The City Council committee heard narrow but consequential testimony on Intro. 13‑59, a local law proposed by Chair Rita Joseph that would require New York City Public Schools to publish annual data about manifestation determination reviews (MDRs) — the process that determines whether a student’s behavior was caused by a disability for the purposes of disciplinary protections.

Advocates including Advocates for Children, the Legal Aid Society, Legal Services NYC and the NYCLU told the committee MDRs are an essential safeguard but are currently opaque and inconsistently applied. Rohini Singh of Advocates for Children urged the council to "disaggregate data by community school district, not just by school, and by race, income, disability type, housing status and whether families had representation," saying that transparency would help identify systemic inequities.

DOE officials supported the bill’s goals but said some data are not yet publicly reported even though they are tracked internally. Andy Corso of the division of inclusive and accessible learning told the committee that the department recorded roughly 1,550 MDRs in the 2024–25 school year and that 22.7% (352) of MDRs were found to be a manifestation of the student’s disability. Corso also provided suspension figures: he said 1,343 students without IEPs experienced a suspension of more than 10 consecutive days (about 0.2% of non‑IEP students) and 869 students with IEPs experienced suspensions of more than 10 consecutive days (about 0.5% of students with IEPs). Corso said the DOE follows up with monitoring and training but acknowledged limits to public reporting and supported the bill’s intent to increase transparency.

Advocates’ requests and DOE caveats

- Additional data points requested by advocates include whether an MDR was for a "deemed to know" student (a student who does not yet have an IEP but whom the school should have identified), whether parents had legal representation at the MDR, the infraction that led to the MDR, and whether the MDR was held within the 10‑day time frame required by federal regulation. Joel Pietzak of the Legal Aid Society urged adding disability‑classification cross‑tabulations to analyze whether teams are considering the full functional picture rather than only a single label.

- DOE said it can provide many of the data points but noted limitations in how information is currently captured in data systems and recommended careful drafting to align reporting requirements with what districts can reliably produce from existing MDR processes.

Why it matters

MDRs can determine whether a student with a disability can be removed from their educational setting and, if so, what alternative services are required. Advocates argued that public reporting would reveal patterns of disparate outcomes — for example, whether students of color with disabilities are less likely to receive positive MDR determinations — and would support corrective action. DOE officials, while endorsing the principle of transparency, asked the council to coordinate statutory requirements with existing special‑education reporting systems.

Next steps

Council staff and advocates will continue negotiating the bill’s language. DOE committed to follow up with the committee for additional data and to work with advocates on aligning reporting fields with DOE data systems. No vote was taken at the hearing.