‘We’re Working On It’: Hempstead Administrators Detail Path Forward For David Paterson School

HEMPSTEAD, NY — David Paterson Elementary School received a subpar report card from New York State this week, as the state education department designated the Hempstead elementary school as one that needs comprehensive support and improvement (CSI), a state accountability metric that places Paterson in the bottom 5 percent of schools in the state. In conversations with Patch Thursday, district officials said the work to improve the district’s performance has already begun.

The CSI label is handed out based on a “report card” that the State Education Department assembles for every school in the state. Paterson scored a 1 on the state report card for core subject performance (ELA, Math and Science), weighted average performance and attendance, meaning it was in the bottom 10 percent of New York schools in those categories. The full set of Paterson School data can be found here.

For Superintendent Gary Rush, the problems at Paterson start with attendance and snowball into students' academic proficiency.

“Students can’t learn if they’re not here,” Rush said.

State data for Paterson lists a 48 percent rate of chronic absenteeism at the school during the 2024-25 school year, which Rush said was caused by circumstances both within the district and without.

“Chronic absenteeism is one of the pillars for state accountability, moving forward, and David Paterson School is a school that the former superintendent announced would be closing, early in the year last year. We all know, once you announce that a building is closing — in conjunction with ICE being pretty much planted at Home Depot, which is within two blocks of the David Paterson School — all of those things had a resounding effect on student attendance,” Rush said. “So, we didn’t meet the threshold for chronic absenteeism. As far as the academic piece was concerned, normally you have to have a subgroup [of students] that’s identified [as underachieving] two years in a row before you’re identified. Our African-American students were identified for the first time, based on last year’s data, and that — in conjunction with the chronic absenteeism — did put us on the list.”

As for what the district is planning to do to treat the chronic absenteeism problem, Rush said there are attendance plans being put in place at each school in the district.

“Once a student is out for a day, they outreach to find out why he’s absent, and what the school can do to support the students coming the next day. And, as far as the academic piece is concerned, we’ve been looking at the impact of attendance on academics,” Rush said.

At Paterson specifically, Principal Linda St. John said the school is already working on an improvement plan.

“I’ve identified my team, a team of teachers, staff, support staff, and we had our first official meeting yesterday,” St. John told Patch Thursday. “We’ve conducted surveys of parents, students and then teachers. I did have an initial meeting with [an official] from the state, and I spoke with him briefly, with my district person that’s on the team. He outlined everything I’ve seen on the NYSED website about the process. So, that’s where we are. I have to have three meetings with my team before I have another meeting with the state, but we’re working on it.”

When asked if the results of those surveys had come in, and what the main concerns coming from parents and students were, St. John said the surveys for parents focused on how their kids felt going to school. Question topics included safety and general attitudes toward education, St. John said.

“As far as parents, and everything, it’s just really getting a feel for how they feel about the school, and things like that, what the school is doing as far as their academics, with regards to their students. The parents, they’re questioned more about how their child feels about the schools, how they feel about education, do they feel safe, things like that.”

Safety has been a difficult thing to ensure, Rush said, with ICE still conducting operations on Long Island daily. Still, the superintendent said the district is doing its best to convince parents that their kids are safest at school.

“ICE is still an issue…they’re still present in the community, but we have been trying to support families with reassuring that the school is a safe place,” Rush said. “ICE cannot come in school and take students out, which some parents were under that belief. We’re doing all we can to ensure, for their sake and students’ sake, that the safest place for them is in school and not out of school.”

While he said ICE has had a chilling effect on attendance, Rush said the announcement that Paterson School would be closing, which was ultimately reversed after funding came in, prompted many parents to begin looking for other places to put their kids in school.

“It’s very difficult for parents to be committed to the school district,” Rush said. “They’re spending a lot of their time trying to seek other places to attend…charter school or any place else. Especially if you’re telling them in December, January that the school will not be open for the 2025-26 school year.”

Attendance at Paterson steeply declined after the announcement that Paterson would be closing, Rush said. Even after the announcement that Paterson would not, in fact, be closing, Rush said some of the attendance damage had already been done.

“You can imagine what the impact is, between January and May, of parents finding out that the school will be reopened the next year,” Rush said. “You had some parents that left the district, some that were not committed to the school. It was not good.”

At this point, Rush said, the district has sufficient funds to keep Paterson Elementary open for the foreseeable future. The plans to improve district performance will focus first on attendance, with an eye towards improving academic results once students are back in school more often. While results at Paterson drew the attention of the state this year, Rush said the problem isn’t district wide.

“District-wide, we had an increase in achievement, but not at David Paterson,” Rush said.