NY’S CLASSY KIDS
1st day of school and Blas’ new 3-K
With the blaring of alarm clocks across the five boroughs, more than 1 million city school kids marked the end of summer Thursday morning and kicked off a fresh school year.
Following custom, Mayor de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña accompanied a pre-K youngster and his proud mom on their route to PS 277 in the South Bronx.
Wearing a red fireman’s hat to take the edge off his first day, beaming Joel Lopez, 3, and his mother strode through the front doors of his new school with the eminent entourage in tow.
The mayor selected Joel and PS 277 because the school is at the vanguard of de Blasio’s new 3-K program, which launched Thursday in District 7 in The Bronx and District 23 in Brooklyn.
Building on his popular universal pre-K program, de Blasio hopes gradually to expand fullday schooling for 3-year-olds across the city.
Fully enlarging 3-K from its initial scope — roughly 1,400 kids — will require substantial state and federal funding that has not yet been secured.
“When we started pre-K, we knew that would be tough to put together, and everyone worked so hard to achieve it,” de Blasio said on Thursday. “Then we started dreaming some more; we said what would really be the next step if we want to reach every child and give them the strongest possible start.”
De Blasio and Fariña made a five-borough tour of schools, including a charter, on Thursday to mark the start of the new academic year.
Separately, state Board of Regents Chancellor Betty Rosa scheduled a visit to a Bronx location of charter-school operator Success Academy among other destinations.
De Blasio demurred when asked if he had any plans to visit one of the high-achieving operator’s schools anytime soon.
“It’s well established that I have some differences with Success Academy, but I have focused on visiting some of the charters that I think we see a lot of great work being done in,” he said.