Education

“I’m beyond disappointed,” Council Member Ben Kallos (D-Manhattan), who spearheaded a January City Council law requiring the tracking devices, told The News Wednesday.

“What’s the point of having a GPS on a school bus if you can’t track the GPS?” he said.

NEW YORK — Lainie Gutterman has two children with special needs who rely on City Department of Education buses to take them to their special-needs school on Long Island.

But she got a text message from her bus driver that said: “There was a mechanical error, no bus today, bus running again on Monday.”

This fall, more young New Yorkers are heading back to school with valuable work experience under their belts, and much needed earnings in their pockets, thanks to recent significant expansion and improvements to the City’s Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP). The growth in baseline funding that allows better planning and expansion of school-based models tied to academics are changes the Community Service Society (CSS) advocated for that the City has now adopted.

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — Hundreds of Upper East Side families sending their children to their first days of preschool this week can breathe a sigh of relief knowing they don't have to take their four-year-old's to school in Lower Manhattan.

Don’t lower the standards, raise them.

That was the message from City Council members who rallied Wednesday at City Hall urging the de Blasio administration to reject a recommendation by the School Diversity Advisory Group to scrap the city’s Gifted and Talented (G&T) Program.

An app for the 9,000 bus routes going to and from schools across New York City was just rolled out.

“We’ll have GPS in every bus on the first day of school, and through our partnership with Via, we’ll soon have a state-of-the-art app for families to track buses and get real-time automatic updates,” said Schools Chancellor Richard  Carranza. “We are grateful for the City Council's advocacy, leadership and partnership. Safe and reliable transportation is critical for all families, and we’re committed to getting it right this year.”

The app will feature updates on bus location, student ridership, route changes and vehicle delays.

“The DoE has promised to have a GPS on every single school bus in our city so parents will be able to call I and know where the bus is if that bus isn’t there,” said New York City councilman Ben Kallos. 

Kallos suggested the move after a sudden storm last fall stranded some students

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 on school buses for 

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The city is still working to install required GPS devices on every school bus by the first day of school on Thursday, Sept. 5, according to a recent report.

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — It looks like the city’s Department of Education is going to miss the bus on a crucial deadline.

A new law CBS2 first told you about in January requires the city to install GPS devices on every school bus. But we’re less than a month away from the first day of school and parents say they’re still in the dark about bus safety, Lisa Rozner reported on Monday. 

Workers are prepping P.S. 77 on Third Avenue for the first day of school, but what isn’t getting an upgrade are the city’s school buses.

Back in January, legislation was passed that mandated the city equip its nearly 10,000 buses with GPS tracking for the 2019-20 school year, so parents can monitor their children’s whereabouts.

“I just can’t see another school year go by where parents don’t know where their kids are,” City Councilman Ben Kallos said.

Kallos first introduced the law back in 2014. It finally advanced this year after the freak November snowstorm that paralyzed city streets and had children sitting on school buses without food, water or a bathroom for hours on end.

Back then, Mayor Bill de Blasio said, “I never want to see public school parents have to go through what they went through last night.”

So this spring, nine different vendors submitted proposals to the city to develop a bus tracking app for parents. In May, Kallos asked Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza if the city would meet this year’s deadline.

He said, “We’re not going to be late with our homework. We’re going to get it right.”

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — Students at a public school that serves the Upper East Side and East Harlem celebrated the opening of a brand-new playground at the school this week.

The new playground at PS 77 and PS 198M, located on Third Avenue and East 95th Street, features upgraded play equipment, new safety tiles and additional seating. Improvements were funded with $500,000 from the 2017 participatory budgeting cycle, with local City Councilmember Ben Kallos chipping in an additional $100,000 to finish the project.

"Children and adults alike are getting a lesson in democracy as they get to enjoy the playground for which they voted and campaigned," Kallos said at a ribbon cutting for the new playground. "Thank you to the parents and students age 11 and older who voted for this new playground and saw it built while they were still students at the school."