With New York’s first nine-day early voting period set to start on Saturday, city officials are scrambling to respond to parents and educators angry that more than half of the city’s early voting sites will be in public schools, increasing security risks and operational challenges for students, teachers, and staff.
The city Board of Elections (BOE) selected a total of 61 early voting sites, including 33 schools. Of the 248 early voting sites statewide, only one other school outside of NYC is being used for early voting.
Earlier this month, Gothamist reported that the Department of Education notified city principals on Saturday, October 5 via email, that their school was designated for early voting, three weeks before it was set to begin.
Since then, as parents of children at those schools learned that their facilities would be open to the voting public for nine days, including two weekends and one full week of school, they are asking why no one told them sooner, and how they can have more say before sites are picked for the 2020 elections.
Some of the loudest protests came from parents of students at Manhattan’s PS 116 who gathered there on Monday to speak out against the decision to use their school as an early voting site, news some said they learned just days before the rally.
“Nobody wants to push the BOE to get rid of early voting entirely,” said PTA co-president Erica Rand Silverman. “We don't want this to be an excuse for them to say, ‘That's it, we can't do early voting here, it's not working.’ What we want is for them to select sites responsibly.”
Hosting early voting in the Murray Hill school’s gym means that, for safety reasons, students will lose access to not only the gym but also the play yard and the cafeteria for a week. To mitigate safety concerns, Silverman said, the DOE told the school that they would increase security until 6 p.m. during early voting. Eighty parents also signed up to volunteer at the school as a “Community Safety Staff.”
Parents at Monday’s rally urged the BOE to remove their school from the list of early voting sites in 2020 and beyond. Several parents also showed up at the weekly BOE meeting on Tuesday to deliver that message straight to the BOE commissioners.
“Good policy requires good implementation.This policy is incredibly poorly implemented in our school,” said Michael Argilla, whose daughter is in third grade at PS 116.
While there’s been some public back and forth with the Mayor’s office calling on the city BOE to designate more early voting sites, and the BOE blaming the city for not adequately communicating with schools, what’s not disputed is that the BOE ultimately picked the early voting sites in a process conducted behind closed doors with no formal input from the general public.
According to city BOE executive director Michael Ryan, the early voting sites were selected after BOE staff in each borough evaluated potential locations and made recommendations to their respective commissioners, who ultimately chose the sites.
(Each borough has one Democratic and one Republican commissioner, chosen by their respective party leaders. There are ten commissioners altogether.)
Still Ryan said the city BOE began communicating with the Department of Education about the impact of early voting on schools as far back as January, when the legislation first passed.
“This did not sneak up on anyone,” he said, noting that 23 of the 33 sites being used for early voting were known to the education officials last spring. “For some reason, inexplicable to me, the central management of DOE did not communicate to the schools,” he added.
The reason so many schools made the city’s BOE’s final list is in part a function of state election law, which allows other buildings to opt out when designated a poll site, but does not afford public schools the same leeway.
City Hall did provide the city BOE with a list of 222 sites that all agreed to host early voting, according to Ayirini Fonseca-Sabune, the city’s Chief Democracy Officer. That list included facilities run by Parks and Recreation, Health + Hospitals, and Libraries. But the BOE made the final selections.
“This is going to be an opportunity to see how it goes,” Fonseca-Sabune said.
Republican Assemblymember Michael Reilly of Staten Island, who voted for early voting despite security concerns, raised the same safety issues parents are talking about now during debate over the legislation back in January.
“I'm concerned about security of the schools, allowing people to just enter into a building to cast their vote because we can't ask for IDs,” said Reilly, “and that's contrary to the Department of Education's protocol.”
In the meantime, the Department of Education is attempting to respond to complaints about the upcoming election.
“We’ve heard concerns loud and clear, and we’re taking action to keep our kids safe and minimize disruption to the school day,” Miranda Barbot, Department of Education spokesperson said in a statement.
“Parents should rest assured there will be at least two additional safety agents on site, and a hot meal served every day. We’ll continue our focus on supporting schools through additional staff, careful planning and communication with families while the Board of Elections focuses on making early voting a success,” she added.
Between October 7th and October 22nd, the DOE toured all 33 school buildings designated for early voting and met with principals to discuss ways to mitigate disruption and even alter space arrangements for this election period. Every building will receive additional support from the NYPD, BOE, and custodial staff, although the DOE did not provide complete details.
The DOE sent a letter to principals that is supposed to be sent home to families to inform them of the additional steps being taken to increase security during the election period. Follow-up letters are expected to go out early next week. All information will be made available in nine languages in addition to English, and posted online. Families or staff members with specific concerns can email [email protected].
So far, no parents at PS 116 say they’ve received the letter.
Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that Assemblymember Michael Reilly was in favor of early voting legislation, not against it. Additionally, this article has been corrected to reflect that the DOE, not BOE, told PS 116 co-president Silverman about additional security. We apologize for the errors.
