This is my 29th year with the New York City Department of Education. I have served in the role of teacher, assistant principal, principal, and Director of Youth Development. Schools play a vital role in identifying children and families that need help and support, I support school leaders and work collaboratively with all city agencies and community-based organizations (CBOs) to provide our neediest families with the necessary resources to help their children succeed in our schools. Working shoulder to shoulder to design parent engagement strategies that establish trust and build pathways to resources and supports in the community. I help to identify and provide schools with training to identify children and families in crisis, develop effective screening tools, and strengthen mental health programs in our schools.
We have been building a network of external partners both in city agencies and CBOs to effectively address the unmet needs of our most vulnerable children and families. I am determined to create a cross-sector culture that addresses racism, shame, and stigma–as well as confusion and bureaucracy– that many of our families have to endure when seeking help. We need to make it easier for families to connect to the support and services they desperately need.
Innovation requires a deep understanding of the challenges and barriers that get in the way of connecting families to resources and support. After many years of experience working with families, we realize that relationships are a critical piece of this reform, and we must listen to the people we serve and honor their feedback. With experience working in low-income neighborhoods for years, I bring a deep understanding of the needs of our families. I bring a love of children and families to the work. As a proud father of four children, three of which currently attend our public schools, I see the impact the pandemic has had on each of them and the extra care, understanding, and support they need. My personal experience helps me appreciate the need to customize our efforts to the specific needs of every child and family in our city.
In many ways the school I served as Principal; Banana Kelly High School in the Bronx was a community school in practice. We invested a lot of time and energy in ensuring that our students and families felt heard, respected, and supported. During that time, I was recognized by the Department of Education and Advocates for Children for my work with children and families in shelters. Our school was celebrated for having one of the highest graduation rates for students in temporary housing. I am proud of the work I have accomplished over the last 29 years but I am most proud of what I have learned from the children and families I have had the privilege of working with in my various roles. I am excited about the prospect of bringing all that I have learned to this moment and helping our public schools provide a 21st-century education for all of the children we serve.
Presently I am leading an interagency team that is committed to connecting 11,000 children (ages 5-17) living in shelters to a caring adult at school. Our team recognizes that real support is much more than connecting a child and family to benefits it requires a relationship. In order to build trust, and strong partnership we need to engage with them about the challenges and obstacles that are getting in the way and problem solve together.
I greatly honor and admire Joshua for the extraordinary educator that he is. He has purposively taken on the most arduous and complex challenges that an educator could confront in the New York city public school system. I have witnessed firsthand the passion, concern, and dedication that he has for his students who I met with him over the span of almost a decade as the Director the Institute and the Co-Founder with my Associate Director, Heather Barry, of the Institutes’ Inquiry program – an immersive secondary school experiential learning program (now in its 31st year) dedicated to enabling high school students to confront and discern global challenges. Josh prepared them, accompanied them, and encouraged them every step of the way. So much so, that they often competed extremely well with private schools and specialized schools.
He has a distinctive sensitivity and at the same time, a very bold and courageous intelligent, confrontational style. Joshua backs down from no one and is one of the least intimidate-able people I know. While a man of strength and conviction, he is delicately attentive and thoughtful and an ideal mediator.
I first mt him in an unusual moment, I have laughed that he is the sole person responsible for my missing any of my symposia over 30 years. During EPIIC’s 1988 symposium on covert action and democracy, Joshua stood up to denounce our having brought a former director of the CIA, members of the US military and others he found morally objectionable. We held our symposia under the university’s controversial speakers program and campus police moved in to remove him. I suspended our session to escort him out, dismissed the police, and spent perhaps 3 hours with him discussing his thinking and opinions. He was a sophomore and I admired his passion, and his commitment to what he deemed an ethical protest. I reasoned with him and enunciated my commitment to not only an open spectrum of opinion but did not base my argument on freedom of expression, but freedom of thought and argued that it was essential for our students to confront dilemmas of the most vexing kind to debunk cant arguments and not to polarize but o seek to understand and intelligently confront policies that he and I agreed were in any ways deplorable. He realized that there were many people we had invited that were famed dissidents and protestors, from Daniel Ellsberg to Frank Snepp, from Mort Halperin and Senator Eagleton. No one was allowed to speak without knowing they would be confronted by other narratives and credible challenges. I invited him to present his thinking at Institute forums and encouraged him to enroll, as he did, in the following years’ EPIIC theme on drugs, international security and US public policy. I supported his research on CIA complicity and drug dealing in South Asia. As a member of the program committee, he was responsible for invitations, once again, to a wide spectrum of actors He moderated this panel and Peter Dale Scott later wrote a book in which he acknowledged the information he gained at the forum.
Joshua Laub gained notoriety when he disrupted a speech at Harvard Law School by a contra leader, Aldolfo Calero and denounced the school for inviting him to speak without any rebuttal.
Joshua was a wonderful student - very thoughtful - who based his arguments on research and reason. He went on to take his Masters work under the distinguished educator, Professor Theodore Sizer at Brown University who told me Josh was one of his very best students.