It’s not what you think. The nonprofit organization New York Sun Works has set up a hydroponic farming program in almost 200 schools across New York City and New Jersey and about 65,000 students are harvesting their crops this year. 

The absenteeism rate in NYC schools has hit 40%. That is equivalent to around 375,000 students. This number is up from 26% before the pandemic. A student is considered chronically absent when they miss 10 percent or more of the academic year—at least 18 days of excused or unexcused absences. 

It took five years, but P.S. 9 in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, finally ditched its school sign, which had featured the name of a slave-holding family name. The school is replacing it with Sarah Smith Garnet, the name of the first Black woman to serve as a public school principal in the city. This process started back when a parent at the school first realized that the school’s namesake, Democratic congressman and historian Teunis G. Bergen, came from a family of slave owners. 

We previously wrote about a class-action lawsuit that was filed in 2018 that alleged that the city’s policies for funding and allocating high school sports violated the New York City Human Rights Law. Finally a settlement was approved by a state court this month that requires the DOE and the Public Schools Athletic League (PSAL) to form 200 new high school sports teams by the Spring 2024.

Back in January, the software Illuminate Education, which the Department of Education uses to track grades and attendance, was hacked. Illuminate Education runs familiar platforms like IO Classroom, Skedula and Pupilpath. This breach gave hackers access to 820,000 current and former NYC public school students’ names, birthdays, ethnicities and other information. Fortunately, social security numbers and family financial information were not collected. Banks called for city, state, and federal investigations into the breach, expressing his outrage about the lack of standard critical safeguards in a New York Post story. 

Banks recently sat down with Gothamist to discuss how he would like NYC schools to focus on “the science of reading,” which focuses on the rigorous teaching of phonics. Banks believes the current methods used in schools don’t work, and is calling for an overhaul.