My comments at the School Construction Board meeting and how you can help

 

UPDATE:  I followed up with a letter to the SCA board and President, making the same points as below.  On March 25, the General Counsel replied with this letter.. On April 8, two weeks after the board meeting, the SCA  announced they had finally appointed a third member to the board, Liz Bergin, former VP of SCA Capital Plan Management, meaning that the board had been without its legally required membership for 18 months. NYC Education Chair Rita Joseph had also written them a letter asking them about this.  

March 22, 2025

On Thursday morning, I spoke at the School Construction Authority board meeting, down in the bowels of Tweed, explaining how they have failed to fulfill their legal and ethical obligations to provide schools with the space necessary to comply with the class size law, and the requirements of the Public Authorities Law.

Seven people sat around a table, only two of them SCA board members, going over multi-million dollar contracts and appointments.  

After I spoke, Deputy Chancellor Dan Weisberg responded dismissively to my comments, while the other board member, Peter McCree, said nothing. Though the law requires three members at all times there have only been two since August 2023, when Lorraine Grillo resigned, as the NY Post reported back in September. [More on this here.] Nor did the President of the SCA, Nina Kubota say anything in response.   My comments in full are below. I sent them a copy of my comments afterwards but have so far received no reply.

On Wednesday night, the Panel for Educational Policy is scheduled to vote on the five-year capital plan, which funds less than half the 70,000 seats which the SCA says are necessary for schools to be able to comply with class size law. Moreover, fewer than half of those seats funded are even specified as to district, subdistrict or grade level, which violates at least two laws requiring SCA transparency. Finally, the SCA board itself has failed to adhere to basic governance requirements, established in the NY Public Authorities Law.

I urge you to send this message to the Panel members before the vote – deadline Tuesday night March 25, 2025. First, you can check if your child attends one of the 500 schools that do not have space for smaller classes, according to the DOE’s own estimates. Then send them the email; and put the name of your school into the subject line and edit it any way you like. Instructions and a template are posted here. Please copy me at info@classsizematters.org

More on what the DOE and SCA should be doing but are not to make space for smaller classes was detailed in our NYC Council budget testimony on March 13.

thanks Leonie

Comments at the School Construction Authority Board meeting 3/20/25

Hi, my name is Leonie Haimson and I am the executive director of Class Size Matters.

While Cora Liu of the SCA testified  at the preliminary budget hearing last week that 70,000 more school seats would be needed to comply with the class size law, passed by the State Legislature in June of 2022, there are only about 33,000 seats funded in the five-year capital plan, and fewer than 20,000 are expected to be completed by September 2028,  the deadline in law. 

According to the DOE, there are nearly 500 schools without the space currently lower class sizes to the mandated levels that enroll nearly half of all students, but no apparent plan on how they will be provided with the space to comply.

·       Moreover, nearly half of all the new seats that are funded in the five-year plan are still unspecified as to district, subdistrict or grade level.  Under no previous administration has the SCA capital plan refused to specify where schools by district and grade level. Not only is this lack of transparency unfortunate, given the need to accelerate school construction to meet the timeline in the class size law, but it also appears to violate two laws.

·       First, the state class size law itself requires DOE to submit an “annual capital plan for school construction and leasing to show how many classrooms will be added in each year and in which schools and districts to achieve the class size targets.”

·       Second, the lack of transparency also violates Local Law 167, passed by the Council in 2018, requiring the SCA to explain where seats are needed by district, subdistrict and grade level, as well as the demographic data and methodology used to make these projections.  Yet Instead of becoming more transparent after this law was passed, the capital plan became even more opaque.

·       We also have ongoing concerns with the School Construction Authority’s lax governance. As reported in the NY Post in September, the SCA Board has been comprised of only two members since August 2023, though three members are required at all times by the state law that established the SCA in 1998: “The authority shall be governed by and its powers shall be exercised by a board of trustees consisting of three members….Each appointed member shall continue in office until a successor has been appointed and qualifies.”  

·       According to the latest annual report of the NYState Authorities Budget Office, the SCA Board also lacks a Governance Committee, a Finance Committee, as well as official policies for salary and compensation, time and attendance. Nor does it have a Whistleblower Protection policy. According to this NYS Authorities Budget Office, all of these are required by the NYS Public Authorities Law.

We urge you to reform the Board’s structure  and policies according to the requirements in the law, and to revamp the capital plan, so that it clearly shows where and when school seats will be created to allow the city to meet the Sept. 2028 deadline in the class size  law.

Thank you for listening;  I will email you a copy of these comments and hope for a point by point response.

Revelation that NYC's School Construction Authority has been operating without a legally constituted board for a full year & Why it Matters

Sept. 3, 2024

In Saturday's NY Post, it was reported how the School Construction Authority, which has jurisdiction over NYC's $19 billion dollar capital plan, has been operating for a full year without a legally constituted board.  Over that period, the board has approved not only the capital plan, but also hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to consultants and builders, passed resolutions including the move of the agency's headquarters and the hiring of 31 new civil service employees.

The enabling state act which created the SCA says this:

The authority shall be governed by and its powers shall be exercised by a board of trustees consisting of three members. The members shall be the chancellor, or acting chancellor if the position of chancellor is vacant, and two other members, to be appointed by the mayor. The chancellor or acting chancellor shall serve as the chairperson of the board of trustees. ...Each appointed member shall continue in office until a successor has been appointed and qualifies.

And yet there have only been two members of the SCA board since August 2023, when Lorraine Grillo resigned:  the Chancellor and Peter McCree, who according to LinkedIn is president of a company called Link2Consult Inc.

The Agency itself seems so oblivious of the necessity of having three members that it actually posted this organizational chart on its website last April:

Highlighted above is also the name of the Inspector General, William Schaeffer, who is supposed to ensure that the SCA operates legally.  Yet Schaeffer is quoted in the NY Post article this way: "We need to appoint a third trustee, not because we’re violating the law, but because that’s what the statute requires.” What?

 

To make things worse, Schaeffer is not only the IG but also the Vice President of the SCA and his salary is paid by the SCA, rather than by the Department of Investigation, unlike the IG of every other city agency.  In addition, his situation is unique in that he was jointly appointed by both the SCA President and the DOI Commissioner.  These findings raise real concerns about his potential conflicts of interest, leading to a lack of sufficient oversight and real independence. 

 

If one reads the Board minutes from the past year, there is no mention of the class size law, no mention of how the $2 billion cut to new capacity imposed by the Mayor would affect their ability to build enough classrooms to comply, and no mention of the state budget passed in April 2024 that required them to add another $2 billion for new construction to create the space for smaller classes.  In fact there is little discussion of any of the relevant issues confronting the DOE and SCA except for much self-congratulatory chatter about how they have awarded more MWBE contracts.

Nor is there any discussion of how the contract with Local 1740, the union of School Architects, Engineers and Technical Professionals, expired three years ago, and negotiations have stalled, except for brief comment by Deputy Chancellor Weisberg following a statement from a union leader during the public comment section of their March board meeting, in which she expressed her hope for a swift resolution. 

 

As it is, the SCA operates with little transparency and accountability, as we have pointed out many times including in the NYP article.  By refusing to publicly report in which districts they need and intend to build more school seats in the capital plan, and by saying this will not be revealed until the sites have already been acquired and projects are in design, SCA officials appear to be violating their own enabling legislation, as well as Education Law §2590-o, the class size law, and Local Law 167.

 

 

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.

Send a letter to the Mayor & Chancellor to end school overcrowding now!

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 449-A: requires the School Construction Authority to publish subdistrict maps online.

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.