Mayor Mamdani is expanding New York City’s most popular special education programs to preschool for the first time.
The $67.5-million plan will bring the programs — including Nest, Horizons, AIMS, Path and ACES for preschoolers with autism and other disabilities — to 14 school districts across all boroughs this fall. Mamdani is set to make the announcement at a news conference on Tuesday morning in upper Manhattan.
“We’re bringing those classrooms closer to home and taking another critical step toward making Pre-K truly universal,” Mamdani said in a statement.
The five specialized programs are highly sought-after and effective, boasting higher-than-average graduation and attendance rates and test scores for students with disabilities across the city’s public schools. Nest students are 50% and Horizon students two times more likely to be proficient in math and ELA, school officials testified at a recent Council hearing.
Several of the programs, including Nest and Horizon, have been targeted for major expansions in recent years. But each admissions cycle, school officials report receiving thousands of applications, with seats available for only a fraction of interested families.
The expansion to pre-K will add 250 seats, the majority of which are reserved for students with disabilities, across 26 schools, according to a mayoral spokesperson. Offers have already been made to families.
Mamdani ran for mayor on the promise of universal childcare, pledging to expand the city’s early childhood education system to kids as young as 6 weeks. But for years, education advocates have criticized the programs as not truly universal if they exclude young children with disabilities.
“For the first time, we’re giving young children with autism and other disabilities the same high-quality, specialized instruction that has delivered real results for our older students,” Chancellor Kamar Samuels said in a statement.
“This investment is about strengthening the foundation,” he added, “and when we get early childhood education right, we set children up for a lifetime of success.”
Alongside the preschool expansion, the tens of millions of dollars will fund hundreds of new special education staffers to reduce evaluation wait times and translate assessments into different languages. The school system will also place more special education teachers in preschool classes where students of mixed abilities can learn alongside each other.
The investment was included in the recent city budget passed at the end of last month.
Mamdani’s financial plan assumed the city can save $149 million by appropriately serving students with disabilities whose families would have otherwise turned to private education, then sued the city over the costs. Those lawsuits are projected to total $1.5 billion this year.
The mayor’s office said the new funding will help boost services in local schools, so that families do not need to seek private special education to get the help they need close to home.