Help Class Size Matters continue our work helping kids in 2013!
Last spring, I heard about a girl named Megan who had been prevented from graduating with the rest of her 8th grade class because DOE believed she’d failed the state exam. Over the summer, it turned out that she had passed the exam after all. I contacted a reporter, Yoav Gonen of the NY Post, who wrote about her story, as well as the experiences of seven thousand other New York City childrenwho had been prevented from graduating because the DOE had wrongly assumed they had failed their exams. As a result of my contact with Megan’s mom and the articles that followed, the city decided to hold special graduation ceremonies for all of these students.
I also learned of the plight of another child, named Matthew, a third grader with special needs who had been placed in a class of 29. His mother told me that he was completely lost because his class was too large, and he began acting out, with his academic performance tumbling from a level four (advanced) to a two (below grade level), almost overnight. This fall, he was put in an even larger class of 33. We filed a complaint to DOE on behalf of Matthew, demanding that