BHB: Is your focus on successfully implementing the Common Core in NYS at all personal?
JS: I have step sons who are older. I have grandchildren: a six year old and an 11 year old. One is going into to public middle school and my granddaughter is in a small charter school in Long Island City.
With or without them this would be an area of concern for me. I’ve been an education advocate for years. I’m a member of the ARISE Coalition—providers, attorneys, parents—who are concerned about educational outcomes for kids with special needs. We have been actively engaged…. [w]e’ve issued reports on the persistent failure rates of our kids with special needs. We were involved with engaging the Department of Education to bring these issues to light. Under Mayor Bloomberg [there was] special education reform which we were involved with monitoring and responding to as it was piloted and then later rolled out.
There’s a lot of changes now with the new administration. We have been very active in monitoring that. Recently test results came out and the results for kids with disabilities are abysmal. That’s a consistent issue that we are working to address in a productive way.
In terms of local issues, there are many that Joan’s been active in that I will be active in as well. I’ve always been more active in transportation issues, for example. I’ve been active in education issues in a different way. Development pressure is enormous in this area. There’s so much housing going [up]. P.S. 8 for example—well over capacity. They’ve cut their pre-K program; in a year when we’re talking about adding pre-K all over they’ve had to cut their pre-K classes. P.S. 29—bursting at the gills. As we’re talking about adding housing in the LICH site, where are these kids going to school? We consistently don’t deal with physical infrastructure as well as social infrastructure. I’ve been very involved in that planning issue for many years.
One of the things I’ve talked about is master planning—[by which] I mean the community has to be at the table. The master plan by the masters who have no connection with the community is not my idea of a master plan.
BHB: As an assembly member how do you envision working out these infrastructure issues that you identify, given the amount of time it takes to effect institutional change?
JS: You need a five-year plan. The Soviets weren’t entirely wrong that you have to plan for a certain number of years….. We’ve also undergone such rapid growth, there has to be a mechanism to revisit some of these issues. One of the things I’ve talked about is master planning—[by which] I mean the community has to be at the table. The master plan by the masters who have no connection with the community is not my idea of a master plan. I’ve been a community activist for too long dealing with plans that developers… or some entity have decided, without input from the community. They usually get it wrong unless they actively engage with the community. That can work, and we’ve demonstrated that it can work.
Five years ago nobody would have thought that we would be facing the specter of residential development on the LICH site. This is gonna happen one way or the other, even if you have a small, full-service hospital, which is what people want and what I believe we very much need. You would still end up with housing on the campus because there’s lots of different buildings. There has to be some mechanism to look at these things and adjust. Some aspect of working with developers when they come in to make sure that the proposals accurately reflect what the needs are [while] looking at the trends.
I was one of the people who early on were involved with the “Save the G Train” [movement]. They [the MTA] were going to cut the G train. But we could tell that the G train was going where the neighborhoods were growing. It’s the only one from Brooklyn to Queens and that was where the growth was. It was the step-child train line, but it’s enormously important. The MTA does everything 15 years behind the curve. Everybody else could see the growth but they were planning to cut a train line that’s vital. We’re still trying to get them to [expand the G train] to six cars.
An issue that I have with the School Construction Authority [SCA], and we’re dealing with it in regards to several of our schools, is accessibility for people with disabilities. We have taken several schools in this district offline as poll sites. We can’t use them because they’re not accessible. The school system is supposed to make their schools accessible [according to] regulations passed in 1978—Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. They have consistently not done [this]. The [SCA’s] first plan was they’d do a middle school, one elementary school, and those would be the accessible schools. They did that in every district. Then they stopped! So there are many fewer schools that are accessible and we are literally interfering with peoples’ fundamental right to vote by not having poll sites that are accessible. There’s been this huge class action [lawsuit], and the court has ruled that they have to use only accessible sites.
But there’s lots of ways the city has failed [and] the SCA has not kept up—those are some issues that I will fight for as well. I’ve always [fought] for that these kind of issues and that’s also something that Joan was sensitive to.
So I don’t see that there will be some enormous difference [between us]…. This is a liberal, progressive area, I’ve been ahead of the curve on a lot of these issues for many, many years and I’m going to be there as well.
