As the school year came to a close, our Executive Director, Kevin Dahill-Fuchel, gathered with Counseling In Schools staff to reflect on the challenges, accomplishments, and extraordinary impact of the past year. His remarks celebrated the dedication of our team, the resilience of the students and families we serve, and the relationships that make our work possible. We invite you to read his end-of-year address and join us in celebrating another year of showing up for New York City’s young people.
Good evening, everyone. Before I say anything else — thank you. Thank you for the year you just gave our students, our families, and each other.
I want to start somewhere you might not expect: a Knicks parade.
On June 18th, at the rally down at City Hall, Mayor Mamdani stood at the microphone and reminded the crowd of something most of us had already tried to forget. In Game 4 against the Spurs, with the Knicks down by 29 in the second half, the win probability — according to the analysts, the people whose job it is to know — was 0.4 percent. Less than half of one percent.
And then he said the line that stuck with me. He said that’s when New Yorkers go to work. That’s when the Knicks went to work.
I’ve been thinking about that line ever since. Because if you change a few words, he could have been describing us.
The students we serve are told, by data and by circumstance, that the odds are not in their favor. In the schools where we work, 83 to 90 percent of students fall within the Economic Need Index. At one of our partner schools, the chronic absenteeism rate is nearly 65 percent. Girls in our Familia Adelante groups are walking in with rates of moderate to severe depression that should stop any of us in our tracks. And this year, families told us they were afraid to even come into the building.
By a lot of the metrics the world uses, the probability of these young people thriving is somebody’s version of 0.4 percent.
That’s when CIS goes to work.
That’s when 66 master’s-level clinicians, 35 youth workers, 21 Directors, 3 Clinical Supervisors, 4 Chief Officers, 23 trainers, 12 success mentors, and every single person in this room goes to work. Not because the numbers told us to. Because the student in front of us did.
And here’s the part of the Knicks story I keep coming back to. That comeback wasn’t clean. Josh Hart missed a layup he should have made. A wide-open look, the kind he hits in his sleep — and it rimmed out. In a 0.4 percent game, you’d think that’s the moment it’s over. But it wasn’t. His teammates picked him up. The next possession came. Somebody else made the play. And then OG blew our minds and lifted our hearts.
That’s our work. Honestly, that’s the whole job.
This year we missed some layups too. At Boys & Girls High School, our team was working hard on attendance and the numbers weren’t moving the way any of us wanted. The principal challenged us directly — do better. That’s a hard message to sit with when you already know your team is pouring everything they have into it. We could have gotten defensive. We could have explained. Instead, we got accountable. We tightened the focus, leaned into the data, and kept showing up for kids one conversation at a time.
And then the district pooled all 17 schools together to see who was moving the needle. Boys & Girls came in fourth. Fourth out of seventeen. That didn’t happen because the odds shifted. It happened because a team decided to own the challenge and refused to walk off the floor.
When a success mentor at A-Tech sat with a senior whose attendance was sliding, and that senior’s attendance climbed 11 percent — that was someone picking up the next possession.
When 72,087 counseling hours got delivered across this city, one conversation at a time — that was the team going to work.
When a clinical supervisor told us that families in Familia Adelante said they finally felt a sense of belonging “at a moment when other messages told them they were not wanted here” — that was the shot that went in.
Persistence is the whole thing. The Knicks didn’t win that game because they were supposed to. They won it because they refused to accept the probability assigned to them. They went to work for each other, possession by possession, until the scoreboard caught up to the effort.
That is what I have watched all of you do this year. Quietly. Without a parade. Without a camera. Without 0.4 percent flashing on a jumbotron to make the comeback feel cinematic. Just showing up the next day, in the next school, for the next student, and picking each other up when the layup rims out.
So tonight, I want to borrow the Mayor’s line and give it back to you, because I think it belongs to us too.
When the data says the odds are long. When a family is afraid to walk through the door. When a student self-refers because they’ve finally decided to trust someone. When a colleague misses the shot and needs the next pass.
That’s when CIS goes to work.
Thank you for the work. Thank you for picking each other up. And thank you for refusing, again this year, to accept anybody’s version of 0.4 percent for the children of New York City.
Now go rest. Get some sun. Read something that has nothing to do with work. Hug the people who waited for you while you were pouring yourself into other people’s kids all year. You’ve earned every minute of it.
Have a wonderful summer. I cannot wait to see you back here in the fall, ready for the next possession.
