As we wrap up the school year, I want to take a moment to say thank you and congratulations to everyone at the DOE who made this school year a success, particularly myself and the various family members I've gotten on the NYC gravy train. From all of us, let me say it certainly beats working.
I’ve only been Chancellor for six months but in that short period of time, we’ve accomplished a lot together. We’ve gotten billions of dollars from the feds, and still managed to cut the budgets of your schools by millions of dollars. We’ve managed to confound not only the City Council, but also the State Assembly and Senate in their efforts to reduce class sizes. Instead of seeing your class sizes go down, you’ll almost certainly watch them explode next year. No skin off my apple, since I'll be sitting in my office, doing Whatever.
We successfully navigated the Omicron surge, and cleverly managed to drop the mask mandate despite the most contagious strain yet. Sure, some of you got COVID even if you masked every day, but I never got it. Now the mayor did. Let me ask you this question—the mayor says when he has swagger, the city has swagger. Therefore, if the mayor has COVID, does the city has COVID? (Just a joke, Eric. Keep that 350K a year coming, and please don’t fire my brother.)
We’ve refused to cooperate with potential lifeguards, resulting in a dire shortage. We are instead embarking upon a drowning awareness campaign. That way, while you’re drowning, you’ll understand completely what’s happening to you right up until you drown. We’ve defunding public schools at the highest rate since the great recession. We’ve raised rents on stabilized apartments by the highest level since Bloomberg.
We announced key initiatives such as the expansion of Gifted & Talented programs, which may or may not mean something, given budget cuts. We made you sit through training on dyslexia, because that’s what the mayor has. If your students have some other learning disability, too bad for them. Let them elect a frigging mayor who shares it. We also made you sit through an insipid online seminar about online privacy, because when and if it’s violated, we intend to blame you. We’ll say, hey, we offered the training, so it’s not our job, man.
All of these accomplishments are the result of your hard work!
In a school system as large as ours, each and every one of you plays a vital role in ensuring that our students are well supported and thriving academically and socially. And you better believe when we max out class size, that’s gonna be one hell of a task! Good thing we’ve weaseled our way out of both city and state efforts to reduce class sizes, and can save tons of money by slashing your budgets. In fact, in our surveys, when we asked what parents most wanted for their kids, it was reasonable class sizes. Well, screw them and the subway trains they rode in on.
I feel enormous gratitude to be working alongside such smart and passionate people. If it were not for you, people like me would have to do this work, as opposed to sitting in comfortable offices at Tweed counting my blessings and paper clips I will look for your guidance and feedback, and believe me, I will give it valuable lip service at every opportunity.
Have a safe and fun summer. The best is yet to come as we advance toward the 2022-23 school year! Wait until you see what surprises the mayor and I have in store for you, UFT!
Soaring high,
Mister Chancellor David C. Banks
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