Julia Marsh

The city’s plan to reopen public schools this September does not provide enough specifics on how to keep students, teachers and staff safe, city and state elected officials said Friday.

“We need a plan for how to open schools, not more information on how to close them,” Councilman Ben Kallos (D-Manhattan) said about the details laid out hours earlier by Mayor de Blasio and Dept. of Education Chancellor Richard Carranza.

De Blasio announced a “blended approach” of in-class and online teaching as long as the city’s daily positive-test rate for the coronavirus stays under 3 percent. It is currently at 1 percent.

The mayor and chancellor also explained protocols for the quarantine of students and temporary closures of individual buildings if someone at the school test positive for the virus.

But Kallos, a member of the council’s education committee, said that he and other public school parents are looking for something else.

The NYPD is facing its first budget cut in at least two decades — thanks to a “perfect storm” of events including “dire economic circumstances,” fallout from the George Floyd killing and calls for reform from the progressive wing of the City Council, experts and insiders said.

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Meanwhile, the City Council’s 21-member progressive caucus is meeting with criminal justice reformers who want $1 billion in cuts this year to the NYPD’s $6 billion budget as a response to charges of police misconduct.

“Many members of the progressive caucus have already come out in favor of #Defund NYPD and we will be taking a formal position as a caucus shortly,” said Ben Kallos (D-Manhattan), the group’s chair co-chair.

“We’re very concerned even more so now about mental health especially regarding our students who have been through a sort of traumatic once-in-a-lifetime experience,” Deputy Budget Director Kenneth Godiner replied.

“Can we cut our bloated contracts?” Manhattan Democrat Ben Kallos asked Godiner.

Godiner promised to look at the issue.

De Blasio defended ThriveNYC during his press briefing, saying he disagreed with Stringer’s assessment that it wasn’t making an impact.

“Anything that’s about health and safety is a priority whether it’s about physical health or mental health,” he said.
A mayoral spokeswoman defended ThriveNYC’s annual budget of about $250 million a year for four years, and instead detailed planned cuts to mental health consultants in schools as well as delays to mobile treatment teams and crisis response teams.

Councilman Ben Kallos (D-Manhattan), who was one of the members questioning Camilo at the hearing, was surprised by the disclosure.

“I’m deeply disappointed in the administration for lying under oath and for doing so with knowledge and willfully,” Kallos said.

“I understand the litigation risk that they were dealing with however there were numerous other questions that were answered with, ‘We can’t answer due to ongoing litigation,'” Kallos said.

“I think we need to look into holding this administration accountable if they come before the council and swear under oath it needs to be the truth,” Kallos said.

Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed mandatory composting during his Earth Day announcement, but in September, he temporarily shelved expansion of a pilot project to recycle food scraps due to low use.

The project more than doubled curbside composting collection from 13,000 tons in fiscal year 2017 to 31,000 tons in 2018, according to the Department of Sanitation. But the city generates 14 million tons of garbage a year, about one-third of which is food waste, so the increase in composting made only a tiny dent in landfill reduction.

Manhattan Democrat Ben Kallos wrote to the city’s Law Department on Monday after reading an exclusive story in The Post about how the agency paid InSync Litigation Services $1.2 million over the past five years to deliver legal papers by hand when it could have filed them online for free.