Who We Are
NYC Kids PAC is a political action committee that advocates for better schools by informing the electorate and supporting candidates for office who have demonstrated a commitment to improving our city’s public schools.
We send out and post candidate surveys and host candidate forums. Our governance board includes parent leaders from throughout the city who care about strengthening our public schools.
Fatima Geidi
Fatima is the mother of two sons in the NYC public schools. After her special needs son was mistreated at the Upper West Success Academy charter school, she pulled him out of the charter school and subsequently filed a civil rights complaint and a FERPA complaint with the US Department of Education. She has been a member of the School Leadership Team at the her son’s public school on the Lower East Side, and has served on the District 1 Diversity committee.
Leonie Haimson
Leonie Haimson is the Secretary of Kids PAC. She is a parent advocate whose children attended the NYC public schools for nearly 20 years. She is the founder and Executive Director of Class Size Matters, the co-chair of the national advocacy group the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, and on a board member of the Network for Public Education. She has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, and Fox News and numerous radio shows. She blogs at NYC Public School Parents and has written for Education Week, the New York Times, the Daily News, InsideSchools, Washington Post’s Answer Sheet, Gotham Gazette and elsewhere. In 2009, she was named as one of NYC’s family heroes by NYC Family Magazine and in 2020 and 2021, was named one of the most powerful education leaders in the state by the magazine City and State.
.Lupe Hernandez (bio forthcoming)
Margaret Kelley
For over twenty years, Margaret Kelley has been an education advocate committed to confronting inequality to ensure that all students and families have the resources and access they need to improve their lives. She created the first Brooklyn Parent Academy to help parents help their children, worked with the Brooklyn CECs and provided monthly training to help them with their work, and authored the first Brooklyn Parent Help Guide to Public Education in New York City. She was elected twice to Community School Board 15, Brooklyn, where she served as a member and President. She is an active member of the Working Families Party. She currently writes a weekly Education News Update for the Cobble Hill Association.
Erika Kendall (bio forthcoming)
Andy Lachman
Andy Lachman is the treasurer of NYC Kids PAC. He had two children who attended the NYC public school students, and served on several different PTAs and School Leadership Teams. He founded Parent Leaders of Upper Eastside Schools (PLUS), an education advocacy group dedicated to improving education community wide. He is especially proud that this group of parents from all UES middle and elementary schools worked collaboratively to help open three new public elementary schools and a new middle school. He owns Promotion Promotion, a company that specializes in promotional products, packaging, and printing, and Fiscal Guardians, a financial accounting consulting firm that serves small business and not-for-profits.
Veronica Piedra Leon (bio forthcoming)
Naomi Peña
Naomi Peña is a native New Yorker raised in the Lower East Side. Her parents were immigrants who instilled the need to excel through education. Naomi became involved in educational advocacy work when her oldest child was given an IEP. She quickly had to learn how to navigate the special education bureaucracy and saw how overwhelming it was to navigate. Through support from organizations, she learned the special education law and lent herself to be a support for other special education parents.
In 2015 she joined the Community Education Council for school district 1. During her time on the council, they worked on the first ever district-wide diversity admissions policy in NYC. She is also an advocate for dyslexia services and is a co-founder of the Literacy Academy Collective, whose goal is to break the cycle of illiteracy for students with dyslexia, LBLDs, and other struggling readers.
Naila Rosario
Naila Rosario is the President of NYC Kids PAC. She is a long-time community organizer, a public school parent, and the former President of the Community Education Council in District 15, representing the neighborhoods of Cobble Hill, Boreum Hill, Park Slope, Gowanus, Sunset Park and parts of Fort Greene. She now lives on Staten Island.
Karen Sprowal
Karen Sprowal is a mother of three who resides in the Washington Heights community of Harlem. She serves on her district community board, education and landmarks/preservationist committees. She is a museum docent at Morris-Jumel and owner of Experience the Heights tour company. Her son was the focus of a New York Times article that subsequently led to exposure of charter schools illegal “Counseled-Out” practices of students with special needs. She continues to advocate for policy changes on many public education fronts to address class sizes, expansion of charter schools, student privacy and high stakes testing. She has appeared on CNN, CNBC, WABC and Al Jazeera TV news, and has published articles in NYC Public School Parents blog and Inside Schools.
