The new "NYC Reads" initiative starts Thursday, with half of the city’s community school districts rolling out a new reading curriculum for elementary school students.

The initiative was announced last spring, to great fanfare, but not every school community is happy about the change.

“A lot of the parents at our school are super upset. We see a number of problems with it,” said Alina Lewis, a parent at the Brooklyn School of Inquiry.

BSI is a gifted and talented school in District 20, which is one of 15 districts that this year were required to choose from three reading curriculum options.

All of the curriculum options are based on what’s known as the science of reading – an approach that focuses on using phonics to form words and build vocabulary.

The goal is to boost the city’s literacy rates.

In 2022, only about half of the city’s students scored proficient or higher on the state English language arts exam.

But that’s not the case at BSI, where 88% of students were proficient or better.

“It feels like an encroachment on the foundation, the very strong foundation that the teachers and the administration have established to then try something different – which the results, we don’t even have, we don't really have a metric to measure it against,” said Karah Woodward, another BSI parent.

BSI will use publisher HMH’s “Into Reading,” which was chosen by District 20’s superintendent. Parents who spoke to NY1 said they see the curriculum as a threat to the school’s inquiry-based, progressive approach.

“We have an existing reading curriculum that works amazingly well for our students. It speaks to their cultures and their lived identities and their different experiences. It encourages inquiry, and it uses real literature, whole books to explore just interesting themes in the world,” Lewis said.

“The HMH curriculum does not use full books. It's a phonics-based curriculum where you're reading excerpts, it's much more focused on, like, rote skills,” she said.

A spokesperson with the city’s Department of Education said the new curriculum allows teachers to differentiate instruction based on students’ proficiency, and allows for reading whole books, but declined to comment further.

Parents said they were not consulted when the superintendent chose HMH, and in subsequent meetings, their concerns were dismissed. The education department declined to make the superintendent available for an interview.

“There was supposed to be parental engagement around the decision, there was none. And that -- then even when we raised concerns, those concerns were patently dismissed by our superintendent,” Lewis said.

More than 100 parents signed a letter asking the city to consider an exemption to the curriculum requirement for the school. An education department spokeswoman told NY1 no exemptions would be issued to any schools this year.