Below are testimonies from last week's NYC Council Education budget hearings by two parents at PS 889 in Brooklyn, by Ro White and Jessica Kurtz, explaining how DOE has refused to allow the school to make any changes to their enrollment to enable class sizes to be lowered to mandated levels, despite requests of the School Leadership Team, the principal and the Superintendent to DOE officials. Because of these refusals, their third graders are likely to be crammed into classes of 33 instead of the mandated limit of 23 students. Shared with their permission. If your school is in a smilar position, please email us at info@classsizematters.org. thanks!
Good afternoon. I’m Ro White, a parent at P.S. 889 in Brooklyn, in District 22, one of the 3 worst districts in the city for class size compliance. I want to take you on a tour of my kids’ school, a school where 53% of students are in economic need.
It’s been a long hearing. But I’d ask you to imagine being 7 years old, trying to focus at 2 PM when your lunch ended more than 4 hours ago because your school is so overcrowded that lunch starts at 10 in the morning. Imagine being 5 years old in kindergarten, in a class crowded far over the legal limit, and being told that is acceptable because a new school is “in the capital plan,” a school that will not open until you are in middle school.
Imagine being a teacher with 33 students in front of you. For perspective, that is more than all the City Council members in attendance throughout the day today and all the DOE and SCA staff on the dais combined. These are actual examples for my kids, their teachers, and their school. And while a few people mentioned that the chairs on the DAYis are uncomfortable, at P.S. 889 students take music and theater in a room with no furniture at all because of overcrowding.
Next year, unless something changes now, 3rd grade is projected to have 2 classes of 33 students each, when the legal limit is 23. DOE is requiring the school to admit 20% more students than the school has seats for.
Because this is a budget hearing, I ask the Council to press DOE on a basic question, using our school as a case study: how can DOE deny our school’s request for class size funding because of a lack of physical space, and at the same time insist that we continue to accept far more children than our school has seats and rooms for?
Our principal and superintendent both requested to reduce enrollment for next school year based on the building’s physical limits. Someone at DOE denied it. DOE also had a class size webinar and asked parents citywide to submit feedback on class size. Many of us did, and we never received even an acknowledgement of our messages. We emailed, we followed up, and I even wrote to the Chancellor directly. No response.
So, Chair Dinowitz, I hope you will press DOE on this directly: who is responsible for monitoring ClassSize@schools.nyc.gov, and who is accountable for both denying schools class size funding because they do not have space and denying requests to reduce enrollment based on space? You asked today whether DOE needs more time for full compliance with the class size law, and you did not really get an answer. Surely there is a middle ground on class size that City Council can demand right now before releasing another dollar to DOE.
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Hello, my name is Jessica Kurtz and I am a PS889 parent in Brooklyn’s District 22, a school that is struggling to meet the class size mandate.
I've been trying my hardest to get an answer on the question of why the enrollment office can send us more Kindergarten kids than our actual capacity allows (and beyond what the class size cap allows).
The enrollment office is sending us three Kindergarten sections of 25 each (when the state law clearly caps at 20 students per classroom and our capacity can in fact only support two sections of 20 each... that's 75 students enrolled vs. 40 true capacity!) Our funnel is too big and once students reach the upper grades they are eventually consolidated into two overcrowded classrooms as a result. The enrollment office is basically creating the problem that we then need to fix!
It's super frustrating and there seems to be little to no transparency or accountability for how those decisions are being made. And our superintendents are deemed powerless- Superintendent Bove reached out to the enrollment office in November to request caps to both our Pre K & our K programs and was denied. Can anyone help us get through to the DOE on this enrollment issue?
There's also no plan in sight for the long term solution, which is that we ultimately need more physical space. I attended a February CEC22 meeting & the SCA gave a presentation- in that presentation they presented the five year capital plan and only two schools in D22 were included in the capacity projects (P206 + PS197). If my math is right, that leaves about 16 D22 schools with insufficient space to lower class size and no budget or plans from the SCA to address it. Including PS889 (and our co-located middle school MS890). And yet luxury builders scoop up prime lots across the street from our school on Coney Island Avenue and Hinckley Place.
I understand the Superintendent is trying to assess opportunities for extensions/ annexes and parents continue to send leads on vacant buildings in the area but these conversations have been going on for years and we still have no concrete space, plan or timeline. How do we move this forward from good intentions to action?
My daughter's reading has improved tremendously since the beginning of the school year. I credit this to the individualized attention she has been able to receive (from her fabulous teacher Mrs. Williams!) in her well proportioned class of 19. Now her second grade class is at risk of being collapsed into two sections of ~30 next year. I understand the challenges in meeting this mandate but truly believe it will lead to the best educational outcomes for all students once fully implemented.
Thanks for your time & consideration on this matter.
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