The Kindergarten waiting lists, and more disasters just waiting to happen

Yesterday, the DOE announced that there are over 3,000 children on waiting lists for Kindergarten next year; 42 percent more than last year.

About a quarter of the city's elementary schools, or 157, have kindergarten wait lists. An excel file with school by school data was posted by InsideSchools.

We warned them and warned them and warned them again, but they ignored all our pleas to think about the future.

In 2006, for PlanNYC, the Mayor’s taskforce was asked to come up with recommendations to prepare every area of the city’s infrastructure for 2030, when they projected there would be a million more New Yorkers, including the need for more water supply, transportation, sewage treatment, police, libraries, etc. etc. But the much-praised plan did not have a single word to say about schools. In fact, the only mention of schools in the plan was a proposal to convert school buildings to more housing.

In October 2008, we released a report, predicting that there would soon be sharp increases in enrollment citywide, due to the rising birth rate, rampant residential development, the closings of parochial schools, and the growing perception that NYC was a more family-friendly city. The MPB and the City comptroller did their own studies, showing the failure of the DOE to build enough seats to accommodate the population explosion to come.

We urged them to expand their new five year capital plan, and nearly fifty elected officials from the city, state and federal levels signed onto our recommendations.

Instead, they cut the seats in the capital plan by 60%, since their consultants claimed there would be no citywide increase in enrollment till at least 2016! Sure enough, citywide enrollment started to increase in 2009, just as we had warned.

This has been a slow-moving disaster waiting to happen and they paid no attention, and now the disaster is here.

To the contrary, every DOE policy has made overcrowding worse, including co-locations, where they have continued on their reckless course of squeezing more and more schools into existing, overcrowded school buildings, each of them eating up classrooms to create more cluster rooms and administrative spaces.

Rather than focus on creating enough new seats, the DOE plans to spend more than $500 million next year in the capital plan on new technology, to expand online learning and enable new computer-based tests.

This is yet another disaster waiting to happen, given the city's deplorable cost overruns with technology projects. See my comments in Gotham Gazette, this NYT article , and a recent Times post breaking down the millions of dollars in online learning contracts that have already been approved by the PEP– including half a million for a technology consultant, to consolidate the use of technology consultants!

Clearly, the DOE is hoping for the day when they do not have to provide any new teachers or classrooms, because all the “learning” will take place online. We cannot let this go forward without a fight.

A mother's angry testimony to the City Council

Hi, my name is Denise Bigo-Early. I am a parent of five year old twins on the ninety child kindergarten wait list at our zoned, public school. I’m anxious, sleep deprived, and angry. Not a good combination for a parent speaking before the City Council for the first time.

I have to put up with $5 trillion of crushing new national debt to bail out the ineptly run banks on Wall Street. I have to put up with my tax dollars going to bonuses for the reckless that run those banks. I have to put up with $100 K disability pensions for LIRR workers who are not disabled. I have to put up with pay to play in our state and city.

I cannot put up with my five year olds being shut out of our zoned, public school; nor with the DOE promise of a seat somewhere in the five boroughs. There has been a lot of talk about keeping our five year olds close to home, but their only written communication to parents promises seats somewhere in NYC.

Some 25% of incoming kindergartners are on a wait list in my PS 3 + 41 zone. A dozen District 2 schools have wait lists. In District 1, PS 130 and PS 124 on Confucius Plaza are overcrowded.

I hope my children will be lucky and get into either PS 3 or PS 41. If they do, what awaits them? Not a lunch hour, but lunch minutes – 10 minutes, that begin at 10:30, In PS 3 there are five toilets for over 200 five year olds, huge chunks of plaster about to fall off walls in the stair wells, and mice. We are in a crisis. Business as usual must stop.

Some blame for this disaster falls at your feet. You had to know about the construction boom. Developers made hundreds of millions of dollars selling two- and three-bedroom condos in the West Village and Chelsea. Where are all of those children supposed to go to school? Over the last years, you let the DOE cram more and more children into schools that are cracking at the seams.

Now, you have before you the School Capital Spending plan. Instead of putting more money to the construction of badly needed schools, it contains a $ 2.5 Billion decrease from the previous budget! Vote against this budget. Fight for our children and insist that schools be built in our neighborhoods now.

You may be told that schools are planned in our neighborhood, like the one at the Foundling Hospital scheduled to come on line in several years. It will be overcrowded with the children from new construction not yet finished. We need more schools NOW. Don’t let anyone tell you we don’t have the money. Our city, state and country are awash in money going to the wrong places. You must redirect the money to our children and invest in schools before more children are shut out. -- Denise Bigo-Early

For more on the problem of school overcrowding, and those hundreds of Kindergarten students on wait lists, check out www.KidsShutOut.net