Mayor Eric Adams was confronted Monday night by a group of Upper Manhattan protesters denouncing controversial cuts to local schools.
“See, this is the clown, this is the clown,” said Adams. “And this is what we’re up against — people want to spend time being disruptive, that’s what people want to do. But we got to stay focused, and not get distracted.”
“Because people want to spend time on what they disagree on, and not spend time what they agree on,” he added.
The protesters were immediately escorted out of the Police Athletic League, where Adams was to hold a discussion on public safety with members of his administration and local residents.
“So all that noise, that’s what folks don’t understand,” said Adams. “Because you are the loudest does not mean you are saying something.”
Close to 1,200 schools are seeing cuts to the primary source of their individual budgets through the Fair Student Funding formula, according to a New York City Comptroller analysis.
“The mayor and the Chancellor and many others had been really trying to gaslight the city for weeks, really trying to justify or pretend like these are these are good budget cuts,” said Matt Gonzales, one of the protesters who was escorted out. “So we really needed to come here to demand an answer in public, right in front of him.”
Protesters denouncing controversial cuts to local schools confronted Mayor Eric Adams at public safety meeting.
The protesters were immediately escorted out of the Police Athletic League, where Adams was to hold a discussion on public safety.
One of the protesters said the security that threw him and others out tried to “shame” him.
“They basically threw me out here and they started getting in my face, trying to shame me, reprimand me for using my constitutional right to demand a response from the mayor,” Gonzales said.
The slashed budgets — originally forecasted to total $215 million but now appear to be deeper as the city anticipates further enrollment drops — have already led to lost programs, and teachers and school staff.
Another protestor who was escorted out, Shoshana Brown, told The Post she was a social worker at Essex Street Academy on the Lower East Side until she was let go by her school on the first day of summer break because of fewer funds.
“I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye to my students because it came after summer already started,” Brown said.
“I’m sad because I have students that I’ve worked really, really hard for,” she said. “Not only am I not going to be able to see them graduate — I’m scared that they’re not going to graduate because they’re not gonna have that support, and I was the only person in the school that they were really connected to.”
At several city forums, including last month’s Panel for Educational Policy and a City Council budget oversight hearing, parents, teachers and advocates have flooded public comment to decry the cuts. Council members, too, later pushed back against the reductions after hearing from their constituents.
Adams, who acknowledged that the “overwhelming number of questions” at the forum were related to youth and schools, continued to attribute the shrunken budgets to drastic enrollment declines within the Department of Education.
“People have hijacked the conversation,” Adams said.
