Counseling the Mayor

Two weeks ago, Mayor Mamdani put money behind a promise he made in the spring. I spoke to a parent advocate and three special ed attorneys about what would help fix the system.

Here’s the short version that will take less than a minute to read:

Mamdani's $67.5 million preschool expansion is real money aimed at a real problem — but he's not the first mayor to promise this, and the money alone won't fix it.

Hizzoner fought every case to save money — it didn't work then either.

The district isn't short on evaluators — it's short on the right instruments, and evaluators get told to use whatever's already in the closet.

Right now they can shrink a service on their own but can't add one without pulling in people who aren't in the room.

The current five programs are good — but there's no ADHD Nest, no dyslexia Nest, no sensory-processing Nest.

DOE legal stopped putting phone numbers in email signatures, according to a lawyer we spoke with. If de Blasio could force a 90-day settlement deadline under threat of pink slips, Mamdani can force this.

Want a longer version? OK then:

Two weeks ago, Mayor Mamdani had a press conference where he announced a $67.5 million expansion of five popular special education programs — Nest, Horizon, AIMS, Path, and ACES — adding 250 preschool seats across two dozen schools.

It's the follow-through on something he'd told reporters back in the spring: New York City would stop losing families to the private special education system, and start serving them in-house. The administration says the combined investment will save $147 million a year by keeping families out of due process.

Private tuition and services for kids with disabilities cost the city an estimated $1.5 billion last year — more than a third of the $4.2 billion budget gap Comptroller Brad Lander projected for the current fiscal year.

But Mamdani is not the first mayor to promise this. Sarah Birnbaum, a parent advocate who's guided families through this system for close to two decades, remembers Bloomberg making the same pitch. "He went up to Albany and said, 'We're going broke paying for these kids to go to special ed schools, and we could provide them what they need in public schools at a fraction of the cost,'" she told me. The DOE never did.

"Certainly, nothing will ever be as bad as it was under Bloomberg," Sarah said. When he made that promise about serving kids "at a fraction of the cost," she said, "I picked up the New York Times and literally said to my newspaper, in front of my face, 'Then why aren't you doing it? If it's that simple, if it's that easy, what's stopping you?'"

At the same time, the Bloomberg administration made a point to litigate as many cases as possible. Mamdani has said his approach is different from predecessors who took what he's called an exclusively legal one. (This educational approach is notably opposite to what the Trump administration is currently doing by handing the federal DOE to HHS and DOJ, right?)

Lloyd Donders, a special education attorney who's represented families since the Bloomberg administration, isn't convinced this promise will hold any better than the last mayor's: "Bloomberg came in and said that they were going to be fighting every case... And then you had de Blasio come in and say, okay, we're going to try to settle as many of these cases as we can. So then you went into the Adams [administration] and during that time it was, why are we settling all these cases?’ And it just goes back and forth. A pendulum swings.”

Spend $147 million now, save money on litigation later. Good idea, right? Let’s see what $67.5 million can and can't buy:

Part of the new money is going toward hiring more psychologists and evaluators for preschoolers. That's exactly the kind of move Michele Kule-Korgood endorses. She's been litigating special education cases in New York for more than 30 years. But she says the sharper question is whether these evaluators are equipped with the right instruments once they're hired.

She runs into the same assessment-deficit issues in hearing after hearing. She used an example from a case where the child had a speech impairment: During a cross examination, she asked a district employee: “Are there other instruments that could get around a speech impairment, ones that don't require a spoken answer? Have you ever heard of the Leiter or the C-TONI?”

She told me, "Sometimes they say yes. Sometimes they say no."

When the district rep says they have heard of a specific tool, Michele will ask, "did you use that?"

The district will say no.

"Why not?" Michele asks.

"We don't have that one. The district didn't buy that. It's not in our closet."

There's the problem. "We have enough assessment instruments in this country now that you can find another way to assess that child," Michele said. Even for kids with severe autism, she said, "there's the VB-MAPP... There are so many instruments out there. There are computerized instruments. There are a million."

If evaluators are still handed the same instruments and told to use whatever's already in the closet, the city will just be producing more of the same bad data. A real fix means budgeting for the alternative-assessment tools — eye-gaze instruments, augmentative communication devices, the kind of testing that actually reaches a nonverbal or language-impaired kid — not just the headcount to administer the ones already sitting on the shelf.

"I had many a hearing when they tried to use a standard IQ instrument, a WISC, a Stanford-Binet, for a child who has severe language impairments," she said. "The instructions are given verbally. The answers are given verbally. So you're not measuring their intelligence, you're measuring their speech and language impairment."

Not everyone thinks better tools are the fix. Lloyd Donders, an attorney who has litigated special education cases for nearly twenty tears, is skeptical that upgrading the assessments alone would move the needle: "Evaluations are only as good as the people looking at it, utilizing it — and they don't."

He's seen DOE evaluations spell out exactly how far behind a child is in speech and language, only to watch the CSE recommend a single group session a week anyway. The instrument is only half the problem, he said. “Someone still has to act on what it says.”

Some of the projected savings come from routing more kids into contracted-out services — speech therapy, occupational therapy — provided by outside vendors rather than in-house staff.

But that's the same private-provider pipeline that feeds the due process system in the first place. If the goal is fewer families forced to sue for what their kid needs, the lever isn't adding another private contractor. It's letting the team sitting across the table from a parent actually change the plan, that day, without a fight.

That feeds into Kule-Korgood's other complaint: who's allowed to act on what a test shows. She described a problem with IEP teams: "This is crazy to me — the team that's handling the IEP meeting can remove a service from a child's IEP, but they cannot increase the service or add a service that wasn't on the IEP unless they have certain people at the meeting." It's a decision-making structure she says pushes power further from the people who actually know the child.

By definition, Kule-Korgood said, an IEP team is supposed to be able to make decisions in the room without going to anyone else. "They admit every day of the week that they can't do that on their own," she said.

"Every year the DOE add additional layers of bureaucracy to the bureaucracy," she said. "Every year there are more layers of middle management, and the decision making is further and further removed from the people on the front lines who have the facts needed to make a good decision."

Lisa Isaacs, another special education attorney, adds another log to the bureaucratic heap: an Adams-era change that made individual school principals fiscally responsible for their own special ed budgets, creating a disincentive to approve services. "If a parent comes in in January and says, we need a para, the principal's like, we can't afford a para," she said. "It's a lot of pressure to put on principals."

Mamdani’s special ed budget increase seeks to scale what the city already has—Nest, Horizon, AIMS, Path, and ACES. It doesn't widen who those five programs are built for. If the city wants fewer families concluding that public school simply has nothing for their kid, some of the next round of investment needs to go toward building a program for the disabilities New York hasn't built one for yet.

That’s the take from Sarah Birnbaum, who has watched the city's public school programs for autism actually improve. "I'm definitely happy that the city has beefed up the ASD Nest program, and the Horizon program wasn't anything great when it started, and now I have any number of families who are quite happy in it," she said.

But, she says, "There's no ADHD Nest and there's no sensory processing Nest. There's no dyslexia Nest. There's just nothing." ICT, she said, "is an imperfect solution. It's what the DOE offers when it comes to inclusion, and for many kids it works" — but only for the kids whose needs happen to fit the model that exists.

Here's a fix that costs nothing. Kule-Korgood said DOE's legal department has, in recent years, stopped putting phone numbers in their email signatures. Cases that used to get resolved with a half-hour conversation now go all the way to hearing, because nobody on the other end will pick up.

She's not the only attorney saying it. Lisa Isaacs, who has represented special education families for decades, put it more bluntly: "What needs to happen is that the legal department within the Department of Education be completely dismantled and rebuilt with people who are easier to work with. You can't even get their telephone numbers anymore."

Added Michele Kule-Korgood: "I used to say to one of the people that worked in the DOE, a very decent guy on the other side, 'help me with the right people, or lock me in a room for an hour with a legal pad and a pen, and I will save you tens of millions of dollars and it will not take away one service from one child.'"

It's still true, she says. "It's doable," she said. "It is doable."

She points to 2014, when the de Blasio administration proved this kind of thing is a policy choice, not a fact of life. "He rolled out for the attorneys this procedure," Kule-Korgood said. "If a case has been litigated the year before, and it's the same recommendation, and the parent is seeking the same relief, it's going to be fast tracked for settlement, and there's going to be a 90-day period where we expect it to go from beginning to fully signed agreement."

The board's litigation department was given strict timelines — and, she said, "we were told at the time that they were under a threat of pink slip if they didn't abide by the timelines." Cases that used to drag on for years started settling in months. It didn't cost $67 million. It cost a mandatory deadline and the will to enforce it.

If de Blasio could order DOE's own lawyers to move that fast under threat of losing their jobs, Mamdani can order DOE's legal department to put its phone numbers back in email signatures. That one costs nothing at all.

What The Money Can Buy

Kule-Korgood told me about another case, years back — a girl who'd spent five years in a program that wasn't reaching her, whose frustration kept escalating into dysregulation nobody could interpret, until a school psychologist visited her at home and, in two hours, taught her to hand him a card instead of hurting herself when she was overwhelmed. A few weeks later, the girl's mother put her on the phone with Kule-Korgood. She'd never spoken before. "Hi, I'm Eva," she said.

That's what $67.5 million is supposed to buy, multiplied by every kid the city is failing right now. It won't happen because the money showed up. It'll happen if the assessments get fixed, if the people in the room get the power to act on what those assessments show, if the programs get built for the kids none of the current five programs serve, and if someone at 65 Court Street picks up the phone.

The mayor has made a start.

Here's what we’ve been covering at Lighthouse in the last month.

Flower Dept:

We’re members of a community garden in the East Village. Digging has been great OT for our guy. This is a balloon flower:

Here’s art. District 75 Office of Arts Education and the Guggenheim Museum tag-teamed once again for the annual showcase of student art in June. Here’s Michael Jackson.

Pointed quotes Dept:

On the absurdity of filing lawsuits against the DOE:

"Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, 'Lovely day. I think I'll get my nails done and sue the Department of Education.'" — Sarah Birnbaum

On picking up good habits from watching Early Intervention therapists at work:

"To this day, when I see a little kid, I'll say things like, 'Your turn.'" — Jenn Choi

Photo credit: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office, April 13, 2026. © City of New York, 2026. Used with permission.

Questions, comments, and candor, please: [email protected]

And RIP Glen Hansard. Thank you for all that you did.