Editorial/Opinion ....................Pages 12,13 Education

Banks and Adams expand gifted and talented programs. Why?

By STEPHON JOHNSON

Amsterdam News Staff

In a complete reversal from what the previous administration wanted, New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Schools Chancellor David Banks announced last week that they would expand the gifted and talented programs in city public schools.

The mayor and chancellor said they will add 100 kindergarten seats and 1,000 third-grade seats, which, according to the city, would expand entry points to all districts. The city said that this would expand and update the admission process, and the program would serve all five boroughs.

Applications will be open to New Yorkers on May 31.

Banks said that, unlike the former mayor’s desires, New Yorkers wanted more of what was already there. He told the AmNews that parents around the five boroughs spoke to him and said they wanted more gifted and talented programs.

“So, the reason we did it was because we were hearing steadily from parents and families that this is something that they wanted, say whatever you want to say philosophically about it,” Banks said. “The parents were saying that they want it and there was no…cry from folks to say get rid of it and so we see this chancellorship and this administration, as being responsive to parents and channels. …I did not know until I got here that 120,000 families have left the DOE in the last five years. That’s important context, right?

“So many folks have voted with their feet to leave the system,” Banks continued. “And I did not want to be the guy that’s sitting here with my own philosophical beliefs about specialized schools or gifted and talented or whatever while I really should be in service to the families of the communities and what it is that they’re looking for.”

During last week’s announcement, Adams said that these actions were about securing city school children’s centers the right way.

“For the first time, there will be a gifted and talented program in every school district in New York City,” said Adams to reporters. “We are extremely pleased about this purchase over and over again, and I cannot tell you how important this day is. For far too long, we had districts in our city that did not have gifted and talented programs. We are giving every child in every zip code the chance that has been denied too often. I heard this over and over again on the campaign trail, and that denial ends today.”

This didn’t sit right with many. A spokesperson from the organization New York Appleseed, which pushes for equity of resources for public schools, said that they weren’t fond of the recent news.

“New York Appleseed, along with many other organizations that advocate for equitable learning opportunities for all NYC students, particularly our most marginalized students, is incredibly disappointed and dismayed by today’s announcement regarding G&T programming. We are appalled that the NYCDOE came to the conclusion of maintaining programming that separates nd segregates our youngest children, often across racial and socioeconomic lines, despite numerous reports, community engagement sessions, and research that cited the detrimentaleffects G&T programs create for NYC students and the school system as a whole.”

New York Public Advocate Jumaane Williams wasn’t quick to praise the move. He wasn’t ambivalent either. He spent most of his academic life in “gifted” classes but doesn’t want others to share that experience of isolation and shame.

“As someone who benefited from the gifted and talented program in its original construction, I know the value of accelerated and enriched education,” stated Williams. “Adding more seats, more access, more opportunity is an improvement that will extend these benefits to more students. At the same time, it is also an expansion of a program that is inherently inequitable. Even when I was enrolled, the gifted and talented program had deep inequities, which have only become more pronounced in the decades since.”

When asked for a response to the public advocate’s statement, Banks said “…they’re entitled to their own opinion. But this mayor and this chancellor spoke to folks. I used to be a part of gifted and talented myself. …You have people who weigh in on all sides. of the issue. But I’ve been particularly paying attention to the folks who are currently parents in the system right now, and what they have been asking for, and that’s what I was responding to.”

New York State Comptroller Brad Lander echoed Williams’ sentiments.

“Segregating learning environments for elementary students, based on a teacher’s or test’s assessment of how smart they are, is not sound education policy,” stated Lander. We’ve

seen repeatedly that stand-alone G&T programs lead to racial segregation. Elementary school students benefit from learning alongside peers with different backgrounds, abilities, and interests. Let’s be clear: that’s one of the core virtues of public education.” The AmNews also reached out to the activist organization Teens Take Charge. In an email, the group reiterated its stance against anything that separates students, in their eyes, arbitrarily. “…We’ve advocated in the past against the SHSAT exam as it was created with racist intent and has a racially discriminatory impact on the demographics of the students Adams/Banks reverse course and add MORE gifted and talented seats. (Photo courtesy of Michael Appleton/ admitted to these schools,” part of Mayoral Photography Offices) the email read. The last four years in City Hall produced a different song. Previous mayor Bill de Blasio and former schools chancellor Richard Carranza worked to rid public schools off the gifted and talented program and Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT). Banks talked to the AmNews about the SHSATs and what it means to the public school system. He said that the testing is not a sign of intelligence, and it won’t make a person’s college application look better because they went to one. He said the brouhaha over the exams and the schools connected to it (Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech and Stuyvesant) are the noise and not the signal. “So somebody says that ‘what are the fights that you want to have,’ right?” said Banks. “And those are not fights we’re looking to have. We want to create newer opportunities and looking at a different set of criteria for stuff.” To further emphasize the departure from the de Blasio administration, Adams met with former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg this week to announce a program called Summer Boost NYC, whose goal is to give public and charter school students a chance to catch up academically due to the COVIDPUBLIC NOTICE 19 pandemic. “Together with a group of partners, we’re Dated: Tuesday, April 19th 2022 committing $50 million to help charter schools create or expand summer school programs that will provide a coverage of an average of DEMOCRACY PREP NEW YORK SCHOOL five weeks of additional instruction in math MEETING OF BOARD OF TRUSTEES and English,” said Bloomberg at a Monday news conference. “All charter schools serving students in grades K through 12 are eligible to receive funding for the program, which Pursuant to Section 104 Public Notice of the Open Meetings Law, and pursuant to will target students who are most in need of Executive Order 202.1, this notice is to inform the public that the board of trustees of extra help. Schools can apply for funding startDemocracy Prep New York School will hold a remote meeting by teleconference on: ing today through the website, summerboostnyc.org.” April 26th , 2022 at 8:00 am., local time, + 1 646 558 8656, Meeting ID: 872 1204 8191, Password: 746010. Adams followed Bloomberg’s announcement with three simple sentences. “Welcome back. Welcome back. Welcome back.”

Mayor Adams, Bloomberg launch Summer Boost NYC

By ARIAMA C. LONG

Amsterdam News Staff, Report for America Corps Member

Mayor Eric Adams joined former Mayor Michael Bloomberg in announcing a $50 million philanthropic initiative aimed at supporting public charter schools this summer as they struggle to keep kids from falling behind because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Adams and Bloomberg were chummy about the “good old times” as they spoke about the education program at yesterday’s conference in City Hall. “The Summer Boost in New York City is so needed,” said Adams at the conference. “This massive investment that this administration is receiving for those children in charter schools is going to help children and families all over this city, and is going to make our schools work for everyone.”

The program is called ‘Summer Boost NYC’ and is to serve about 25,000 kindergarten through eighth grade students, particularly students of color from low-income families. Summer Boost will provide funding for about five weeks of instruction in math and English for schools that apply at summerboostnyc.org.

Additional funders include Ken Griffin, Stan Druckenmiller, the Carson Family Charitable Trust, Robin Hood, Gray Foundation, and the Wilentz Foundation, said Bloomberg.

“After two years of school closures and inadequate remote instruction, students across the United States have fallen behind, sometimes as much as a whole year,” said Bloomberg at the conference. “And the harm has fallen heaviest on the children who were too far behind, especially low-income Black and Latino students. Without urgent help, many of them will fall further behind, which could have devastating effects on their chances for graduating high school, and going to college, or beginning a career. That would be a disaster for them but also for our city and our country.”

Adams has already taken steps to expand the city’s summer school program called Summer Rising and the summer youth employment program (SYEP). SYEP is supposed to support 100,000 job opportunities for youth ages 14 to 24 as part of the strategy to battle gun violence and spikes in crime usually seen during hotter months in the city.

“During the summer month, crime increases,” said Adams. “Our goal is to place our children in safe spaces so that we can bring down the violence, bring children into safe environments so that they can continue to grow and learn and prosper during the summer months.”

Adams has also recently announced the expansion of the controversial Gifted and Talented programs across the city, which his predecessor former Mayor Bill de Blasio had moved to phase out because of “debates over the unequal and discriminatory treatment” of Black and Brown students, reported CNN.

Bloomberg said that private sector and philanthropic groups have a duty to step in and do what they can to help with educating the city’s youth.

During his 12 years as mayor however, Bloomberg was often criticized for leaving a legacy of ‘stop and frisk’ that affected about 5 million people, most of which were “young Black and Latino men from some of the city’s roughest neighborhoods” who mostly hadn’t committed a crime, reported NPR. ‘Stop and frisk’ was ruled unconstitutional just as Bloomberg left office in 2013, said NPR.

Summer Boost aims to hyperfocus on students of color from low-income families. The Mayor’s Office provided a study from McKinsey & Company that found that the pandemic widened preexisting inequitable gaps in education. The study said that students in majority Black and Brown schools ended the year with six months of “unfinished learning” in math, high schoolers have become more likely to drop out of school and less likely to go on to higher education, and more broadly, more than 35% of parents are very or extremely concerned about their children’s mental health.

“Starting out behind instead of starting out ahead, is something we have to move away from,” said Adams. “We know if we expand opportunities at the earliest possible age, we can set out our kids on the right path to success.”

Adams said he believes in all year school, and that children need to have structured education throughout the entire year to catch up and to exceed.

Howard Wolfson runs the education program at Bloomberg Philanthropies and was the deputy mayor of governmental affairs under Bloomberg. He designed the summer school programs. Wolfson said that the curriculum will be “a rigorous program of academics” in math and English with social and emotional learning and recess.

“Some charter schools will probably choose to use their own curricula,” said Wolfson. “Some of the larger networks have already been running programs like this, and probably have a sense of how they’d want to do it. We’re going to let them do that. But some schools who have never had the money to do this will likely use the model curricula that we’ll be providing. And so it’ll be a mix.”

Adams said he plans to continue reaching out to the city’s former mayors, including de Blasio, and learn what he can from them.

on page 25

Ariama C. Long is a Report for America corps member and writes about culture and politics in New York City for The Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting: https://tinyurl.com/fcszwj8w

50 Nevins Street Apartments 50 NEWLY CONSTRUCTED UNITS AT 50 Nevins Street, Brooklyn, New York 11217 BOERUM HILL

Amenities: 24-hour attended lobby, on-site building superintendent, exercise room, multi-purpose room, community room, computer lab, bike parking,* on-site laundry room*, tenant storage rooms, and on-site social services for low income or formerly homeless households with special needs. (*additional fees apply). Transit: Trains: C, F, G, N, Q; Buses: B103, B37, B62 and B65 No application fee • No broker’s fee • Smoke-free building • More information: https://nyhousingsearch.gov/ This building is being constructed through the Supportive Housing Loan Program of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Supportive housing is permanent, affordable housing with on-site support services to serve the needs of the most vulnerable New Yorkers, including the formerly homeless and disabled. Sixty percent of units in supportive housing are set aside for low income or formerly homeless individuals or families with special needs, who are referred by city agencies. The remaining 40% of units in the building are made available to the public through lottery. The units listed in this notice are only those made available to the general public.

Who Should Apply?

Individuals or households who meet the income and household size requirements listed in the table below may apply. Qualified applicants will be required to meet additional selection criteria. Applicants who live in New York City receive a general preference for apartments. • A percentage of units is set aside for applicants with disabilities: ° Mobility (5%) ° Vision/Hearing (2%). • Preference for a percentage of units goes to: ° Residents of Community Board 2 (50%) ° Municipal employees (5%)

AVAILABLE UNITS AND INCOME REQUIREMENTS

Unit Size

Studio

2 Bedroom

3 Bedroom

(AMI) INCOME MEDIAN AREA 60%

Monthly Rent1

Units Available

$947 41

$1,421 7

$1,632 2

Household Size2 Annual Household Income3

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Español Presente una solicitud en línea en https://housingconnect.nyc.gov/PublicWeb/. Para recibir una traducción de español de este anuncio y la solicitud impresa, envíe un sobre con la dirección a: 50 Nevins Street Apartments C/O Spring Leasing and Management, LLC, 77

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面请用英语注明“CHINESE” 。必须在以下日期之前在线提交申请或邮寄书面申请 2022年5月20日 Русский Чтобы подать заявление через интернет, зайдите на сайт: https://housingconnect.nyc.gov/PublicWeb/. Для получения данного объявления и заявления на русском языке отправьте конверт с обратным адресом по адресу 50 Nevins Street Apartments C/O Spring Leasing and Management, LLC, 77 Cuttermill Road, Great Neck, NY 11021. На задней стороне конверта напишите слово “RUSSIAN” на английском языке. Заявки должны быть поданы онлайн или отправлены по почте (согласно дате на почтовом штемпеле) не позднее 20 май 2022. 한국어 https://housingconnect.nyc.gov/PublicWeb/ 에서 온라인으로 신청하십시오. 이 광고문과 신청서에 대한 한국어 번역본을 받아보시려면 반송용 봉투를 50 Nevins Street Apartments C/O Spring Leasing and Management, LLC, 77 Cuttermill Road, Great Neck, NY

11021으로 보내주십시오. 봉투 뒷면에 “KOREAN” 이라고 영어로 적어주십시오. 2022 년5월20일 까지 온라인 신청서를 제출하거나 소인이 찍힌 신청서를 보내야 합니다.

Kreyòl Ayisyien

ةيبرعلا

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what the Junction needed to thrive: basically jobs for locals, a cleaner facility with better amenities, and an engaged public space.

Adams intends to place a commercial building at the Junction, or 2440 Fulton Street, which will host 1,100 employees of the Department of Social Services and have new retail space along Fulton Street, Herkimer Street, and Van Sinderen Avenue. The building will be developed by the Leser Group and designed by Marvel Architects. It builds on work the Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) began in 2017 and is a part of the Mayor’s CARE strategy to revitalize the city.

Nurse was eventually elected after a long stretch of turnover when Espinal left office in 2020. Former Councilmember Darma Diaz was voted in to replace him, but lost her reelection to Nurse in 2021.

Nurse said about the “inherited” project that big real estate and other top city officials have had plans for Broadway Junction for a while. She said that in some ways the office building is a test to see how future projects might go down. “We absolutely have reservations about the current proposal—which we’ve expressed—about the height and uses proposed,” said Nurse in response to Amsterdam News’ inquiry.

“As we build it, they will come, but they coming cannot be displacement,” said Adams about questions of potential displacement of Black and Brown residents. “There are far too many people who have been here for so long and really wanted to have an opportunity to watch the growth of this community.”

Adams maintains that the office space will feature local businesses and bring much needed city services closer to people who need them most while shortening commutes.

“We don’t think our job is to sell this project in any way,” said Nurse. “It is not my job to build trust around the current proposal, or to lie to my community that displacement won’t happen. Displacement has been happening for a while, and homeowners have been facing speculative pressure even with a Cease and Desist Zone in most of CB5.”

Nurse said that tenants have also been facing looming pressure in the forms of harassment, neglect, dramatic rent increases, and substandard housing because of the amount of “unregulated housing stock in our district and the lack of code enforcement by the city.”

She added that affordable housing development through the 2016 rezoning in East New York isn’t nearly where the city thought it would be, even with the rezoning’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing mandates. Many of the commitments from the rezoning “either weren’t clearly communicated or are still unfulfilled,” said Nurse.

According to the city’s Equitable Development Data tracker, the East New York community, in Community Board 5 where the Broadway Junction falls, is made up of an almost 98% non-white population with about half of those people living with incomes 200% below the federal poverty rate, and severely rent burdened households. Because of these factors, places like East New York and nearby Cypress Hills are neighborhoods among the highest at risk for displacement.

“The history before that was that we were told we were shit,” said Boris Santos of ENY CLT. “We were redlined. We weren’t given the investments that we needed; city, state, federal government were part of our sad tale and narrative. Of course a lot of us are anxious. A lot of us are nervous about what’s to come. Panicked even.”

Santos said admittedly the mayor’s plans for an administrative building at the Junction is “less threatening” than Totem Group’s proposed four high rise towers.

Totem Group filed to build one 18-story senior housing development and three 24-story residential and commercial towers between Fulton Street, East New York Avenue, and Williams Place. The Brooklyn Paper reported that Totem Group’s plans called for the “demolishing and ‘demapping’” of the block of Herkimer Street between Van Sinderen and East New York avenues to make way for the development.

“We are starting to see the fruits of our advocacy and hard work to create new jobs and opportunity for East New York. This public-private partnership between the city and the Leser Group is a major step in the right direction, and we commend Mayor Adams for prioritizing progress for the Junction,” said Totem Brooklyn’s Bill Wilkins, who is director of economic development and housing, in a press release.

Further comment from Totem Brooklyn about the high-rise plans couldn’t be obtained by post time.

In the conference, Adams promised to develop affordable housing and “go after those who harass tenants and displace them.”

“I think there is widespread agreement that we need extremely strong tenant protections,” said Nurse, “ironclad and legally binding agreements around land use issues, and of course income targeted, deeply and permanently affordable housing, preferably in nonprofit or community control. These issues will be the first thing on my mind in any conversation I have with stakeholders.”

Ariama C. Long is a Report for America corps member and writes about culture and politics in New York City for The Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting: https://tinyurl.com/fcszwj8w

Continued from page 3

“In order to do that the first thing, what we have to do is create this nationwide database of estimating drinking water exposures across the U.S. and then we can start looking at inequities and exposure and whether these exposures are associated with disease,” continued Nigra. The report was co-authored by Filippo Ravalli, Kathrin Schilling, Yuanzhi Yu, and Ana Navas-Acien, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health; Benjamin Bostick and Steven Chillru, Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University; and Anirban Basu, University of London.

According to the report, “Approximately 90% of U.S. residents rely on public drinking water systems, with most residents relying specifically on community water systems that serve the same population yearround. The researchers evaluated six-year EPA review records for antimony, arsenic, barium, beryllium, cadmium, chromium, mercury, selenium, thallium, and uranium to determine if average concentrations exceeded the maximum contaminant levels set by the EPA which regulates levels for six classes of contaminants. This included approximately 13 million records from 139,000 public water systems serving 290 million people annually.”

This isn’t the first rodeo that Brown and Black people have had with what is now known as “environmental racism.”

“Our research group tends to focus on chronic disease like cardiovascular disease. For many of these metals, we know for example, arsenic, uranium, we know that they can be toxic to the cardiovascular and kidney systems.”

Similar issues played a significant role in Black and Brown Americans and Indigenous people having a higher number of COVID deaths.

APM Research Lab, a nonpartisan research group, reported recently that 399 Black have died per 1,000 of COVID and Hispanics died at a 259 per 1,000 rate.

So while the report focused on Hispanics. This group of Americans tended to live in neighborhoods not too far from or within Black neighborhoods.

According to the report, “2.1 percent of community water systems reported average uranium concentrations from 2000 to 2011 in exceedance of the EPA maximum contamination levels, and uranium was frequently detected during compliance monitoring (63% of the time).”

“One of the ways that we tried to look at this potential disparity is by using these previous categorizations of counties and one of those groups is a semi urban, Hispanic group,” said Nigra. “And we found that regardless of whether a water system uses groundwater or surface water, regardless of the state the system is located in and regardless of the size of the system, semi-urban Hispanic counties had higher concentrations of uranium and other bottles compared to all other types of water systems. “

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words and phrases into the appropriate operation accurately and consistently? What reading comprehension strategies are being employed that will allow students to access vocabulary dense readings, sometimes written in “old English” or poetry? Outside of data, are there pathways for tutoring or support outside of the classroom environment? What if your child actually gets all that is being taught and is ahead, what are the opportunities for acceleration? 2) If you want your child to go to a SHS, for most, waiting until the summer of 8th grade and taking your child to a prep center the summer of 8th grade is almost too late even if your child attends a Gifted and Talented middle school, or a top-rated private school. Ideally that process needs be started the summer of 6th grade. 3) If we want to collectively move the needle, we need to create cohorts of students and families who are dedicated to that mission and help fund that process for them. Starting the summer of 6th grade or earlier is key. To be clear, I am not advocating test prep in the 6th grade, I’m advocating putting students on an educational track that will allow them to tame that stallion in two years, ride that stable horse at their leisure, and move into whatever high school they end up in with the skills to successfully navigate that process.

I’ve worked with enough students to understand the brilliance contained in our community. Our children are enough. We just need to put them on the proper track based on our goals for them.

Samuel Adewumi is the founder of CAS Prep which has been responsible for sending students to the SHS each year of its existence. Even more importantly, CAS Prep has helped change the trajectory of the educational progress of hundreds of students in a positive way. Adewumi believes in the multiple genius of all of our children and believes in the responsibility of parents, schools, and support organizations like his to help unlock that brilliance.

of a desire to reform the process in 2014 this was basically the first time they’d had the opportunity to go through a census and redistricting.

Li said that it’s really a historical “gentleman’s agreement” in New York where the Senate will be Republican and the Assembly would be Democratic. For the first time, the Assembly, Senate and Congress were all majority Democrat.

“Democrats have the aptitude to gerrymander but they haven’t had all of New York and so I think there was at that point a high likelihood that the commission would not get its job done. People dig in and wear their partisan hats. The process would deadlock and that kicks it to the legislature,” said Li.

Since Republicans and Democrats on the commission couldn’t agree, everything was turned over to the state legislature to make final decisions on a rushed deadline in January 2022. Immigrant communities in the city were especially concerned about the lack of public input.

The Asian American Bar Association of New York (AABANY) were among the most vocal in demanding a public hearing before the state legislature voted on redistricting maps that will affect people’s voting rights for the next decade.

Liz OuYang, coordinator of the redistricting task force at AABANY, said that they were definitely outraged by the lack of community input. She said that since the state and congress handle different issues it’s hard to compare the gains and losses on the part of communities.

The final maps divided Hispanic/Latino and Asian neighborhoods previously in Congressional District 7 under U.S. Rep. Nydia Velázquez. But the state senate maps created a new district in primarily Asian communities in Bensonhurst and Sunset Park and a mostly Hispanic district in Queens. There was also a majority Asian state assembly district created in Queens.

“We would have preferred that Manhattan Chinatown remain with Sunset Park in Nydia Velázquez’s district because they share more in common economically, regarding language access, and just socioeconomic data. However there were some gains in the state senate and assembly district,” said OuYang.

Congressional District 11 now covers Brooklyn’s Sunset Park and very “liberal” Park Slope as well as the usually Republican-leaning neighborhoods in Staten Island. The seat is currently held by Republican U.S. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis. “They were trying to get rid of the only Republican seat in New York City,” said Li, “and they had to move some of the districts around. I think that’s what it is, and creating more opportunity for minority groups would have interfered with the political gerrymandering and protecting white incumbents.”

In Congressional District 10, Manhattan’s Upper West Side was lumped in with Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish population in Boro Park. This protects the incumbent U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler, said Li.

City Councilmember Alexa Avilés in District 38, overlapping with part of the new congressional 11 district, has been pretty outspoken on the impacts the redrawn voting lines will have on her constituents. “The communities of Sunset Park, the Lower East Side and Bushwick that make up the core of today’s #NY07 are culturally and historically connected. The creation of this district in the 1990s was a Voting Rights Act win that advanced Latino representation,” tweeted Aviles.

Aviles, several councilmembers, and more than 60 residents also signed a letter to Senate Speaker Carl Heastie and Majority Leader Andrea StewartCousins, urging them not to split up their communities.

“We are a coalition of leaders who represent communities in Sunset Park, the Lower East Side, and North Brooklyn. We are writing to urge the Legislature to not divide communities that have been united in the same Congressional District for 30 years–and keep these three neighborhoods within the same district,” said the letter.

The letter stated that the majority-minority district was joined by decades of important cultural ties, and it was imperative to keep the communities together. Especially, since there’s been a rise in anti-Asian hate and discrimination against immigrant communities, said the letter.

Steven Romalewski is the director of The City University of New York (CUNY’s) Mapping Service and Center for Urban Research. He leads the Redistricting & You online map that tracks redistricting stakeholders and analyzes proposed district maps in New York.

Romalewski pushed back on concerns of political gerrymandering in Congressional District 11.

He said that an important change to note in the new district configuration is that the number of people who voted for now-President Biden in 2020 were far fewer in the old district and there are many more of them in the new district.

“In 2020, President Trump won that district with 55% of the vote,” said Romalewski. “All other things being equal, if the new district lines had been in effect during the 2020 presidential vote, Trump would have lost that district by almost the same margin.”

Romalewski said, based on CUNY’s analysis of voter patterns, that in the Brooklyn part of the district the number of Biden voters went up to about 80% while votes for Trump were cut in half.

Requests for comment from Malliotakis and former Democrat U.S. Rep. Max Rose, who is running for his old post and had lost to Malliotakis in 2020, were not returned by post time.

In the beginning of April the Brooklyn Eagle reported that State Appellate Division Judge Stephen Lindley declined to delay the primary elections because of the state’s redistricting maps. This comes after Republican State Supreme Court Judge Patrick McAllister ordered that the “Democrat controlled” maps should be redrawn and are “unconstitutional.”

As of now, a scheduled appeals court panel has another hearing on April 20, but could eventually end in the state’s highest court as both parties offer up new legislative maps, said the Brooklyn Eagle.

“However the courts rule, what is important to us is that communities of interest we identified remain as whole as possible in any political subdivisions that they draw,” said Ouyang.

“The reality is that no map would make anyone happy,” said Li.

Ariama C. Long is a Report for America corps member and writes about culture and politics in New York City for The Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting: https://tinyurl.com/fcszwj8w

Second Avenue Subway Phase 2 Poor Richard’s Playground Section 4(f) Evaluation

Public Notification of temporary construction impacts for the Second Avenue Subway project at the entrance to Poor Richard’s Playground at Second Avenue and 108th Street. The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) and Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) have reviewed these temporary impacts in accordance with applicable regulations at 23 CFR Part 774 and anticipate that there would be a de minimis impact on the playground. They are seeking public input on this conclusion.

Description of the Proposed Second Avenue Subway Phase 2

MTA will be constructing Phase 2 of the Second Avenue Subway, which will extend the subway from the current 96th Street Station at Second Avenue to a new station at 125th Street at Park and Lexington Avenues. There will be new subway stations on Second Avenue at 106th Street and 116th Street and on 125th Street at Park and Lexington Avenues. The new 125th Street Station will have connections to the Lexington Avenue 4/5/6 line. FTA and MTA prepared an environmental assessment (EA) for the project in July 2018, which is available on MTA’s website at http://web.mta.info/capital/ sas_docs/ea_phase2.htm. The EA provides more information about the project.

Impact of Project to a Section 4(f) Resource

Construction activities for the new subway will require use of a small area of sidewalk in front of the entrance to Poor Richard’s Playground on Second Avenue at 108th Street. This sidewalk area is part of the park. Section 4(f) of the U.S. Department of Transportation Act of 1966 states that FTA may not approve the use of a “publicly owned land of a public park, recreation area, or wildlife and waterfowl refuge of national, State, or local significance, or land of an historic site of national, State, or local significance” unless the following conditions apply: • There is no feasible and prudent avoidance alternative and the action includes all possible planning to minimize harm to the property; or • The use of the property, including any measure(s) to minimize harm (such as any avoidance, minimization, mitigation, or enhancement measures) will have a de minimis impact on the property. During subway construction, existing utilities that are beneath the sidewalk at the Second Avenue entrance to Poor Richard’s Playground must be reconstructed. This work would take approximately five months. The park entrance would remain open during construction, except for short, temporary closures when needed. The park’s Third Avenue entrance would remain open.

Section 4(f) de minimis Impact Determination in Accordance with 23 CFR 774.3(b)

MTA intends to seek a Section 4(f) de minimis impact determination from FTA as defined in the Section 4(f) regulations (23 CFR 774) for the use of the small area at the Second Avenue entrance of Poor Richard’s Playground. A de minimis impact is one that will not adversely affect the park’s recreational features or activities. Construction impacts will be temporary and will occur outside the playground. Access to the playground will still be available during construction. The small construction area in the sidewalk will be restored to its existing condition at the end of construction. Prior to making a final determination regarding Section 4(f), the regulations require that an opportunity for public review and comment must be provided. MTA invites you to submit comments to the mailing or email address below. Comments will be accepted through May 23, 2022. José Carrero Second Avenue Subway Community Information Center 69 East 125th Street New York, NY 10035 outreach@mtacd.org