The next five-year capital plan for schools
will be introduced sometime in the next two months. In Jan. 2017, Mayor deBlasio promised that he would fully fund the capacity portion of the new plan, to alleviate current overcrowding and address future enrollment
growth. Based upon a Nov. 2017 estimate, this meant adding at least 38,000 currently unfunded seats plus whatever portion of the 44,000 K12 seats
in the current plan are as yet unsited and unbuilt.
As Chalkbeat reported, the addition of those seats
will “largely alleviate the overcrowding issue we’re facing now,” de Blasio
said. Devora Kaye, a spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Education, said
that is in addition to the 44,000 seats already included in the city’s
five-year capital
plan.
We have real questions about the lack
of transparency in DOE’s method of estimating the need for
new seats, especially as over half a million NYC students are crammed into overcrowded
schools, the city’s population is growing fast, and there is a residential
building boom in all five boroughs.
In addition, the current formula is based on
census figures 20 years old, doesn't take into account the increased numbers
of preK or charter school students occupying DOE buildings, and is
aligned with even larger class sizes in
most grades than the current average.
But we would like to keep the Mayor at his word
at least in this regard.
Please
send a letter
to the Mayor and the Chancellor now, urging them to fully fund the number
of seats needed in the next five year capital plan, as de Blasio promised to do.
The letter also asks them to front-load the plan and build these schools
quickly and within five years. Right now the
vast majority of the schools in the current five-year plan won’t be completed
until 2022 or later. As of last spring, nearly one third of all funded seats had no sites and only a small
number of seats in the “class size category” added to the plan five years ago have even been identified.
There is more information below, describing four very basic bills and two resolutions that were approved in the City Council on Sept. 12 in an attempt to make school planning more transparent. Not one of them should have had to be passed – but the fact they were is yet more evidence of how resistant the DOE and the School Construction Authority have been in the past to improving transparency and to working with parents and elected officials to solve this chronic problem which has only worsened in recent years. But please send your email to the Mayor and Chancellor now, by clicking here.
Thanks, Leonie
New Legislation and Resolutions:
Intro
461-A requires Department of
Citywide Administrative Services to notify DOE/SCA when city-owned
or leased property of an adequate size for a school is has no current use (but
for some reason, not to communicate this properties to either elected NYC officials
or parents, who in the past have been primarily responsible for successfully
pushing DOE to acquire properties for schools)
Intro
729-A requires the DOE to report
on the process and data used to determine seat need, as well as to include the
estimate of needed preK seats, “if available, by community school district”
and to report on disaggregated need by elementary vs middle vs high schools. (Currently
the DOE refuses to report on need for elementary schools separately from middle
schools, which tend the hide the need for more elementary schools , especially
given the fact that they now AVERAGE about 108% of their capacity across the
city.)
Intro
757-A : To form an interagency task force
that would identify potential city-owned properties for schools, composed
of members mostly appointed by the Mayor from city agencies, and one by the
Council Speaker, who would release a report with recommendations by July 31,
2019.
Also two non-binding resolutions:
Res
286 , asking the State legislature to allow NYC to use design-build for
capital projects; which is more efficient than bidding out components
separately; and Res
289, urging the SCA to communicate how
people can submit to ideas for potential school sites.
We have also urged that the Council to pass what we
believe would be a bunch of stronger, more effective bills to actually revamp
the planning process to help ensure that schools are built along with new
housing, and not years afterwards.
More on the status of these bills soon, but please do send a letter to the Mayor and the Chancellor today, urging them to fulfill de
Blasio’s promise to fully fund the DOE-identified need for seats in the next
five -year capital plan, due to be released this fall.
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