Parents say Mayor Adams' Afterschool for All must include students with disabilities

Advocates for students with disabilities said Mayor Eric Adams’ Afterschool for All plan won't actually be "for all" until the city updates bus contracts to provide late-day service, especially for students in special education.

“When the mayor says ‘Afterschool for All,’ he doesn’t mean students like me,” said Lucas Healy, a student with autism who attends the High School for Telecommunications Arts and Technology.

Healy spoke at a rally outside City Hall on Thursday, saying he’s able to take the subway now, but many of his classmates can’t.

“They still need the busing because they can’t travel independently,” he said. “They miss out on the plays, the sports, the clubs and the general opportunity to make new friends and have new experiences.”

In April, Adams announced he was adding $331 million to his budget to expand after-school programs to 20,000 students in kindergarten through fifth grade over the next three years — a move celebrated by many working parents. Many existing free after-school programs have waitlists.

When fully phased in, the city would offer 184,000 after-school seats for children in kindergarten through eighth grade, officials said. The budget is now being negotiated with the City Council.

But at Thursday’s rally, parents and advocates warned that many students with disabilities who take school buses to specialized programs across the city are unable to participate because current bus contracts don’t provide a late afternoon option. They said the lack of after-school and summer school busing is part of a broader problem stemming from outdated contracts with bus companies that have allowed a dysfunctional school bus system plagued by delays to persist.

Those contracts are expiring June 30, and parents lobbying for better bus service hope new ones will provide improvements, including late-day pickups, summer school busing and more reliability. The bus driver unions and their allies are simultaneously lobbying state lawmakers to pass a law enabling labor protections for drivers, which the unions said are a prerequisite for new contracts.

A City Hall spokesperson told Gothamist Thursday afternoon that the administration was working "within our budgetary constraints and across city agencies, like partnering with community-based organizations, to ensure students with disabilities can access these programs," and said City Hall was listening to community feedback to potentially make changes.

He said Adams had "delivered meaningful change for our students with disabilities, which includes ensuring our after-school and summer programs are accessible to all students."

A new report from Comptroller Brad Lander says the Adams administration can do more to expand after-school programs for students in special education. According to the report, more than a quarter of the city’s District 75 programs, which serve students with complex needs, don’t have any after-school at all because they lack the funding and specialized staff.

The comptroller’s report also says the city would need to add many more seats than Adams plans to be truly universal.