Brooklyn Borough President

BOROUGH PRESIDENT HOSTS BROOKLYN PARENT EMPOWERMENT FORUM AT BOROUGH HALL

On April 9th, Borough President Marty Markowitz hosted a Brooklyn Parent Empowerment Forum at Borough Hall. This forum was organized to provide parents with an opportunity to share their ideas, questions, and concerns related to the ongoing changes at the Department of Education, and to ensure that Brooklyn parents will still have a strong and active role in how their children are educated.

The Borough President is seeking to establish a strong collaboration with parents to determine how he can best help them with additional support as the public school system undergoes swift restructuring and refocusing.

“As the Mayor moved to restructure and refocus the school system, and to make it perform at a higher level, he promised to give priority to increasing the roles and responsibilities of parents,” Borough President Markowitz said. “The consumers of public education – the parents who speak for their children - need a voice, many voices because no one person has all the answers. Increased parental involvement, and greater parental access to educational decision-makers, are absolutely essential if we are going to have better schools across the board. Our educational system needs to flow from the top down and from the bottom up in order to succeed. And the only way to encourage real parental involvement is to empower parents with real responsibilities.”

Brooklyn’s representative on the Panel for Educational Policy, Donald Weber, was also on hand to answer any and all questions.

United Parents Association President & Community School District Governance Reform Task Force Member Ernest Clayton, attorney Samuel Spirgel (who discussed pending and potential lawsuits against the City of New York/Dept. of Education) and United Federation of Teachers’ Brooklyn Parent Outreach Coordinator Fran Streich also participated.