A new school will open next month to help support students who struggle with dyslexia and other learning disabilities, Mayor Eric Adams told amNewYork in a one-on-one interview on Monday.
The Central Brooklyn Literacy Academy will open in time for the 2025-2026 school year, which starts on Thursday, Sept. 4. Located at 188 Rochester Ave. in Crown Heights’ School District 17, the school was built from an existing building — M.S. 394, which the city announced would gradually close by 2027-2028.
Chalkbeat reports that the school would give M.S. 394 students priority admission and will support students in grades 2 and 3 who struggle with dyslexia and other language-based learning challenges.
Adams, who has a personal history of dyslexia in public schools, said the new school will help ensure that “no student is left behind,” including those with disabilities.
“Our personal journeys should become our personal professional missions,” the mayor shared. “And going through the challenges of a learning disability as a child impacted my desire to go to school and my socialization skills.”
Adams said he dreaded going to school every day. He did not want to read. It was not until he was in college that he discovered he had dyslexia.
“Once I learned that, I went from being a D student to being on the dean’s list,” Adams said, adding that he made it his mission to help families with children who have disabilities get the help they need in school.
According to data from the NYS Education Department, nearly 150,000 school-age children from New York struggled with learning disabilities in 2023. Roughly the same number of children were enrolled in special education services and programs in 2022, but over 154,000 were enrolled in these services in 2021.
The decrease in the number of children receiving special education services in 2023 could possibly be due to more available support services.
The Brooklyn school will require certain criteria for admission, including scoring below a specific threshold. Admission is still open, and more information is available on the website, bkliteracyacademy.org.
“This is an upstream approach to help our children and families deal with learning disabilities. And dyslexia is really one of the important ones,” the Brooklyn-born mayor explained.
Melissa Aviles-Ramos is the chancellor of NYC’s public schools, the largest public school system in the country. She said the Central Brooklyn Literacy Academy builds off the success of the South Bronx Literacy Academy, established in 2023 following parent advocacy to provide critical resources to students with dyslexia and co-occurring conditions like ADHD and anxiety.
“The intervention is extremely targeted,” Chancellor Aviles-Ramos said. “Students have to score below a certain threshold. And that’s indicative of having a print-based disability. Then, they can enroll in the school.”
The school is open to all students who qualify. Classes will be small, around five to six students, similar to the Bronx academy. Lessons will hone in on phonemic awareness to help students understand multi-syllabic words and how to chunk those words together, Aviles-Ramos explained.
“Yes, while things of this nature can happen and do happen in a general education classroom, but for students who need this kind of intervention, rather than have them in a separate class, there is a school dedicated to giving them this around-the-clock intervention,” the chancellor described.
Meanwhile, NYC Public Schools celebrated the newly released state test scores for reading and math on Monday, showing an increase English Language Arts (ELA) proficiency of 7.2 points since 2024, from 49.1% to 56.3% among city students. NYC math scores also fared well, increasing by 3.5 points since last year, from 53.4% to 56.9%
City officials credited the expansion of NYC Reads and NYC Solves education programs this year for improvements.
