Overcrowding in East Side public schools threatens to deny a generation of children their constitutional right to a "<a href="http://www.cfequity.org/" target="_BLANK"><strong>sound basic education.</strong></a>" We must make more school seats available now, build more schools to keep up with current development, and investigate new solutions for building educational infrastructure.<br><br>I have a strong commitment to public education that stems from being a graduate of the <a href="http://www.bxscience.edu/" target="_BLANK"><strong>Bronx High School of Science</strong></a>, State University of New York's <a href="http://www.albany.edu/" target="_BLANK"><strong>University at Albany</strong></a> and <a href="http://law.buffalo.edu/" target="_BLANK"><strong>University at Buffalo Law School</strong></a>. I helped create Community Board 8’s Youth and Education Committee, identified a <a href="http://kallosforcouncil.com/sites/default/files/DYCD_Bus.pdf" target="_BLANK"><strong>Free Yellow Bus Program</strong></a> for local youth service providers, and created an internship program to better serve the youth and education needs of our community. As your Council member I will continue to fight for increased funding for youth services and education.
“Education and the well-being of our neighborhood children have always been a top priority for me,” Kallos said in a statement. “I am proud and happy that the residents who voted and participated in the process share that feeling and made it known with their vote.”
“My only concern is that this is an incredibly popular program and it will continue to be a victim of its own success as more and more parents apply,” and demand will keep outpacing supply, he said.
Los residentes de El Barrio ahora podrán beneficiarse de los programas educativos y servicios comunitarios de la exclusiva escuela Marymount School, situada en el número 20 de la lista de las mejores escuelas privadas de la ciudad de Nueva York de 2018, según el ranking del sitio web Niche.
La educación de un solo estudiante en algunas de las escuelas de ese listado puede costar hasta $50,000 al año; sin embargo, en East Harlem, muchos padres trabajadores no superan los $40, 000 en ingresos anuales, como el mexicano Marcelo Suárez, un empleado de restaurante y residente del vecindario por más de una década.
“Trabajo duro para darles a mis tres hijos educación de calidad. He tenido hasta dos trabajos para comprarles útiles escolares y todo lo que necesitan. Quisiera hacer más por ellos, ayudarlos a que logren sus sueños, aprovechar cualquier oportunidad que los ayude a mejorar”, dijo Suárez, de 43 años.
And if you’ve ever had the displeasure of being woken up by the shrill whine of a drill or other construction equipment, some good news: The City Council is expected to pass legislation today to keep things quieter.
“Our new law will turn down the volume on after-hours construction noise in residential neighborhoods,” said Councilman Ben Kallos, who wrote the bill with the support of the Department of Environmental Protection and who has made the dimming of noise one of his top priorities.
In addition to serving the Spence School’s athletics programs, the new facility would provide gym space for physical education classes from P.S. 151 and P.S. 527 under the terms of a proposed, but yet-to-be-finalized agreement between the schools. The two schools are each located near the proposed site of the new Spence facility and have limited space for physical activities. Students at P.S. 151, located at 421 East 88th St., use two converted classrooms for recreational space, while those at P.S. 527, located at 323 East 91st St., use an auditorium with a sloped floor and low ceiling, said City Council Member Ben Kallos, who described the gym-sharing proposal last week at a public hearing on the project at the Board of Standards and Appeals.
According to Kallos, by the time the new building opens for the 2019-2020 school year, Spence and the Department of Education will enter into an agreement allowing the public schools to use the Spence gymnasium for physical education classes during school hours, at no cost to the schools.
VIPs from corporate business, politics, VC and academia spoke and were honored during the program, among them Sanford Weill, Andrew Tisch, Ronald Lauder, Dr. Irwin Jacobs, Benchmark venture partner Scott Belsky and NYC Council Member Ben Kallos (who coined the term Silicon Island for the new campus overlooking central Manhattan and Long Island City).
Now all it takes is critical mass for the new campus to take off and really become a Silicon Island!
At Cornell Tech (a joining of Cornell University and Technion in an initiative led by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg to create the campus as a springboard by NYC tech), the focus was on how the institution's focus on research, entrepreneurship and intellectual rigor will have an economic impact on New York City.
Free lunch for all from CNBC.
Giving out lunch based on this criterion has led to what some observers have branded as "lunch shaming." As a result, many kids chose to skip lunch to avoid bullying.
New York City Council member Ben Kallos knows that effect all too well. He grew up in the Upper East Side section of Manhattan, which is known to be very wealthy, and attended the Bronx High School of Science. However, he stood out among his classmates.
"Not only did I come from a single parent household, but a multi-generational household, which meant I was eligible for free or reduced lunch," Ben Kallos, NYC Council member told CNBC's "On the Money."
He added that every day his friends would go out and buy lunch instead of staying in the cafeteria. So he had to make a choice between friends and food.
"I would tell them I wasn't hungry, when the truth is, I was starving," Kallos said.
"Every single child will be treated the same. No one will have to worry if their family can afford it…and we'll actually be giving kids an even start to life," said Kallos.
Dozens of young students learned a real-life civics lesson Tuesday, performing a skit in front of the City Council’s Committee on Health and advocating for a bill that would ban more pesticides from being used in city parks and public spaces.
The children, from PS 290 on the Upper East Side, got to see firsthand how grassroots legislation can come to be — the bill, Intro 0800, started in 2014 when they were learning about pesticides in school and were visited by a local City Council member.
“To me, this is the essence of education,” Paula Rogovin, a kindergarten teacher at PS 290, said. “This started with a study about tomatoes and watermelon in our school ... the only thing we can do is to get them to be proactive, to get them to do something about it.
It’s really hard to get parents to come to community-board meetings,” he said in a phone interview. “Along with that comes a lack of diversity in the people I see involved in government and politics.”
There isn’t yet a cost estimate for the legislation, Mr. Kallos said. The measure would require the city to provide child care upon request through the Administration for Children’s Services, the child-welfare agency.
"It's going to have a great impact in 2019," Upper East Side City Councilman Ben Kallos told DNAinfo, noting that the forthcoming program there marks the largest influx of universal pre-K seats in a single location in the neighborhood. "We’re working with providers and parents and public schools to identify anywhere and everywhere we can put pre-K."
