High stakes for de Blasio over rollout of pre-K
With the school year less than two weeks away, New York City is racing to complete an unprecedented prekindergarten expansion — and its success or failure could have major political implications for its first-year mayor, Bill de Blasio.
De Blasio made the establishment of universal prekindergarten — which a top aide called one of the biggest government undertakings in the city’s history — the centerpiece of his mayoral campaign a year ago. It took months of political dealing to obtain the hundreds of millions of dollars needed for the program, but implementing it might be a greater challenge.
“There are several ways this could go poorly, and all of them would end up on the front pages because of how much (de Blasio) has invested in this,” said David Birdsell, dean of the Baruch College School of Public Affairs.
A common campaign criticism against de Blasio, a former political operative and city councilman, is that he had little managerial experience. That argument was revived when his administration struggled to battle some snowstorms and drew criticism for trotting out ambitious goals without a set-in-stone plan to realize them, such as the ill-fated attempt to save a Brooklyn hospital. That narrative could be reinforced if the city isn’t ready to handle the 50,000 prekindergartners slated to enroll Sept. 4.