It’s not every day that high school students get to decide how to spend $500,000. The students at Gotham Professional Arts Community Learning School and Acorn Community School have that opportunity thans to a pilot project in participatory budgeting funded by Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams.

The PTA at PS 705 in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, gave the school’s teachers a remarkable gift: $750 each to use at their discretion during the school year.

The Huddle program at PS 107 in Brooklyn helps students in the departmentalized 5th grade share their feelings and problems, work on social skills and play games that foster skill-building and bonding.

Nickemil Concepcion attended public schools on Staten Island and Manhattan's New School of Ballet, which would become Ballet Tech, the NYC Public School for Dance. The programs and his teachers nurtured Concepcion's natural talent, and his photo hangs in the hallway at Ballet Tech, celebrating a career that began on Broadway in “Cinderella” when he was 11 and has continued to this day in dance companies performing throughout the country and around the world.

Thanks to a partnership between the UFT, NYSUT and the AFT, every single teacher in the U.S. Virgin Islands — 1,400 in all — received a tote bag full of school supplies to help their classrooms recover from the 2017 hurricanes that devastated the islands.

Vital Brooklyn, a collaboration between the UFT, the state Department of Agriculture and Grow New York City, aims to promote healthy and affordable eating through fresh produce markets at schools in central Brooklyn that are in some of the state's most disadvantaged communities.