New York City Public Schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos Celebrates 2025 Respect for All Week

  • Posted: Fri Feb 14, 2025

Photos from Respect for All Week are available here.

New York, NY – Today, New York City Public Schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos is celebrating the 2025 Respect for All Week, a weeklong celebration of diversity, community and inclusivity. During Respect for All Week, February 10 -14, 2025, schools across the city highlighted and built upon ongoing programs to help students, staff, and communities gain a better understanding of diversity, with a focus on preventing bullying, intimidation, and bias-based harassment. 

"Respect for All Week is a time for us to celebrate the rich diversity that makes our schools so vibrant,” said Schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos. “Schools are the centers of our communities, and through our Respect for All work, we continue to build a future where kindness, understanding, and acceptance thrive in every corner of our city."

This week’s celebrations build on New York City Public Schools’ longstanding commitment to supporting our students and creating safe spaces for our youngest New Yorkers to explore, learn, grow, and build community. As part of Respect for All, New York City Public Schools is reiterating its dedication to:

  • Focusing on Student Safety: Announced last fall, New York City Public School recently launched an Anti-Hate Hotline, designed to provide a streamlined path for students, parents, staff, and community members to report incidents of hate, harassment, or discrimination. This adds an additional, overarching reporting pathway to the already established channels for flagging incidents of bullying and discrimination. The creation of this service underscores the commitment to ensuring that every member of the NYCPS community feels safe and protected. The Anti-Hate Hotline is staffed with New York City Public Schools employees and can be reached at 718-935-2889, Monday-Friday from 8am to 6pm. Incidents can be reported anonymously at the caller’s request.
  • Promoting Understanding and Equity Through Education: Throughout the year, we promote inclusivity and fight hate in our classrooms by teaching about our city’s diversity and multiculturalism. Our Hidden Voices series, which shares the culture and contributions of communities whose stories often go untold, has highlighted the AAPI community, LGBTQ+ community, the Global African Diaspora,  and Americans with Disabilities. Our Hidden Voices series on the Muslim American and Jewish American communities are in development. We have also led professional learning through our Meeting the Momentinitiative to educate staff about navigating difficult conversations and combatting bias. We are making progress as a result of this work, with religious bias incidents in our schools down by 46% so far this year. One of our partners in this work, Facing History & Ourselves, also created a curriculum on hate crimes in partnership with the Mayor’s Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes.
  • Fostering Inclusive Environments: It is the longstanding policy of New York City Public Schools to maintain a safe and supportive school environment for all students free from harassment, intimidation, and/or bullying and free from discrimination on account of actual or perceived race, color, creed, ethnicity, national origin, citizenship/immigration status, religion, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, disability, or weight. New York City Public Schools will continue our commitment to fostering school environments that remain free from harassment, intimidation, bullying, and discrimination of any kind.

The New York City Public School Respect for All (RFA) program was launched in 2007 to build the capacity of staff and students to actively promote a community of inclusion in each of our schools. This year, all schools were encouraged to plan events, lessons or activities centering the below themes:

  • Celebrating Kindness/Be an Ally 
  • Anti-Bullying/ Cyberbullying 
  • Respect for Diversity, Disability, Religious Acceptance and Racial Diversity 
  • Gender Identity, Sexual Orientation, LGBTQ Pride and Acceptance
  • Friday, February 14, 2025 - National No One Eats Alone Day