With little fanfare and some disappointment, yesterday's second and final meeting of the School Siting Task Force was held

Indecipherable power points at Monday's School Siting Task Force meeting

Yesterday the second, and it turned out, the final meeting of the School Siting Task Force was held. Reports of this disappointing meeting were published in the Daily News and the Wall Street Journal today.

To recap: In their Planning to Learn report, released in March 2018, the City Council made several proposals to speed up the process of school planning and siting, whose generally slow pace has contributed to over 500,000 NYC students being consigned to overcrowded schools.

In some neighborhoods where the schools are overcrowded, twenty years or more have lapsed without a new one being built, because of the apparent inability of the School Construction Authority (SCA) and the DOE to identify locations, even when these schools have been funded in the capital plan.

The SCA has only four real estate brokers citywide on retainer to help them to find suitable sites, and these brokers never "cold call" or reach out to owners to see if they might sell their properties to the city before they are put on the open market.  Cold calling is considered a "must" in the hot real estate market that is NYC.

The Council’s Planning to Learn report suggested that a process be created to "Improve the school site identification process … that would review City real estate transactions to identify opportunities for SCA. Additionally, the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) should alert the Department of Education (DOE) and SCA if a property of appropriate size for a school becomes available."

As a result, the City Council passed Local Law No. 168 in Sept. 2018 to create an “interagency task force to review relevant city real estate transactions to identify opportunities for potential school sites,” including “city-owned buildings, city-owned property and vacant land within the city to evaluate potential opportunities for new school construction or leasing for school use.” The law also said that this task force should provide a report to the City Council no later than July 31, 2019 on their findings.

The first meeting of this task force was held privately on Feb. 26, 2019. After I heard about it, I asked the City Council and the DOE if subsequent meetings would be open to the public, since any official body created by law is subject to Open Meetings Law, according to the expert opinion of the NY State Committee on Open Government.  Initially, I got nowhere fast with either the Council or the Mayor’s office.

City Comptroller Scott Stringer also sent a letter, urging the DOE to comply with Open Meetings Law and allow members of the public attend. In my experience, it has been parents and members of the community who often have the best and most useful suggestions when it comes to siting schools.

Then in April 2019, an article in City Limits was published that discussed how the city intended to keep these meetings private, using this issue as an example of an overall lack of transparency on the part of the de Blasio administration. Subsequently, on May 2, Chancellor Carranza and SCA President Lorraine Grillo responded to Comptroller Stringer, saying the public be would be allowed to attend future meetings, though they refused to concede that they were legally obligated to do so:

Although we disagree with your position that the Task Force is subject to the OML, we do not object to opening Task Force meetings to the general public, consistent with our commitment to community input and engagement. Accordingly, future meetings of the Task Force will be open to the public.

Fast forward until last week, when one of the members of the Task Force, Shino Tanikawa of CEC2, sent around a message to our NYC Education list that the second and final meeting of the Task Force would be held on Monday, July 29 at City Hall from 3-5 PM, and that this meeting would be open to the public.

Five months had gone by between Feb. 26 and July 29, without the Task Force meeting once.

During yesterday’s final meeting, Lorraine Grillo and her staff from the SCA projected a bunch of undecipherable spreadsheets, listing thousands of city-owned properties and privately-owned land, the vast majority of which they had ruled out as unsuitable for schools, because they were too small, not in the right areas, or strangely configured. They said they had found only two sites out of more than 7,000 properties owned by the city that might be good sites for schools: one where the former Flushing airport had been located, and another adjacent to John Dewey High School in Brooklyn. In addition, they said, they were continuing to explore and analyze some of the privately-owned properties.

Their presentation only lasted about 15 minutes, and then Liz Hoffman of the Deputy Mayor’s office who was running the meeting opened it up to questions. None of the Task Force members asked any questions, but several were asked by members of the audience, which included mostly parents and a few reporters.

I asked if the public could have a copy of these spreadsheets. Liz Hoffman said no. She did not explain why they were withholding this information, only that the release of the data was not specified in the law that created the task force. (I have now FOILed the spreadsheets -- as any “statistical or factual tabulations or data” created by city agencies must be made publicly available, according to the relevant state law. ]

Leslie Brody, the WSJ reporter, asked two good questions: how many sites for schools the SCA needed to find; and whether the city had any requirement to include schools in large scale developments. The SCA said they were looking for about 45,000 school seats out of a projected need for 57,000. [The most current version of the five-year plan lists only 11,538 seats out of the 57,000 funded that are “completed or in process,” which usually means those that at least have sites.]

The answer to the second question was no, the city had no requirement that schools must be included in large-scale developments.

Shortly afterwards, I pointed out that the 57,000 estimate for need for seats was a projection that was nearly two years old. Lorraine Grillo agreed, but said their projections would be updated next November. That figure also doesn’t include 3K and preK seats, though the Mayor has sharply expanded the number of these programs in schools, causing worse overcrowding in more than 350 elementary schools.

[The five-year capital plan released in Nov. 2018 had no estimates for the need for new seats –the first capital plan since 2011 not to include this figure. We pointed out this and other problems with the five-year plan here. ]

Lisa Goren of Long Island City Coalition asks a question

Lisa Goren from the Long Island City Coalition asked about the large DOE-owned building on Vernon Boulevard that the Mayor had planned to give to Amazon for its headquarters – despite the fact that the community had been advocating for it to be converted into schools for more than a year.

Lorraine Grillo said that the building isn’t empty and is being used by DOE and SCA (for offices etc.) and therefore wasn’t on the list of the available properties; she implied it was up to the Mayor to decide on its ultimate disposition.

[Apparently there is also a municipal parking garage at Court Square that some LIC community members want to be converted into schools.]

Another reporter asked if there was a timeline by when they expected to finish analyzing the privately-owned sites to see if they were appropriate for schools; and the SCA said no, there was no specific timeline.

When will the report be released? July 31, as specified in the law. Will it be made available to the public? No, just to the City Council.

Will there be a second report? No. Will there be an ongoing process of consultation between city agencies to help the SCA find sites in the future? Yes, but nothing formal.

What should people do if they have questions about the report? After much hemming and hawing, Liz Hoffman said people could email her at EHoffman@fdm.nyc.gov

[The SCA is also open to hearing about possible sites; if you have suggestions, you can email them at Sites@nycsca.org or fill in the form here. More on what they’re looking for in terms of optimal specs here. ]

The City Limits article mentioned above quoted the DOE as follows: “A spokesman for the DOE told City Limits, “We are committed to continue partnering with parents and community on this issue, and are exploring how to best solicit input moving forward.”

I have no evidence that anyone from the task force “solicited input” from the public in any way, but instead kept community members and stakeholders in the dark. Yet it is my experience that the best ideas on how to improve our schools, including the chronic problem of overcrowding, often come from those on the ground and most affected by these issues.

It is regrettable that rather than welcome collaboration with parents and advocates, the city continues to restrict it. Several members of the Task Force told me that even they have not seen a copy of the report that is due to be released to the City Council tomorrow, with their names attached.

DOE and SCA going backwards not forwards in terms of rational school planning

Yesterday's City Council hearings on the capital plan reveals how the NYC remains stubbornly resistant when it comes to expeditious, transparent school planning. 

As explained in my testimony and the report we released yesterday on preK and school overcrowding, 50,000 seats of the 57,000 seats  in the new proposed five-year plan won’t be finished until 2024 or after, long after the Mayor has left office.

from the City Council briefing paper

The DOE disputed this finding to the Daily News: "City Education Department Doug Cohen said the new seats would be done sooner than Haimson projected, although he did not give a concerete time line for their completion."

Yet these figures were confirmed by the Independent Budget Office and the City Council - see the chart above - and neither Lorraine Grillo, President of the School Construction Authority nor Deputy Chancellor Karin Goldmark disputed them when they were asked about this undue delay by Education Chair Mark Treyger at the hearings.

Only 11,000 seats will have been built over the lifetime of the current five-year plan, with 23,000  folded over into the next plan.  Meanwhile our schools are becoming
more overcrowded due to pre-K expansion and rampant development. Already more than 575,000 students suffer in overcrowded schools.

When Council Members Dromm and Treyger asked School Construction Authority President Lorraine Grillo why thousands of seats are going to be unfunded in severely overcrowded districts like District 10 (-1,172), District 13 (-1,636),  District 15 (-3.023), District 20 (-2630) and District 24 (-3961), especially as compared to the last identified DOE needs assessment released in Nov. 2017, she couldn’t explain why. 

First she claimed she had been so successful siting schools in those districts that they didn’t really need many more seats, then she said it’s too hard to find good sites for schools in these areas, and then she said we just have to focus on creating seats in the rest of the city.

The DOE also basically eliminated the class size reduction section of the current plan that was funded at $490M but over five years went mostly unspent, revealing they never intend to lower class size in the first place. According to the Council briefing paper, “The Council was informed that as of Spring 2018 SCA hoped to identify additional projects but none were.  In addition there is no explanation as to how the projects identified will reduce class size.”

There is no identified needs assessment for new seats in the capital plan by the DOE/SCA for the first time since at least 2011.  While the Council has been begging for a more transparent and accurate needs assessment, the DOE decided to take that figure out of the plan altogether.  When asked why, Lorraine Grillo couldn’t explain why, and then said it was all up on the SCA website, [which is untrue.]

CM Dromm said he was very disturbed about the lack of identified needs assessment and the severe cuts to District 24.  CM Treyger said that he saw no reason that the timeline to build schools has to be so painfully slow and that the Amazon deal showed that the city could act faster to encourage economic development; also when it comes to creating new housing  in the various re-zonings happening throughout the city.

CM Brad Lander pointed out that the planning process is dysfunctional.  When a large-scale development is proposed and then approved, too often more schools may be promised on paper, but  aren’t really incorporated  into the overall plan and if and when they are built, this happens years later.  Often, this occurs long after the rest of the development is complete and when  school overcrowding is already at a crisis level and sites are hard to find.  Instead, schools should be included as part of the development’s planning, design and construction at the outset.  He said he hopes this will happen with the Gowanus rezoning happening in his district.

When he asked about the promised installation of air conditioning, and the fact that the DOE’s last progress report to the Council on this had contained inaccuracies, Deputy Chancellor Karin Goldmark insisted that teachers can teach and students can learn no matter how warm the room. (Lots of research shows this is just untrue.)

My testimony is here. When I spoke extemporaneously I said that all this new development could and should be used by the city officials as a way to help them get schools built quickly, yet they fail to take advantage of it. I despair that in the year 2025 when a new five-year plan is introduced, the same problems will be in evidence yet even more severe. There will be yet another Mayor who makes campaign promises to solve the problems of school overcrowding but when he is elected sells his soul to developers.

Hearings on NYC's dysfunctional school planning and siting process begins with DOE saying there is no negative impact of school overcrowding on students

Elizabeth Rose, Deputy Chancellor of NYC DOE and Lorraine Grillo, President, School Construction Authority

On Wednesday there were joint hearings at the City Council of the Education, Finance and Land Use committees on their comprehensive new report, Planning to Learn: The School Building Challenge, as well as five bills introduced to address the school overcrowding crisis which has led to more than 575,000 students crammed into overutilized schools according to the DOE's own data.  Here is the overcrowding by type of school, as included in the report -with elementary schools at 106% overutilizaiton, and the citywide average at 96%:

From Planning to Learn: The School Building Challenge

Deputy Chancellor Elizabeth Rose and School Construction Authority President Lorraine Grillo testified on behalf of the city.  Rose refused to admit that school overcrowding was a problem or disadvantaged students in any way, and claimed that "some of our more successful schools are overcrowded."

Rose remained obdurate on this point even in the face of repeated questioning from Council

Council Member Mark Treyger

Education Chair Mark Treyger, who pointed out that overcrowding leads to huge class sizes, loss of art and music rooms, and other evidence of a substandard education.  Using closets for intervention services  and increasing class size does have an impact on opportunities for kids, he pointed out. Moreover, educators aren’t robots and need working space too. But Rose refused to budge.

(One can only imagine the scandal that would ensue if a Department of Health Commissioner testified that hospital overcrowding, with patients receiving treatment in hallways or closets, had no effect on the quality of care provided.  Yet to my knowledge, no media outlet reported on Rose's claims.) 

Lorraine Grillo admitted that the SCA has only four real estate brokers on retainer in the entire city to help them find sites for schools, and yet claimed "we’ve had enormous success with our brokers" and didn't need any more help locating sites.  Yet Council Members Vanessa Gibson and Danny Dromm pointed out how it was they who had recently identified sites for new schools in the Bronx and in Queens and had forwarded them on to the SCA. In fact,  when asked, Grillo couldn't name one school site that had been located by their brokers.

As to the SCA's enrollment projections, Grillo repeatedly claimed that they were accurate within 1-2 percent citywide.  However, that claim cannot be verified since neither the DOE nor the SCA release these projections publicly, and even if true, it could still mean that from district to district, neighborhood to neighborhood the projections were completely off.  Finally, given how many schools are at or near 100% capacity, the difference of only a few students could bring many of them above the tipping point.

Dromm also pointed out that the majority of seats funded in current five year capital plan won’t be ready till after 2022- wouldn't it be better to do rolling ten year plan instead? By 2022, it is likely that school construction will have fallen even further behind the need.  Grillo said that "we're mandated only to do a five year plan", implying that they couldn't go beyond that.
 

Will you include preK seats in future seats projections? Dromm asked.  The SCA doesn't apparently include preK in its seats need projections, even though many thousands more preK students are now in our schools, contributing to even worse overcrowding. Grillo said no,  those figures come from a separate department at DOE.  (what?)

Council Member Danny Dromm

Dromm: There's a huge development planned for Willis Point with 5000 housing units; but only one elementary school planned for the area.  Why not include a middle and a high school in the project?  Grillo responded: Queens high schools are already  overcrowded (This of course doesn't explain why they won't site on there.) What about a middle school, asked Dromm? Grillo said she didn't know.  

The reality is that the school planning process uses a formula that is based on census figures twenty year old, and doesn't take into account either the increased numbers of preK students or charter school students in DOE buildings.

The planning process also requires very high thresholds of increased overcrowding to be predicted by this inadequate formula to consider building a new school, even in neighborhoods where the schools are already overcapacity.  (One of the bills we proposed in our testimony is that the City Planning be required to update the formula based upon the latest Census figures, to include preK students, and to eliminate all thresholds so that the city builds schools where the schools are already overcrowded or likely to become so when the project is built.)

CM Rafael Salamanca, head of the Land Use Committee, also asked a series of good questions:  Why does the SCA use housing data in its seat needs analyses that includes so few units  built between 2019-2024, despite the current construction boom?  Grillo didn't know what he meant.

See this chart, with data drawn directly from the current SCA website - which reveals that for the purpose of projecting enrollment, the city predicts that not a single housing unit will be built in the entire borough of Brooklyn between 2019-2024, and only 184 units in the Bronx -- both experiencing huge building booms:

Council Member Salamanca

Salamanca then asked, Why is there only one multiplier used per borough to project the need for schools, given how the birth rate and immigration differs widely from one neighborhood to the next?   Grillo responded, this is only one piece of puzzle.

Salamanca also questioned why there was no effort made by the City Planning to address these issues: City Planning comes to us and says, we want 4000 new units in my district, but they have NEVER mentioned the need to build any new schools for the new families living there.  Why?  In many districts school overcrowding has existed for decades; and as we expand preK and 3K, and available land gets scarce and the population grows, the challenges increase to provide enough schools.   We must revise our methodologies to ensure all students have the maximum chance of success.

But perhaps the biggest revelation came when Council Member Treyger asked representatives from City Planning and DCAS (Department of Citywide Administrative Services) to join the DOE and the SCA at the witness table.

He then questioned them if they regularly communicate with the DOE about the need for new schools.  While they didn't answer the question directly, it soon became clear that there was no ongoing collaboration between these city agencies on the issue of school overcrowding, and that they are only involved when it came to major rezonings (City Planning) or when identifying available city-owned or other buildings for expanded preK and 3K (DCAS).

After the questioning of government officials was over, I testified, followed by disability advocates who spoke on the need to retrofit schools for better access.  Then CM Treyger asked if we felt that there was any real coordination between city agencies on tackling school overcrowding.

I answered that there was no effective collaboration that I could see, and that city agencies responded

Leonie Haimson at NYC Council hearings

only to the Mayor's top priorities, which up to now have been expanding preK, implementing 3K and building more housing, all of which actually contribute to worse school overcrowding rather than counteract it. Meanwhile, the only schools that are built are those where there is a tremendous grassroots effort undertaken from parents and their elected officials to demand this.

An example of what it requires occurred in the hugely overcrowded community of Sunset Park last year.  There have been five additional schools for Sunset Park funded in the capital plan for over 20 years without a single one built or even sited, with the DOE claiming there was simply no room in the neighborhood for new schools.  Then last year, four sites were acquired by the SCA for schools but only as a result of a tremendous organizing effort of parents, community organizations, and CM Menchaca, who identified these sites and pressed for their acquisition.

Not every community can do this, of course, and with the capital plan for school construction only half funded, many children will be left out.  Without the active involvement of the Mayor to prioritize this issue, and without a substantial boost in spending in the capital plan, along with systemic reforms to the process of school planning and siting, the problem of school overcrowding will likely grow even more severe, and NYC children will suffer the consequences.

Our testimony is posted below and here; and includes suggestions for strengthening the five bills already introduced.  It also proposes four additional bills:

• A bill to to ensure that the CEQR formula used by City Planning is based upon the latest census data –  and that it includes enrollment projections for UPK and 3K students as well as charter schools already co-located in DOE buildings.

• A bill to reform the ULURP process, so that proposed residential projects in areas where the schools are already overcrowded or likely to become so would require the building or leasing of new schools to provide sufficient seats to keep the schools below 100% utilization.  Right now the thresholds are far too high, even in areas where the schools are already overcrowded.

• Any large-scale development project or rezoning should also be referred to the district Community Education Council for their comments. Often CECs are more aware of specific issues related to school capacity and overcrowding than local Community Boards. Like Community Boards, the CECs should hold public hearings and vote on whether to recommend approval, modification or rejection to the proposed project, based upon its likely impact on schools.

• DOE should be also obligated to report each year on how many schools seats have been added and lost, whether through lapsed leases, elimination of TCUs, annexes or for other reasons. Right now, they only report on the number of seats added rather than lost each year, which gives a highly inaccurate picture of the progress made towards alleviating school overcrowding.

The city's attempt to bury the news of its rejection of the Blue Book Working Group's recommendations on class size

Yesterday, in the middle of summer, the DOE finally released the recommendations of its own Blue Book working group, recommendations which had been finalized last December, according to several reliable sources.  (Chalkbeat wrongly reports the date as March.)  See also Schoolbook, WNYC radio and DNAinfo, for more information on the recommendations -- and what the city refused to accept.


The DOE not only delayed the release of these recommendations for over six months; they refrained from putting out a press release or posting them anywhere on their website, presumably because officials wanted to tamp down as much as possible on the news that the city had rejected the most critical proposal: that the space utilization formula should be aligned with smaller classes.

More specifically, the city signaled that it would not align the class sizes in the Blue Book with the goals in the DOE's original, state-mandated Contract for Excellence plan -- of 23 students per class in grades 4-8 and 25 in high school.  As Lisa Donlan was quoted in Schoolbook,

Certainly for me and for many of us, the class size issue was the biggest issue that we felt would have the greatest impact on bringing us to painting an accurate picture of reality and making sure that all kids got access to an adequate education — hands down," said Lisa Donlan, president of the Community Education Council for District 1 and a member of the working group.

Because the class size standards in the Blue Book (currently 28 students in grades 4-8 and 30 in high school) are larger than current averages, the failure to align the formula with smaller classes will likely stand in the way of efforts to reduce class size, and  contribute to even more overcrowding in the years ahead.

One of the members of the Working Group, Isaac Carmignani, explained the six month delay to  Chalkbeat this way: that the city didn't want the Group's recommendations or (presumably) their rejection to complicate their negotiations over the budget or mayoral control.

If so, this is yet more evidence that they are aware of the political volatility of this issue -- the number one priority of parents according to their own surveys --as well as their unaccountable refusal to take any real action to reduce class size, or even make an honest attempt to calculate which schools could and could not accommodate smaller classes.

While several news accounts correctly reported that this refusal appears to violate numerous promises made by Bill de Blasio during his campaign to reduce class size, and adhere to the original C4E plan approved by the state in 2007, they omitted the fact that he made even more specific pledges to align the Blue Book formula to smaller classes, according to his response to a KidsPAC survey, filled out by his campaign manager, Emma Wolfe, in July 2013:

Also glossed over in some of the news stories is how the city is shirking its constitutional and legal obligations to reduce class size.  In the CFE decision, as pointed out in our press release by Wendy Lecker, an attorney at the Education Law Center, the state's highest court said that NYC public school students were denied their constitutional right to an adequate education, in large part because of their excessive class sizes -- a denial in which this administration is now actively complicit.

The Working Group's letter, co-signed by Lorraine Grillo, President of the School Construction Authority and Shino Tanikawa, the President of CEC D2,  complete with its the recommendation on class size is posted on Chalkbeat.  Yet nowhere can I find online the email sent to reporters, containing the list of the specific proposals the DOE is going to accept, and those they are still considering. Few of those they are planning to adopt relate to actual changes to the Blue Book utilization formula.   So, for the record,  here they are: 

The DOE plans to adopt the following recommended changes to the Blue Book:

·         Publish capacity information for Public Assembly spaces (gymnasiums, cafeteria, etc.) in the PASS [the Principal's Annual Space Survey]

·         Include the total enrollment population of English Language Learners (ELL) in PASS

·         Include the total enrollment population of students with an Individualized Education Program (IEP) in PASS

·         Designate private counseling space for elementary and middle schools that currently do not account for private counseling space

·         Establish teacher workrooms at the middle school level to ensure teachers have an appropriate place for a prep period and encourage principals to allow available space to be used as teacher workrooms, subject to repurposing at the principal’s discretion

·         Include information on total enrollment, utilization, and capacity of school buildings within a particular grade level in a geographic district

·         Increase the minimum number of cluster rooms to two for elementary level schools with an enrollment at or below 250 students and conduct further analysis to determine a minimum for schools larger than 250 students

The DOE further agrees that the BBWG should continue to meet in order to monitor progress and make further recommendations as needed. The next Blue Book will be published later this summer or early fall.

The following recommendations require further study and analysis, which the DOE commits to undertake over the next year:

·         Change the formula for Special Education and English Language Learner space allocation based on the population of the targeted students

·         Require a minimum and maximum number of administrative spaces within a school.

·         Change the formula for specialty room allocations for grades 6-12 so there is a minimum of three for all schools

·         Transitioning the specialty room allocations for secondary level schools, grades 6-12 and 9-12, to a formula based model with minimum and maximum spaces allowed.