New report finds pre-K expansion has led to worse overcrowding in hundreds of NYC public schools

The expansion of Pre-K led to worse overcrowding at 352 elementary schools, with about 236,000 students. At 76 schools it pushed the school to 100% utilization or more. The expansion of 3-K will likely make the overcrowding even worse. Daily News coverage here; full report here.  Press release below.  Moreover, of the 57,000 school seats in the new proposed five-year capital plan for 2020-2024, 50,000 seats will not be built until 2024 or later -- long after the Mayor has left office.

For immediate release: December 18, 2018

More information: leoniehaimson@gmail.com; 917-435-9329

New report finds pre-K expansion has led to worse overcrowding in hundreds of NYC public schools

School overcrowding in NYC has been worsened by the expansion of pre-K and 3-K classes, as detailed in a new report, “The Impact of PreK on School Overcrowding: Lack of Planning, Lack of Space.”

About 575,000 students, more than half of all students, attended schools that were at or above 100 percent capacity in 2016-2017, according to data from the NYC Department of Education.  In recent years, overcrowding has worsened significantly, especially at the elementary school level. Nearly 60 percent of elementary schools are at 100 percent or more and 67 percent of elementary grade students attend these schools. This is due in part to the fact that enrollment in these grades has increased faster than new school construction.

The report’s analysis finds that 14,220, or more than half of the pre-K students enrolled in public elementary schools in 2016-2017, were placed in 352 schools that were at 100% utilization or more, thus contributing to worse overcrowding at these schools for about 236,000 students.

In about one quarter (22 percent) of these schools, the expansion of pre-K actually pushed the school to 100 percent or more.  As of 2016-2017, 76 elementary schools, with a total of 45,124 students, became overutilized, according to the DOE’s data, because of the additional number of pre-K students at their schools.

In addition, thirty schools with pre-K classes had waitlists for Kindergarten, necessitating that these children to be sent to schools outside their zone and sometimes far from home.  

District 20 in southwestern Brooklyn is the most overcrowded district in New York City with a critical shortage of elementary school seats.  The average utilization of elementary schools is 130 percent.  Yet the DOE continued to place pre-K classes in already overcrowded District 20 schools, despite the presence of an under-enrolled pre-K center nearby.

Laurie Windsor, the former President of the Community Education Council in District 20 said: “It is appalling how the DOE insists on keeping pre-K classes in elementary schools when there is such severe overcrowding and families are forced to travel for Kindergarten, sometimes quite far away, without available public transportation. Especially egregious is that there are pre-K centers nearby which could absorb these classes easily. This practice has put unnecessary hardships on families and is insensitive to the needs of the community.”

The DOE began to implement 3-K in 18 schools in two districts last year, and three of these schools were already overcrowded in the prior year. Additionally, of the 61 additional schools which added 3-K during the current school year, more than one fourth were already overcrowded. Several of these were also Renewal schools, meaning they were struggling with low performance and in danger of being closed. 

The new five-year capital plan will not sufficiently address the worsening overcrowding. Although the Department of Education claims that new plan includes “funding for 57,000 seats over the next five years,” 50,000 of these seats won’t be completed until 2024 or later, when the Mayor has long left office.

To make things worse, the NYC Department of Education has failed for many years to update its methodology to project the need for new school capacity.  The formula used for estimating enrollment, called the Projected Public School Ratio, has been based on census data over twenty years old. and has not accounted for the expansion of thousands of new pre-K students placed in the schools. Though the formula was updated this fall, it remains uncertain whether it fully accounts for additional pre-K students and it does not anticipate the mayor’s plan to expand 3K.

Cramming more pre-K students into public schools worsens school overcrowding, which in turn can contribute to larger classes, and/or sacrifice the space necessary for a well-rounded curriculum.  If this occurs, then the educational benefits of the program will be undermined.

A recent large-scale experimental study in Tennessee found that pre-K was no silver bullet, and failed to produce gains in achievement. The chief investigators of the study emphasized that the lack of positive results underscored how the quality of the entire early childhood educational experience through 3^rd grade must be addressed if improvements in student learning are to be achieved.

Leonie Haimson, Executive Director of Class Size Matters, said: “The DOE must stop its practice of making overcrowding worse in our already overutilized elementary schools by jamming more pre-K and 3-K classes in these schools, or else the education of students in other grades will be seriously impaired and the eventual benefits of expanded pre-K undermined.” 

She added: “The Mayor needs to increase the number of seats in the capital plan and build them in a more efficient, accelerated manner, or else his legacy will be seriously marred by even more extreme overcrowding and educational neglect.”

The report, “The Impact of PreK on School Overcrowding in NYC: Lack of Planning, Lack of Space” is at: https://www.classsizematters.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/PreK-report-12.17.18-final-final.pdf

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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.

Capital plan comments; $14.9 billion Capital Plan and Contracts amounting to millions approved by PEP without discussion or debate

The below comments expressing our concerns with the five year capital plan were sent to the members of the Panel for Educational Policy on May 17.  A good article about some of the flaws in the Plan and the entire school planning process was published by DNA Info here.

Sabina Omerhodzic of CEC 30 also attended the hearing at the May 18 PEP meeting at Long Island City HS, and made an eloquent speech about the inadequacy of the capital plan.  Nevertheless, the $14.9 billion five-year plan was unanimously approved by the Panel members, without a single question or comment.

The same was true of the proposed contracts, about which Patrick Sullivan and I submitted many questions and serious concerns  on behalf of the Citizens Contract Oversight Committee, well before the hearing.  Every contract on the list, totaling millions of dollars,  was unanimously approved without any discussion or debate.

Comments on March 2016 Capital Plan by Leonie Haimson

Send a message about school overcrowding and the $5 billion cut from the school capital plan!

In the press of other news, like rampant budget cuts, school closings, rising class sizes, and harmful co-locations, we have failed to focus on one of the most important issues that will determine the quality of education in NYC schools for years to come: the five year capital plan.

On Wednesday, the Panel for Educational Policy will vote on this plan, which compared to DOE’s previous proposal issued in November, cuts the funding for new capacity over five years by almost $6 billion.

Spending is slashed for new seats from $8.8 billion to $2.9 billion, and the number of new seats is cut by 30,000, or 67% . At the same time the DOE wants to spend $1 billion on new technology, including $542 million next year alone – so that they can the spread of online learning to 300-400 schools over the next few years.

This an extraordinarily large amount to be spending in any one year, especially given the city’s (and the DOE’s) dreadful record with technology projects.

It is also more than twice as much as the $259 million that the DOE plans to spend on building new schools next year. If this plan is approved, there will be very few new seats over the next few years, with only 609 new seats projected for Sept. 2013—the smallest increase in more than ten years, just as our school-age population is rapidly expanding.

This is a recipe for disaster.

The November DOE proposal, which called for 50,000 new seats, was the first under this administration to admit the reality of increased enrollment citywide, resulting in widespread wait lists for Kindergarten and class sizes growing at an unprecedented rates. Though we have been warning of increasing enrollment for several years, the DOE’s official projections wrongly claimed that this would not occur until 2016 at the earliest, although it already started in most districts three years ago, and occurred citywide in 2009.

At the same time, the DOE plans to accelerate online learning, called the Izone, expanding it to 300-400 schools over the next few years, without any independent evaluation of the pilot program that currently exists.

As a recent report warned, the rapid spread of this sort of experimental, expensive program is happening nowhere else in the country:

“NYC school district leaders are taking risks with the iZone, implementing new models, committing deeply to a defined set of principles that challenge core assumptions about what a school should look like, and moving to scale very quickly. How and when they will know if they got the big bet right is a question district leaders will have to ask so that students are not subjected for too long to programs and schools that don’t work. … At some point, the district may get pushback from parents about the idea of having their children participate in unproven programs and may need to consider catch-up academic plans if certain programs are not effective.”

In truth, this plan represents a large scale experiment on our children, with no research to back it up. Already, hundreds of schools have found that the $80 million ARIS was a costly mistake, and are using a far more inexpensive and useful model called Datacation developed by a science teacher in the Bronx, as NY1 has reported.

But the half billion dollars that the DOE plans to spend next year on expanding the Izone will make the $80 million ARIS looks like chickenfeed.

For more on the radical cuts in new seats and the concomitant increase in spending on technology, see my comments on the capital plan in Gotham Gazette.

Click on the chart to the right for the number of seats that will be cut in every borough and in most districts, ranging from 39% in Manhattan, 54% in Queens, 60% in Staten Island, 72% in Brooklyn, to 78% in the Bronx, compared to the November plan.

Five districts will have all their new seats cut – including D3, D8, D14, D26 and D29. [CORRECTION: D3 does not have its 480 seats cut; I have corrected the chart to the right.]

Because the DOE has never published a needs assessment for any district, we cannot know if these cuts are fairly apportioned; all we know is that is this plan is approved, children in these communities will be sitting in overcrowded schools for years to come.

The mayor blames the Governor for proposing a cap on capital reimbursement; and it is true that Cuomo is partly responsible. But the mayor and the DOE are ultimately accountable, because of their refusal at any time during their administration to provide accurate utilization (Blue book) figures, reliable enrollment projections, or a transparent needs assessment of how many seats are actually required to eliminate overcrowding.

Instead, they have consistently hidden the truth and minimized the problem, and continued to pursue damaging policies that have made overcrowding worse, such as charter school co-locations.

To add insult to injury, at the same time the DOE plans to rapidly spread risky virtual learning to hundreds of schools over the next three years, they are refusing to replace the leaky PCB-lights in our schools in anything less than ten years, risking our children’s health and safety.

Please send the mayor, the chancellor, the PEP members and the borough presidents a message now, on the need to expand new seats in the capital plan and freeze spending on technology!

A sample email is below, along with relevant contact information, and room to plug in your own borough and/or district cuts, if you like. But PLEASE do it today. Then come Wednesday to Brooklyn Tech PEP meeting and make your voices heard.

SAMPLE EMAIL:

To the Mayor, Chancellor Black and members of the PEP:

mbloomberg@cityhall.nyc.gov; Cpblack@schools.nyc.gov; patk.j.sullivan@gmail.com; sipeprep@aol.com; majorm766@gmail.com; okotieuro@yahoo.com; pepofqueens@yahoo.com; llbryant@inwoodhouse.com; robert.reffkin@gs.com; tomas.morales@csi.cuny.edu; FFoster@schools.nyc.gov; jchan@dbpartnership.org; gittepeng@yahoo.com; lnieves@yearup.org; thernandez@samvill.org;

CC: BPs and education staff:

bp@manhattanbp.org; emcgill@manhattanbp.org; askmarty@brooklynbp.nyc.gov; cscissura@brooklynbp.nyc.gov; margkelley@aol.com; info@queensbp.org; rdarche@queensbp.org; webmail@bronxbp.nyc.gov; jmojica@bronxbp.nyc.gov; dmarciuliano@statenislandusa.com

Dear Mayor Bloomberg, Chancellor Black and members of the PEP:

The proposed five-year DOE capital plan will cut $5 billion from new capacity, and nearly 30,000 new seats from the version of the plan just released in November. Given existing overcrowding, the rapid increases in enrollment and class size throughout the city, as well as Kindergarten wait lists at many schools, these cuts are simply unacceptable. [My borough of X will be cut by y seats; and my district by Z seats].

At the same time, the DOE is proposing to spend nearly a billion dollars to expand virtual learning to hundreds of new schools, with more than half a billion dollars to be spent on technology next year alone. This is a recipe for disaster, given the city’s record in overspending and waste on technology projects, as well as the fact that the Izone is a risky experiment without any independent research to back it up.

Though the Mayor and DOE blame the Governor for capping the reimbursement for school construction, they are ultimately responsible for this fiasco, for refusing to report accurate overcrowding figures, reliable enrollment projections and/or a realistic, transparent needs assessment of new capacity for our schools at any time during this administration.

As a parent, I ask that you to reject this inadequate plan, which disregards the rights of our children to be provided with a quality education in uncrowded schools with reasonable class sizes. You should also immediately freeze the billion dollars to be spent on technology until an independent analysis of the Izone pilot can be released to the public, and parents and experts can thoughtfully evaluate its results.

Otherwise, you will be risking a huge waste of money on a large-scale experiment on our children, without our consent.

I also urge you to restore the full amount ($5 billion) to school construction and new capacity, and to eliminate all PCB-laden lights from schools over a much more rapid time frame than ten years. If you really care about NYC children, you will agree. In exchange, I promise to work with you to persuade the Governor and the Legislature to raise the cap on school construction.

Thanks,

[Name, school, district]

Darkness at Five

The evening grew lonely as twilight descended over City Hall and lone Council Members Robert Jackson, chair of the Education Committee, and Lewis Fidler heard out the public comment section of the Council’s hearings on the DOE’s proposed five-year capital plan. Councilmember Gale Brewer had weathered a few rounds of public comment, but the other members had all vanished, along with reps from the DOE and SCA, the moment the official testimony was over. The following estimable witnesses played to a nearly empty house: UFT President Randi Weingarten; a representative of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity; Dan Golub, Senior Policy Advisor to Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer; Class Size Matters Executive Director Leonie Haimson; liaisons for Representative Carol Maloney and Assemblymember Deborah Glick; a number of ardent and articulate students from Bushwick and Highbridge; parent representatives from notably overcrowded neighborhoods; and a teacher. I guess DOE/SCA and City Council Members must have such good information that they do not need to hear from these persons—though the substance of the testimony suggests otherwise. Readers are encouraged to put down their eggnogs long enough to go to their local CEC meetings on the capital plan and shout loud and clear, because word has it that responses coming in after January 9 will not be taken into consideration, so whatever influence there is to be had over this ominous process had best be had now.

(The thoughtful reader may protest that it is difficult to respond to the capital plan without 2007-2008 utlization figures, which are not yet available. To this we can offer no consolation.)

Read testimony of Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, Assemblymember Deborah Glick, UFT President Randi Weingarten, Doug Israel, Center for Arts Education,
Class Size Matters Executive Director Leonie Haimson, this reporter

The city's capital plan for schools -- breathtakingly awful!

The new proposed 5-yr. capital plan for schools is posted here. This administration has once again surpassed any reasonable person's expectations in terms of the meagerness of their response to the ongoing crisis of overcrowding in our schools. City officials clearly do not care enough about providing our students with a decent education, from the evidence provided in this plan.

Only a measly 25,000 new seats are offered – over five years -- with 8,000 of those seats rolled over from the previous plan, when we know according to their own current data, we need at least 165,000 -- at least five times as many.

This needs assessment provided in our report, A Better Capital Plan, based on the figures in the DOE’s own Blue Book – adjusted to estimate the number of seats needed to eliminate existing overcrowding and lower class size to the goals in the city’s class size reduction plan.

At least 40% of students are in overcrowded schools according to their own statistics – and about 70% are in schools where the class sizes are larger their stated four year goals.

Compare the meager 25,000 seats to the 66,000 new seats in their last plan – which still was inadequate to meet the need. Despite the fact that at yesterday’s press conference, the Mayor acknowledged that “"We don't have enough classroom space for the number of students we have” and even, that it was likely to get worse as new families moved to NYC – the plan is astonishingly bad.

If you count the seats rolled over from the last plan, this means the city proposes creating only 17,000 new seats, compared to 66,000 when the last plan was introduced; only about one fourth as large.

Even the last plan was insufficient to meet any of its stated goals: to provide enough new seats to alleviate overcrowding, eliminate trailers and other temporary spaces, and reduce class size in all schools to 20 or less in grades K-3.

The above figure of more than 160,000 new seats does not even count the many areas of the city which are experiencing rapid growth, and where schools are already becoming even more overcrowded– without any attempt to create new space in schools --nor does it address the way in which the current utilization figures understate the actual level of overcrowding at many schools.

According to a survey, half of all NYC principals say that the DOE's utilization figures at their schools understates the actual level of overcrowding at their schools; 51% say that overcrowding sometimes led to unsafe conditions for students or staff; more than one fourth (26%) of all middle and high school principals said that overcrowding made it difficult for their students to receive the credits and/or courses needed to graduate on time, and 86% of all NYC principals said that they were unable to provide a quality education because of excessive class sizes.

The administration does not seem to be ready to honestly address the issue of overcrowding, no less provide our children with a decent education. The proposed new capital plan undercounts the need for new seats in elementary and middle schools in Manhattan by nearly 5,000, in the Bronx by more than 16,000; in Brooklyn by more than 13,000; in Queens by more than 15,000; and in Staten Island by more than 4,000 seats.

For high schools, the undersupply of new seats is even more shocking: though there is a need for at least 90,000 new HS seats, the plan would provide only about 2,600 IS/HS seats. Not a single new high school is proposed for Manhattan or Staten Island, even though there is a need for 12,000 new high school seats to eliminate overcrowding and reduce class size in Manhattan, more than 4,000 in Staten Island.

In the Bronx, not a single new HS seat is proposed, even though, there should be more than 16,000. In Brooklyn, there are only 1200 IS/HS seats proposed in the plan, while more than 27,000 HS seats are needed, and in Queens, while nearly 30,000 new HS seats needed, only one IS/HS is proposed – with only 4,679 seats.

Nowhere in the plan is it laid out what the actual need is to address overcrowding, reduce class size, and be ready for the enrollment growth that it already started to be experienced by neighborhoods all over the city – and that is likely to continue, as the population grows by a million over the next twenty years.

Compare the total amount spent on new capacity in Manhattan and the Bronx of $660 million – which is considerably less than the $800 million proposed for more technology.

To add insult to injury, the city expects the state to finance half of this plan up front and is planning to spend only $2.8 billion on new capacity over the next five years. With half of this paid for by the state, this means the city would be spending only $1.4 billion on school construction. Amortized over 30 years, this amounts to only $152 million a year, with half of that paid by the state – according to the state reimbursement formula.

Which means the city would only be paying out about $75 million annually for all new capacity. Compare that to the $302 million we are paying this year for charter school tuition; or the $423 million DOE projects for charter school payments for FY 2010.

The city has been devoting a rapidly shrinking share of its capital funding to schools over the last four years, as our report points out, and this trend would mean that this share would drop much lower still.

Here are some news clips: With Budget Shrinking, Schools Will Get Fewer New Buildings (NY Times); Ed Dept. plans 50% slash in new seats for students (Daily News); SCHOOL BUILDING IN DETENTION (NY Post); Less money for new schools in capital plan released today (Gotham Schools).