Use your voice: submit a letter

Dear Chair Joseph,

I am writing to urge you to take action to help the tens of thousands of children who are suffering from education neglect at ultra-Orthodox and Hasidic yeshivas in New York City. As the Chair of the City Council Education Committee, you are uniquely positioned to help these children. Today, in New York CIty, there are an estimated 45,000 private school students attending Hasidic yeshivas that are not providing secular instruction as required by NY state law 3204, which mandates that all students in non-public schools receive an education that is “at least substantially equivalent” to that which their public school peers receive. These schools have operated with impunity despite numerous complaints from graduates and parents, and the New York City Department of Education has so far abdicated its responsibility as the regulator for both public and non-public schools.

These New York City children need your help. The City Council must use its power to hold the NYCDOE accountable to its mandate of ensuring that all schools, including nonpublic schools, comply with the law. Families spoke up through the filing of a complaint in 2015, and the de Blasio administration turned its back on them, willfully delaying the release of any findings on how these schools are operating. We fear this administration is doing the same. Virtually nothing has been done by the NYCDOE to solve the problem in seven years. I urge you to use your power to hold hearings to:

• Demand that the NYCDOE make its investigation of the 2015 complaint public, and
• Reveal a plan for how it will effectively implement the enforcement regulation that the state education department recently enacted

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