April 14, 2020
Saskia Traill
Dear Partners, Colleagues, Supporters, Friends, and Students:
As we head into what promises to be a difficult budget season, ExpandED Schools is determined to do everything in our power to protect afterschool funding. Can we count on you to help us protect afterschool funds?
We have just learned that City Council Speaker Corey Johnson has asked Council Members to submit their list of funding priorities to him by Friday. On Wednesday and Thursday, ExpandED will be on Twitter, letting NYC Council Members know that afterschool must be on their list. We will be tagging relevant Council Members (see below) and using the hashtag #CovidLearningLoss to speak to the need for afterschool support to counter the hours of lost learning amid the shelter-in-place order. We hope you will join us on Twitter on Wednesday and Thursday.
If you do not already follow us on Twitter, please do. The handle is @expand_school. Please like and retweet ExpandED posts and feel free to post your own messages about afterschool as an essential human service. Don’t forget to include the #CovidLearningLoss hashtag in your posts.
By coming together we stand the best chance of protecting afterschool programs. Afterschool is designed to address education inequities and provide children with enrichments that build critical learning skills and ensure healthy development. With major budget cuts projected, these programs are vulnerable. But we know that these programs will be all the more necessary to compensate for the academic, social and emotional, and financial losses that will have accrued during the crisis.
We anticipate that we will have to fight harder than ever to protect the money that will allow us to give hard-hit families programs they rely on for their children’s educational success. Just as we are re-tooling our programs to be effective in an online environment, we are re-tooling our advocacy strategies to align with the most effective ways to reach elected officials during the crisis. Even if you haven’t used Twitter in the past, please join us in doing so today.
In solidarity,
Saskia Traill
President & CEO
