New York City schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels pulled four school proposals from a scheduled vote Wednesday, scrapping plans for the city’s first artificial intelligence-focused high school and halting efforts to close two Upper West Side middle schools.
Samuels said he’s withdrawing the proposals after hearing that families wanted more time, and after determining it wasn’t fair to push major changes so quickly following a leadership transition. The city’s Panel for Educational Policy, known as the PEP, had been set to vote on all four proposals Wednesday before Samuels intervened.
“These proposals were always ambitious,” Samuels told the City in an interview Sunday. “I think when you have a transition and you’re hearing simultaneously that families want more time, I want to be a chancellor who listens and engages and understands the complexity of all of the issues.”
The pulled proposals cover a lot of ground. The city wanted to open Next Generation Technology High School as a selective, screened school in downtown Manhattan, a plan that drew sharp criticism from parents and advocates who argued a screened admissions process would limit access for lower-income students. The city also proposed closing the middle schools of P.S. 191 and Manhattan School for Children on the Upper West Side, and relocating The Center School.
Community opposition to all four plans had been building for months.
Samuels is entering his fourth month under Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and the chancellor has a complicated personal history with these proposals. He previously served as superintendent of Manhattan’s District 3, where he helped get the process started on the Upper West Side school changes. As superintendent, Samuels built a reputation for pushing difficult school merger proposals through to completion. This time, he stopped short.
PEP Chairperson Greg Faulkner wrote a letter to Samuels asking him to withdraw the Next Generation High School proposal, according to a copy obtained by Chalkbeat. Multiple panel members had also raised concerns directly with Samuels in the days before the scheduled vote, according to those same panel members. The central objection was the school’s screened designation, which PEP members said raised serious equity questions.
Samuels said he didn’t pull the proposals because he feared they’d fail the vote.
Skeptics may find that hard to accept. Losing a high-profile PEP vote would have been a painful early stumble for an administration that has made democratic governance a central selling point. Mamdani is currently lobbying state lawmakers for a four-year renewal of mayoral control of city schools, which expires in June. He’s also pushing for an extension of the city’s deadline to comply with the class size law. Both arguments depend at least partly on his ability to convince Albany that his administration will be responsive to what communities want. A public defeat at the PEP would have undercut that case.
Withdrawing the proposals now makes it effectively impossible for any of them to take effect in the next school year.
Samuels said he hopes to revisit all four proposals later, with a more deliberate process for collecting community feedback.
What that looks like in practice is unclear. The proposals for P.S. 191 and Manhattan School for Children had already stirred deep anxiety among Upper West Side parents, many of whom showed up in force at community meetings to fight the closures. Closing a neighborhood school is never a simple administrative move. It touches off fights over building space, student displacement, staff contracts, and years of community organizing that won’t reset just because a timeline slips.
The Next Generation Technology High School plan carries its own set of complications. The school was conceived as a response to demand for more career-focused technical education, a goal with genuine public support. But the decision to make it a screened school put it on a collision course with the city’s ongoing school integration efforts, which have pushed to reduce the role of selective admissions across the system. Reconciling those two goals will require more than an extra round of community meetings.
Samuels said he believes the proposals “met multiple goals” and framed the withdrawal as a tactical pause, not a permanent retreat. He did not give a timeline for when or how the city would bring the plans back.