to consider removing masks at this time,” said researcher John Giardina, who emphasized that vaccination continues to be an effective way to stave off severe coronavirus outcomes. 

In mid-February, the Harvard University Ph.D. student was the lead author on a peer-reviewed study spelling out exactly how many cases unmasking in school might trigger depending on factors like vaccine coverage and local transmission.

“There is no one-size-fits-all policy for a city as big as New York City,” he cautioned, emphasizing that individual school leaders may want to look at the vaccination levels of their own community to determine the best public health decision.

The breakdown of parent opinions tends to fall along racial lines, Farah Despeignes has noticed. Despeignes is a Bronx mother of two and president of the Community Education Council in District 8. Herself a former educator, she decided to homeschool her children in September rather than send them back to the classroom amid a pandemic. In her experience, Black and Hispanic families, who were more likely to have lost loved ones to the virus, seem to be more cautious in their approach to school COVID mitigation measures.

“I understand that whiter populations may see it more as a question of freedom. But I can tell you, here, it’s not a question of freedom. It’s a question of safety,” she told The 74. “A lot of these parents and children live in multi-generational homes. They have comorbidities that can be fatal.”

Still, many families fall somewhere in the middle.

On Monday morning, Sonia Maynard dropped off her grandchildren — all masked — at P.S. 093 in Brooklyn. 

“We’re waiting to see how everything goes,” she told The 74.

Some of her grandchildren’s classmates, Maynard knows, might not be covering up, and that doesn’t bother her. After some days or weeks, it’s possible her grandchildren may join them — “We’ve got to get back to some kind of normalcy,” she said — but not today.

From early November through Jan. 1, the Bay Ridge, Brooklyn family was under investigation by the Administration for Children’s Services, or ACS, the New York City agency tasked with looking into suspected cases of child abuse and neglect. Healy had been reported for educational neglect for not sending her children to school amid COVID fears, even though she says her kids kept up with their work remotely. 

The report that spurred their investigation was one of more than 2,400 that New York City school personnel made to the during the first three months of the 2021-22 school year, according to data obtained by The 74 through a public record request — about 45 percent more than were reported over the same time span a year prior when most of the city’s . From August 2020 to November 2021, records show NYC school staff made a total of 9,674 reports. 

The highest monthly tally, 1,046, came in November 2021, the same month that ACS and the Department of Education issued ​​instructing schools to have patience with families keeping their children home due to COVID-19 concerns, and to avoid jumping to allegations of educational neglect when students don’t show up.

About a third of the reports from NYC school personnel from September through November — 839 out of 2,412 — included an allegation of educational neglect. Of that total, just over half named educational neglect as the sole allegation, according to an ACS spokesperson, who pointed out that the rate was actually higher pre-COVID in the fall of 2019, when about 40 percent of reports from city school personnel alleged educational neglect.

Many of the families caught up in COVID-related investigations this school year, including the Healys, say that given the DOE’s statements and guidance, their ACS reports should never have been made.

Child welfare investigations, which disproportionately involve low-income families of color, can have devastating impacts. Charges can stay on parents’ records for years — even in cases like Healy’s where the agency ultimately found no evidence of neglect. Job prospects in fields like child care and education can be erased. And most dire, children can be separated from their parents — a trauma that studies show is later associated with elevated risks of .

ACS has clarified that, on its own, missing class should not be a reason for educators to suspect neglect. “We are … working together (with the DOE) to make sure that families are not reported to the state’s child abuse hotline solely because of [a] child’s absences from school,” a spokesperson wrote in a Jan. 13 email to The 74, adding that the agency is providing training to professionals working with children on ways to support families without calling the hotline.

But now, after New York City student attendance rates plunged in early January amid surging Omicron cases, and with over how the Adams administration will approach remote learning, questions swirl over whether even more families may get entangled in the child welfare web.

“I’m … worried about who’s going to be asked to answer for the decisions that they made in the wake of Omicron,” said Gabriel Freiman, head of education practices at the legal nonprofit .

Healy echoed the concern, adding that families who kept children home amid the surge may be “vulnerable to possible investigation.”

How did we get here?

Rewind to the fall: New York City announced that schools would open in-person with no option for remote learning, and Healy was terrified. She had suffered massive personal losses through the pandemic — more than a dozen of her relatives had died of the virus, she said, ranging in age from 36 to 87 — and the Brooklyn mother remained unconvinced that sending her children into crowded buildings was a good idea. She quickly submitted applications for home instruction for both of her kids. 

Meanwhile, just before classrooms reopened, the nation’s largest school district made a vow to parents: “The only time ACS will intervene is if there is a clear intent to keep a child from being educated, period,” then-schools Chancellor Meisha Porter said during a September . “We want to work with our families because we recognize what families have been through.”

Even while remote, Healy’s kids were still learning, she said. Both were accessing and submitting coursework via Google Classroom. She had even met with school staff to update both children’s Individualized Education Programs, the plans that spell out their special needs and mandated school services.

“I was in constant contact (with the schools),” Healy said. “​​All of the things that needed to happen were still happening.”

So it caught Healy off guard when, in early November, an ACS caseworker knocked on her door. The agency had received a report of suspected educational neglect from a staff member at her younger child’s school.

Healy had understood that a visit from ACS was a possibility. As a member of the advocacy group PRESS, , she knew of numerous other parents keeping their children home from school due to coronavirus concerns who had been investigated. She had even put together informing parents of their rights when ACS shows up. But her own investigation still took her by surprise. If anything, she was over-involved in her children’s education, she thought, not neglectful. 

“I’ve always inserted myself into the schools whether they wanted me there or not,” Healy joked.

Familiar with her rights as a parent, Healy did not let the caseworker inside their house. But despite being armed with strategies to navigate the situation, the visit was jarring to the whole family. After the caseworker left, her 14 year-old son, who has autism, paced back and forth for an hour, worried that the unfamiliar woman would return with law enforcement, Healy said. Her 13 year-old child, who identifies as non-binary, had continued nightmares, fearing they would be taken away from the only home they knew. Even Healy herself couldn’t avoid creeping thoughts of the worst-case scenario.

“You automatically think someone’s here to take my kids away,” she told The 74.

‘ACS is like the police’

Just like doctors and nurses, school personnel are mandated by New York state law to report suspected cases of child abuse and neglect to a central hotline. But even before COVID-19, alike have critiqued the practice as potentially harmful to families and prone to racial bias.

In New York City, some of children named in ACS investigations are Black or Hispanic, while, together, those racial groups make up 60 percent of the city’s youth. In 2019, according to , the lower-income, mostly Black and Latino neighborhood of East Harlem saw over six times as many investigations as the nearby Upper East Side, which is mostly white and affluent.

Even among neighborhoods with similar poverty rates, those with greater shares of Black and Hispanic residents face , research shows.

“ACS has long been used to criminalize our families,” said Tanesha Grant, a New York City parent leader who formed the group for mutual aid throughout the pandemic. Many Black parents, she told The 74, see child protective services as a form of racialized surveillance and punishment. 

“ACS is a curse word in our community. ACS is like the police,” she said.

“It is deeply concerning to us,” said a spokesperson for the agency, “that, year after year, there are dramatic racial and ethnic disparities in the reports ACS receives from the state and is required [by law] to investigate.” 

As per a 2021 state , mandated reporters are now required to undergo implicit bias training intended to keep reporters’ assumptions from coloring their assessments of parental fitness.

But just how much of an impact it will make in the K-12 setting remains to be seen. Nationwide, school staff report more allegations to child protective services than any other category of reporters, yet school reports are or lead to family interventions, research shows. In New York City, approximately 1 in 3 calls from school personnel ultimately lead to evidence of abuse or neglect, said ACS. In cases where no evidence is found, families often report that the investigation process can be .

There’s often a mismatch, said Freiman, of Brooklyn Defenders, between the typical impacts of child protective services investigations and the purpose they are meant to fulfill.

“Neglect is supposed to cover a category below which we don’t expect any parent to go,” the legal expert explained. 

But the parents keeping their children out of classrooms this school year, from what he has seen, tend to be highly involved and caring, like Healy. Some are even former PTA heads at their children’s schools. 

“These aren’t people who are trying to hurt their children. They’re trying to protect their children,” he told The 74. “ACS is just the wrong tool to employ.”

Even the softer guidance that ACS and DOE offered in November was not enough to sufficiently blunt that tool, advocates said. Healy said she worked with 50 families accused of educational neglect through PRESS and was only able to use the updated guidance to dismiss cases against two of them. 

Miranda rights for child welfare

As a way to mitigate some of the worst effects of ACS investigations, state Sen. Jabari Brisport, a former educator from Brooklyn, is that would require a Miranda-style reading of parents’ rights at the outset of every child welfare investigation. 

“Parents of color are more likely to be unaware of the rights they have when dealing with [child protective services],” Brisport told The 74. “The bill seeks to address the disparities in the CPS system.”

When, without warning, ACS showed up at the door of Melissa Keaton’s Flatbush, Brooklyn apartment in late October, the mother was taken by surprise. Having lost her father, who was a caregiving adult to her 9-year-old daughter, in April 2020 during the city’s deadly first coronavirus wave, Keaton chose not to return her traumatized child to her sought-after dual language school in Manhattan’s Lower East Side when classrooms reopened. The family was not ready for a two-train commute to and from school each day, Keaton decided. Unlike Healy, she was in the dark about how to navigate the interaction with her caseworker.

“There’s no paperwork. There’s no way of, you know, finding out what is this process? How does it work? What is expected of me?” Keaton told The 74.

Parents are not legally obligated to allow caseworkers to enter their homes unless ACS has a warrant. But many parents assent without realizing they have a choice. If caseworkers find evidence of drug use or other outlawed practices, it can lead to compounding charges and increase the likelihood of child separation. 

“Sometimes our families actually find themselves in a deeper hole — not because they’ve done anything wrong — but because ACS comes into the home looking for a problem,” said Tajh Sutton, a PRESS organizer. “They’re going through your refrigerator, your cabinets … asking these really invasive and inappropriate questions of your children.”

“This bill doesn’t create new rights,” explained Brisport. “It literally tells parents what their rights are.”

‘ACS should not have been called’

Despite the lasting psychological impacts of the neglect investigation upon her children, Healy also acknowledged that her caseworker was kind and actually quite helpful. The staffer fast-tracked her children’s applications for home instruction, helping her younger child recently gain approval for the program. Healy hopes her son will also soon be approved.

But her example, she believes, is an outlier. Not everyone is so fortunate. 

On Dec. 23, Keaton was preparing to lay flowers on the gravestone of her late father. The day marked what would have been his 63rd birthday — and because her dad’s December birthday used to be a part of the family’s holiday rituals, Keaton was feeling his absence even more acutely.

But before she left, she was contacted by her caseworker, who relayed what the mother thought was good news: She was ready to close the case. Keaton told her to come by.

When the caseworker arrived, she told Keaton that the investigation had been completed, but the agency had indeed found evidence of neglect. The news hit her like a thunderclap, Keaton said, stirring fears for how she might appeal, what the findings might mean for her future employment having previously worked at a children’s summer camps, and, most of all, whether it opened the possibility of her daughter being taken away.

The message, Keaton said, was “imprinted in my mind throughout the holidays, along with the thought of, ‘What happens next?’” 

The caseworker instructed her to appeal, Keaton said. When pressed on the evidence behind the finding of neglect, Keaton said, the caseworker explained that her daughter’s school had taken weeks to respond to requests, and when they did, they cited her elementary schooler’s inconsistent 2019 summer school attendance as a strike against the family — data that Keaton said is “completely false.”

Staff at the elementary school did not respond to requests for comment and ACS said that it cannot disclose the details of individual cases. Keaton is awaiting paperwork in the mail that will provide insight into the exact reasons the educational neglect allegation was substantiated by ACS. 

Keaton believes her case was unproductive at best, and inappropriate at worst. She was trying to keep her daughter safe and had been putting together educational assignments for her despite, she said, not being provided materials by her school. She was also applying for medically necessary home instruction — a process through which the November ACS and DOE joint guidance instructs schools to support parents wary of COVID rather than reporting them to child services. 

“Based on the guidelines,” said Keaton, “ACS should not have been called.”

Lead Image: Paullette Healy at the front door with her younger child, Kira. (Asher Lehrer-Small)

“I think the school experience is gone. People aren’t even showing up.”

“I avoid the cafeteria now.”

NYC students explain why they walked out of class.

Thousands of students from more than 29 New York City public schools abandoned their classes Tuesday walking out into frigid weather, demanding a remote learning option as Omicron surges and they feel unsafe at school.

As COVID cases rise and attendance remains unpredictable, New York City parents, students and teachers uncomfortable with in-person learning took to social media.

From coast to coast, Oakland and Boston students will soon stage their own walkouts.

One student’s reddit post last week described being in school as “beyond control,” detailing a day of absent teachers and “functionally no learning.” Study halls became “superspreader events.” Bathrooms were full of students taking COVID tests. 

Teachers abandoned their classes when notified they had tested positive. Skipping class became “ridiculously easy,” the student wrote.

An anonymous student that their parents are forcing her to go to school despite testing positive for COVID.

Despite last week’s low attendance and 2022 first major snowstorm, Mayor Eric Adams has consistently opposed closing schools or offering a remote learning option.

“We don’t have any more days to waste and the long-term impact of leaving our children home is going to impact us for years to come,” Adams said, stressing schools are “sanctuaries.” 

Students left the conditions they called unsafe in hopes of garnering attention from “policy-makers that can help close down schools temporarily,” organizers said in .

Cruz Warshaw, a Stuyvesant High School Junior behind the walkout, charged it was “ignorant and inconsiderate to put people’s lives at risk for without reason.” 

Three more juniors and seniors from Brooklyn Technical and Stuyvesant High Schools created social media accounts to share walkout plans and information on what they’re asking for — and why: 

Before long, students from more than two dozen of the city’s schools said they would join in. The plan: Leave school at 11:52 a.m. — right before sixth period, around lunchtime for many — and head straight home. 

Right on time and one after the other, Brooklyn Technical High School students did just that.

By lunchtime, the cafeteria in New York’s largest school — by enrollment — looked like this:

Their exit was met with backlash, accusations they simply wanted the day off — and that they were probably all going to hang out. 

This Brooklyn student insisted that wasn’t the case:

However, some participants faced more than online anger. A redacted email from a Brooklyn school official threatened students with mandatory detentions upon their return.

“There are so many people sick and our mayor is not doing enough to protect us … We want the choice to keep our bodies safe,” Felicia, a junior at Bronx High School of Science told The Riverdale Press reporter Sarah Belle Lin during Tuesday’s walkout.

Some of the city’s youngest learners, alongside parents, also joined the .

Many students and parents disagree with offering a remote option and point to its shortcomings, including that . 

While attendance is , it is up 9 percent . 

A few hours after the walkout, New York Schools Chancellor David Banks responded to the protests, asking student leaders to meet with him to work together for safe and open schools.

But long before the announcement, the Brooklyn Public Library had been considering how to help its patrons return books before they ever become overdue. In 2017, the library partnered with a University of Virginia behavioral science lab to help people bring their books back on time without shame or financial stigma, as well as increase patron engagement and reduce barriers to accessing the library.

“The idea of this partnership was to strengthen our relationship with our patrons and make sure the people who needed the library most weren’t being deterred from coming if they didn’t bring their books back on time,” says Linda Johnson, president and chief executive of Brooklyn Public Library. “We did a whole bunch of experiments and took a hard look at data to figure out what worked and what didn’t.”

Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) began this work in understanding and shedding light on how library fines disproportionately affect young people from low-income communities. In 2017, , roughly 225,000 youth across New York City had accumulated $15 of library fines. That was enough per library policy to prevent them from checking out any new books.

In October 2017 BPL had a chance to erase fines during a one-time forgiveness program for youth. The library forgave about 171,000 youth cards, restoring library access for 70,000 young people who owed more than $15.

BPL wanted to go even deeper, as there was no existing program to help patrons avoid fines before they accrued. By December 2017, BPL  from the Heckscher Foundation for Children to partner with the  at the University of Virginia. “We had a lot of conversations around structural versus behavioral barriers,” explains Katharine Meyer, an affiliate researcher at the nudge4 solutions lab.

At BPL, structural barriers to returning books on time included that library branches had limited hours but lacked book drops. The nudge4 solutions lab didn’t think they could solve those problems, but they did think they could address behavioral barriers — like people forgetting when their books are due.

To understand why patrons don’t return books, the team tested three approaches across focus groups (which included patrons who had accrued late fines), surveys and interviews. The team wanted to know the effectiveness of providing better information, like customized messages naming the title of the book due and displaying its photo. They also explored planning prompts to help patrons fit book returns into their schedules, highlighting the library’s opening hours alongside encouragement to make a visiting plan. Finally, a set of messaging emphasized the community aspect of the library — “bring books back so other families can enjoy them,” as Meyer puts it.

The team found out that providing better information and planning prompts were most effective, with the community-rallying messages least effective — because, Meyer theorizes, people already knew that others were waiting for their books. “It wasn’t that patrons didn’t want to be good library stewards and return their books on time,” she notes. It was because they didn’t know which books to bring back, or had trouble remembering when books were due.

Before the intervention, about 59 percent of individuals receiving the standard courtesy notice — which were non personalized, with blunt language — returned their book on time. Behaviorally informed courtesy notices with enhanced information about checked-out items, including the book titles and images of book covers, increased timely return by almost 10 percent. BPL has made changes to reflect their findings, including a photo of the book jacket on overdue notices, with more engaging outreach and translations in four different languages.

The library also made applying for a library card friendlier. “Out of the Nudge project, we unrolled a ton of improvements to the process — and it was in some ways a parallel example to how we changed our overdue notice,” says Amy Mikel, a BPL librarian and director of customer experience. The application process is now “more engaging and dynamic,” she says, “with a form that begins to recognize what kind of patron you’re presenting yourself as, then changes itself to gather information you might need.”

In addition to the intended project outcomes, BPL hoped this work might contribute to the elimination of late fines altogether. “All of this work put us in a position to go to the city, in the next budget negotiation, and say that we’d really like to go fine free — we were working to bring the fine down organically through these efforts, and wouldn’t it be great if the city would make up the difference?” says Johnson. Then COVID-19 hit, closing down in-person libraries and putting borrowing and returns on hold.

BPL applied the findings from its nudge4 solutions partnership as it reopened libraries this year. “There was a question about how we bring folks back to the library and help them get back into the habit of circulation,” says Meyer. The team helped promote the  program — which lets readers get personalized recommendations about what to read — this spring with postcards. Requests for the program leapt to about five per day up to 20-60 requests per day, according to Meyer.

This year, BPL also tackled that structural barrier that nudge4 pointed out: It tripled the amount of overnight book drops at branches.

Finally, BPL is planning to introduce a “Welcome Card” to patrons early next year, which lets patrons use the library’s digital services immediately without providing government identification. “After you go online to apply for a library card, in order to activate it or use it you have to visit a library branch with your identification,” explains Mikel. “What if we said that once you apply for a library card, we grant you digital access to our online services?”

The “Welcome Card,” then, will offer immediate access to BPL’s digital services, including e-books, databases and computers. (It can be upgraded at any time to a regular library card with identification.) “We won’t need to verify any information against legal documentation for you to do those things,” Mikel explains.

As BPL transitions with the rest of New York City libraries in becoming fine free — an initiative that’s  in cities like Chicago — the nudge4 solutions work has well prepared the library to continue strengthening engagement with patrons.

“In Brooklyn, we look at ‘fine free’ not as the end of the road, but as the first step,” says Mikel. “We still want to help patrons keep their accounts in good standing. We do want to use fine free as a tool to find and retain new library card users. We do want to create engagement with our collections and services.”

This article originally appeared  and is published in partnership with .