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.

Public School Parents and Community Activists Sue Bloomberg Administration Over Randall's Island Fields Controversy

Mayor Bloomberg has won accolades for his plan of sustainable growth, PlaNYC 2030, which he calls "our plan for a greener, greater New York". While his intents are laudable, his actual record on city parks has shown that some people get more green than others.

His plan for 171 acres on Randall's Island will double the number of playing fields. Unfortunately, he intends to grant exclusive access to 66% of these fields during after-school hours to an elite group of twenty private schools for the next twenty years. The Franchise and Concession Review Committee approved this controversial no-bid contract in February with the sole dissenting voice from Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer.

Last week, public school parents represented by the District 4 (East Harlem) PTA Presidents Council and the Citywide Council for High Schools, the elected and legally mandated representatives of high school parents, joined East Harlem community activists Marina Ortiz and Matthew Washington to sue the Bloomberg Administration.

The NY Times quoted Eugenia Simmons-Taylor, president of the Parent and Teacher Association of the Young Women's Leadership School:

“The Parks Department never met with the parent associations of District 4 in East Harlem to discuss their plans. Our PTA presidents voted unanimously to be part of this lawsuit because it’s wrong to deprive public school children of these fields, in their own district, for the next twenty years. Also, I faithfully follow the Chancellor’s regulations and Robert’s rules of order as a PTA president. The Parks Department should have to abide by the law, like everyone else.”

In response, the Bloomberg Administration claims the review process was adequate. The Times quotes Law Department spokesperson Connie Pankratz:

“A full and fair public hearing appropriately addressed citizens’ concerns prior to the approval. While we have not seen the lawsuit, we intend to vigorously defend the decision to approve the sports complex, as it was entirely lawful and in the city’s best interests.”

When was this hearing? Febuary 13th. When was the deal approved? February 14th. Not so much time to address "citizens concerns". Private school headmasters testified they had been working with the Parks Department for over a year. Some citizens apparently get more attention from the mayor than others.

The City Charter says concessions considered "major" need to go through an extensive land use process including review by the local community board, borough president and the New York City Council. To be considered "major" the contract must cover use of more than .7 acres. With this concession involving 171 acres, the mayor's attempt to avoid review by forcing the deal through various loopholes has been particularly brazen.

Public school parents and community activists are represented by Norman Siegel, the noted civil rights attorney and Alan Klinger of Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, LLP.

See additional news of the lawsuit in the NY Times here and Metro here . Our earlier post on the topic has more in-depth coverage here.

For the latest, including text of the legal documents, check East Harlem Preservation's website.

How education -- and schools -- always come last

Nothing reveals the flawed priorities of this administration more than the fact that almost twice as many new seats in sports stadiums will be created over the next five years as new seats in schools. See this chart – with 117,000 new seats projected for the new Yankees, Mets and Nets stadiums, with only 63,000 new seats in our schools.

Take the $360 million the city will give the Yankees in tax subsidies and exemptions for their new stadium – that amount alone could fund 8-10 new elementary schools or 8 new high schools with 5,000 new seats.

The plaintiffs in the CFE case determined that we needed at least 120,000 new seats to eliminate overcrowding and reduce class size in all grades – not even taking into account any population growth. This new capacity, along with libraries, science labs, and other needed improvements was the basis of the $9.2 billion that the state provided the city in capital funding.

Yet the administration plans to create only 63,000 seats. In fact, since they received all this new funding from the state, they cut back the capital plan by 3,000 seats.

Meanwhile, new development is springing up all over the city, and will likely cause even more overcrowding in our schools.

Recently, the Mayor assembled a sustainability task force to come up with proposals on how to serve a population that is expected to grow by a million residents by 2030, to deal with the increased pressure on housing, energy, sewage, transportation, parks, playgrounds, and other infrastructure.Yet this task force was explicitly instructed to leave schools out of their considerations. See the report of PLANYC 2030 here.

To add insult to injury, the only mention of schools in the 160 pg. report, aside from opening up school playgrounds for more hours, is to use school buildings for more housing!

The report uses as a model PS 109 in East Harlem, and how the school is going to be converted to artist housing: “By working with HPD and the Department of Cultural Affairs to open new affordable spaces for artists, we can not only preserve our physical city but also its essential creative spirit.“

The authors go on to describe the battle of community activists residents who fought for the school building to be preserved – without mentioning that what they really wanted was for PS 109 to be a school again!

This is the mentality we are fighting in this city. While all of our elected officials, including our Mayor, always proclaim education comes first, it really comes last – that is, if it ever enters their minds at all.

The problem is put in further relief by the fact that the DOE is now obligated by state law to submit a five year plan to reduce class sizes in all grades by July 1 – and the regulations specifically require that the city's capital plan be aligned with this proposal.

And this is why we must ask our elected officials to require that schools be incorporated in all large scale residential and commercial developments – and not just small schools with 500 seats, when the need is more than 1,000 new seats, as generated by the Atlantic yards project. And why we need a better capital plan -- one that provides at least twice as many seats as the one currently proposed by DOE.