Call it early spring cleaning: the city’s Department of Education is planning its third official reorganization of how schools receive support services in eight years.
Support organization leaders say the new plan involves decentralizing the city’s large service centers, which offer schools assistance with writing their budgets and handling the mountains of paperwork that pile up. Since 2007, a Brooklyn principal would call the Brooklyn Integrated Service Center for help with these tasks; now, she’ll turn to a small group that’s assigned to work with her school through her support organization.
The groups, called Children First Networks, are part of a model that has been quietly piloted for several years by Eric Nadelstern, the DOE’s chief schools officer. About 300 schools are already part of the CFNs, an expansion that took place last year and is now being extended to all of the city’s public schools. The networks are small — each has a staff of 13 staff members — and are meant to personalize the way schools receive non-academic, logistical support.
Under the new plan, all schools will bypass the ISCs and go straight to the smaller networks, putting the ISCs out of business. The CFNs will be aligned with existing support organizations so that, for example, a school in the New Visions for Public Schools support organization will be paired with one of the organization’s several CFNs, each of which will focus on only about 25 schools.