Updated, 11:49 a.m. | On a day of firsts, more than one million New York City public-school children returned to class Wednesday morning to schools facing serious new challenges but tighter budgets with which to meet them.  City Room is looking for your best shots of the first day of school.  This time last year, the city was riding high on state test scores that showed students at record levels of proficiency in math and English. But over the summer, the state made it more difficult to pass the tests, creating a less rosy reality for the city’s 1,600 schools. Now, just 42 percent of the city’s third through eighth graders are considered proficient in English, down from 69 percent. In math, the proficiency level dropped to 54 percent from 82 percent.  Each year, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein spend opening day visiting schools that they feel deserve praise. This year, their first stop was at Public School 172 in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, the Beacon School of Excellence.  The school maintained its nearly perfect record on the state tests this year, even with the higher bar — 99.6 percent of its students passed the math test and 95 percent passed in reading — even though 80 percent of its students are poor enough to qualify for free lunches.  As children in neat blue and white uniforms arrived at 7:30 am, the mayor greeted them, and congratulated the veteran principal, Jack Spatola.  “He asked me what I did this summer,” said Karla Galindez, 7, who shyly chatted with the mayor. “I said I did my homework and went to Hershey Park camping.”  A swirl of news cameras filled the cafeteria as the children started breakfast. “Now we can see our friends and have fun in school again,” said Leslie Lopez, 9, who had French toast and chocolate milk.  Speaking at P.S. 172, Mr. Bloomberg challenged the idea that scores had slipped, pointing to steady improvement in raw test scores, if not proficiency rates, over the last eight years.  The bar for proficiency “is truly an arbitrary definition,” he said. “So we have a P.R. problem, but we are not going to dedicate a lot of resources to P.R. We are going to devote our resources to improving schools.”  Asked about the impact of budget cuts, which caused P.S. 172 to lose two classroom teachers, Mayor Bloomberg said he wished there was more money. “But the job is not just to make things better. The job is to make things better with the resources we have.”  Absent from the visit was Michael Mulgrew, the teachers’ union president, who elected to go on his own tour, beginning with Public School 332 in Brooklyn, a school that was supposed to close last year for poor performance but was saved for at least a year by a union lawsuit. It and the other 18 rescued schools opened Wednesday with a unusually small contingent of students.  The union is asking for extra support for the schools, to help them succeed, and blamed the city for swamping them with high needs students. The city has judged the schools lack the capacity to improve.  “We can’t do everything together,” Mr. Bloomberg said of Mr. Mulgrew’s absense, adding that the salvaged schools “are hurting our kids.”  In the bustling schoolyard at Public School 19 in Corona, Queens, teachers held yardsticks with colored signs attached to the top listing class assignments. But Seoul Rosado, a second grader, was at a loss. Her father, Michael Rosado, had pulled her out of school last year before she had received her report card, so she did not know where to go.  Then, in the sea of faces, a woman with a stack of papers appeared and pointed out that she was in “2W1,” and she was gone.  “That was very quick,” Mr. Rosado said as he led Seoul toward the door.  To ease congestion at Public School 16 in Corona, Queens, five classes of fifth graders were reassigned this year to nearby Public School 307, according to parents.  One of the reassigned students is Kevin Urena, 9, who was wearing a tie and backpack with his hair gelled into a faux-hawk. Kevin seemed unfazed by the change. His mother, Carmen, a clerk, however, was excited after having taken a tour of the school on Tuesday.  “It’s clean, it’s not as crowded, it’s great,” Ms. Urena said.  At Public School 212 in the Bronx, though, crowding was the order of the day. Dozens of parents lined up with their children, trying to register for kindergarten and a few precious prekindergarten spaces.  Neidaly Cruz, 17, of Canarsie, Brooklyn, had a longer commute than most to her new school: it’s on Governors Island. She attends the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School, which just relocated to the island and offers unique coursework in subjects such as diving and oyster aquaculture.  After more than two hours on bus and subway, Naidaly arrived at the cavernous ferry terminal in Manhattan, where the din of summer catch-up chatter ricocheted off the ceiling, and into the embraces of her friends. “I’m happy,” she said, and hopped on the boat.  At 9:37 a.m., two seniors raised the harbor school flag, and the student body belted out, “Harbor!” With that, the seniors lined up in front of the school to welcome the lower grades, and school was officially in.  Across the city, schools started their year with fewer resources. All schools have had to cut their budgets 4 percent this school year, on top of 8 percent in additional cuts since the 2007-8 school year.  That means that new after-school programs, tutoring and other intensive interventions are out of reach for most schools. And with budgets stretched citywide, school officials see little sign of additional money on the horizon.  “We are confident schools will be able to leverage existing resources to help students meet the higher bar,” said Matthew Mittenthal, a Department of Education spokesman.  Within the restrictions, the city has begun to train principals and teachers in a new set of national curriculum standards, known as the common core, which will emphasize writing and higher-order thinking as they are phased in over the coming years. Innovative ways to use technology in on-line coursework and classroom management will be introduced in selected schools.  Overcrowding remains a problem in many parts of the city, particularly in Queens high schools, but the city’s school construction authority has been working to ease the crush. The city says it has added more than 17,000 new seats for this school year, through a mixture of 26 new buildings, annexes and leased spaces.  One of these projects, the Mott Haven Educational Campus in the South Bronx, will serve more than 2,300 students at a steep price: an estimated $230 million in construction and environmental cleanup costs. In an emergency declaration issued last week, Mr. Klein moved to reduce overcrowding at Public School 16, a 1,500 student primary school in Ozone Park, Queens, by placing some fifth graders in unused space in a nearby school building. On the Upper East Side, parents who could not get their kindergartners into their zoned schools will spend Wednesday meeting the faculty of their children’s new school, Public School 267.  The city avoided layoffs this year by not giving teachers a raise, and rescued 800 aides and parent coordinators with a last-minute injection of federal funds. But there will still be 1,100 fewer permanent classroom teachers, even though they remain on the city payroll at a cost of $100 million.  The fate of these teachers, known as the absent teacher reserve pool, promises to become the next battleground between the city and the teachers’ union, the United Federation of Teachers, even though both sides agreed to the current system. Mr. Klein has said he wants to limit the amount of time teachers can receive a salary without finding a permanent job, while the union argues that the city should do more to place the teachers in jobs.  The summer also brought some bright news. The state’s second-place finish in a federal grant competition, called Race to the Top, will bring the New York school system $700 million over four years. The money must finance systematic educational change, not plug budget gaps. School leaders believe the money will lay the groundwork for a better era of schools, by paying for better data systems to track student progress, more rigorous ways to evaluate teachers, and new methods to train them.  Yet as students across the city met their teachers for the first time, there was also a reminder that in New York City, little happens without contention — even on the first day of school. Wednesday will be an orphan, the only school day this week before the start of the Jewish holidays on Thursday. Amid muted threats of parent boycotts, it was unclear how many children would actually show up. Attendance, in the end, will prove to be one more unknown as the nation’s largest school system grinds into gear.  Cate Doty, C. J. Hughes and Jennifer Medina contributed reporting.
After a summer of sharply mixed news, the city school system throws open its doors to its million-plus students.