Joshua Laub

Joshua Laub is the Director of Youth Development at the Office of Safety and Youth Development (OSYD) for the New York City Public Schools. He was born in NYC and attended public schools in Los Angeles and Houston. He earned his Bachelor of Arts at Tufts and a Master of Arts in Teaching at Brown University.

Joshua has served NYC’s public-school children since 1994 when he began his teaching career at East Side Community High School on the Lower East Side. In 1999, he became an Assistant Director at Banana Kelly High School in the South Bronx. He then served as the school’s Principal for ten years before taking on his current assignment with OSYD in 2011.

Joshua’s work uplifts systematically marginalized young people, with a specific focus on supporting these youth in rejoining the community. He works to bring along the adults in children’s lives who are needed to make such an effort succeed. For instance, collaborating with skilled teachers - who, struggling to make a class work, want to punish children who express anger and disrupt classroom activities- to sign on to the important, difficult job of forging a collective, non-punitive strategy to win those children over.

In Joshua’s current position at OSYD, he coordinates a landmark NYC inter-agency collaborative: Every Child and Family is Known, which supports students and families living in shelters with the goal of connecting them to services in our communities and improving students’ chances of graduating high school. This promising initiative encourages schools to rethink their current practices for young people in shelter: assigning a Caring Adult to every child living in a shelter, providing training and coaching to Caring Adults, and connecting the entire team to a wider array of resources and services in the community (e.g., tutoring, housing, health and wellness, benefit access, childcare, legal services, food insecurity, and employment).