Days before the city’s Panel for Educational Policy was set to vote on controversial plans to open an AI-focused high school and relocate three Upper West Side schools, Chancellor Kamar Samuels unexpectedly pulled them off the agenda, a decision he attributed to needing more time to listen to families.
But last week’s unexpected move comes amid a palpable shift. The PEP, long considered largely a rubber stamp has increasingly been flexing its political muscle.
While the move had immediate ramifications for students who attend or applied to the impacted schools, it also had citywide implications, demonstrating how the mayor’s control of the public schools has quietly been evolving — both by law and in practice. Under a system of mayoral control, the mayor appoints the chancellor and majority of members of the PEP, an oversight body that authorizes school openings and closures.
Panel members said some or all of the proposals were on track to be voted down, though Mayor Mamdani denies that was the reason for pulling them off the agenda.
“While those proposals have been removed at this time, those conversations are going to continue,” Mamdani said during an unrelated news conference on Monday. “Part of this just comes back to the ethos with which the chancellor leads: To ensure that there is adequate time to actually speak to the community about any of these kinds of larger-scale proposals that are being made.”
“This is more of just a reflection of the fact that there were significant enough concerns that would make it worthy to have an extended conversation around this,” he said.
The plans would have opened Next Generation High School in downtown Manhattan this fall, closed the middle schools of P.S. 191 and Manhattan School for Children, two K-8 schools on the Upper West Side, and relocated Center School, also on the Upper West Side, to make space for a growing program in the same building.
As a candidate for mayor, Mamdani said he would end mayoral control if elected but reversed course just hours before his inauguration. He now supports a four-year extension, while promising a new approach that involves more parental input. Samuels was in Albany two weeks ago for what he said was his third trip to the capital since becoming chancellor.
But mayoral control is already a vastly different system than the one his predecessor Eric Adams inherited as many years ago.
In 2022, the New York legislature amended the mayoral control law to implement one-year terms, so that mayors could not remove appointees for breaking with their directives. (They can still not reappoint members each summer.) That meant Adams, after he dropped his re-election bid, had no recourse against defectors. And Mamdani, for now, is represented by Adams appointees.
Gregory Faulkner, the PEP chair, portrayed the shift as a move toward “co-governance” between the panel and the mayor’s schools chief.
“Lines are more blurred than they used to be,” Faulkner said. “When I joined the panel it was very clear: The mayorals would go one way, the non-mayorals would go the other way. I think that’s different. We talk to each other.”
As the PEP vote was approaching, a similar narrative to the one that Mamdani had long criticized was beginning to take shape.
Parents at The Riverside School for Makers and Artists, one of the Upper West Side schools, reported learning of the proposal to close their middle school when representatives from the Center School came to tour their facilities. And while Next Gen, the AI-focused high school, was still just a proposal, the deadline to apply to the new school was a week and a half ago, with offers expected next week. During a public hearing on the plan, where parents were debating its merits, a representative for Next Gen was in San Diego for a recent education conference known as “the Davos of Education.”
“I went to one of the parent meetings, we had over 100 parents, and the district leader was out of town promoting the school,” said Faulkner. “That did not go over well.”
Faulkner said that between concerns about AI, parent engagement, and screened admissions that select students based on grades, there was “almost no support” on the panel for Next Gen. He did support the Upper West Side plan, though, and speculated it could have passed with more parent input.
Naveed Hasan, who represents Manhattan parents on the PEP, disagreed the Upper West Side proposals could have passed on Wednesday: “Generally speaking, when the DOE doesn’t have the vote, they don’t leave things on the agenda knowing they don’t have the votes,” he said. “That’s where we were.”
Still, Hasan did not reject the underlying premise of the plan, but the public should have more of a say: “There has to be the understanding that some of these things, the DOE is not completely crazy here,” Hasan said, urging the chancellor to ask parents for input. “Until you ask the people you’re about to affect, you never really know.”
City Hall declined to comment beyond the mayor’s comments, referring the Daily News to the public schools. A schools spokeswoman shared a letter to families promising improvements to the process.
“Over the coming months, we will continue to partner with school communities to explore how we can address the needs of our students and families, which could include revisiting these proposals on an extended timeline or collaboratively developing new scenarios that achieve our shared goals,” read the memo. “We remain committed to strengthening parent and community participation.”
Samuels has indicated he would be interested in revisiting Next Gen after a citywide policy on AI is finalized. The chancellor released interim guidance last month, with a full policy due in June.
Despite no immediate plans for the new high school, students, parents and teachers turned out in droves to the Wednesday night panel meeting, which lasted nearly seven hours, to speak against AI and the use of technology in classrooms more generally.
“We’re on screens all day, so it’s not actually good for our brains,” said Dina, a first grader. “We could do something more. Because you could play with friends. You could bring toys or play a Pokemon game. Or you even could read.”
But while some families were against the AI school proposal and welcomed the delay as proof of the mayor listening, there were other parents clamoring at the new opportunity — who rejected the idea that it was to their benefit to pump the breaks.
“You’re never going too make everybody happy,” said Lisa Marks, a Manhattan parent of a seventh grader who would have considered applying to Next Gen in the coming school year. “I think for the greater good of the whole city, having this other option would’ve been really great.”
In an interview, Gale Brewer, the Upper West Side councilwoman, said that she agrees with education officials that Center School has to move to make space for P.S. 9, a growing school with more students than it can fit in its current classrooms. But she would like to see students relocated to different building — in the former location of Manhattan Country School — that better suits the Center School model than the P.S. 191 building.
“I feel strongly they need the space because they need to keep families in the public schools,” Brewer said. “We have good schools. We need to have enough space for these good schools.”