Crisis in school overcrowding; likely to be even worse in future if proposed capital plan adopted

For immediate release:                                     

June 5, 2014 

For more information: 

Leonie Haimson, leonie@classsizematters.org; 917-435-9329

Nearly half a million NYC students are crammed into severely overcrowded buildings; if capital plan adopted, crisis will be even worse five years from now

Today, Class Size Matters released a comprehensive report on school overcrowding.  Among the findings:  More schools are now overcrowded than in 2006, with 488,438 students enrolled in school buildings at or above 100% target utilization, according to NYC Department of Education figures for 2012-13.  

The situation is especially dire in elementary schools, where according to the DOE Blue Book, 57 percent of students are in over-utilized buildings.  The average utilization rate of elementary schools is 97.4 percent and the median rate is an astonishing 102 percent.   The report is posted here: http://tinyurl.com/m632rg6

 

 At the same time the administration and most experts agree that the Blue Book formula actually underestimates the actual level of overcrowding in our schools, and a taskforce has been appointed to revamp it.

While there are only at most 38,654 seats in the capital plan, the real need is at least 100,000 seats, since enrollment is projected to increase by 60-70,000 students over the next ten years, and 30,000 seats are needed just to alleviate overcrowding in districts that currently average over 100 percent utilization. The estimate of 100,000 seats does not count the need to expand preK, reduce class size, address neighborhood overcrowding, or eliminate trailers.

Moreover, though the DOE officials have reported that “only” 7158 students are currently housed in trailers, the real figure is likely more than 10,000 students, since they do not count thousands of students housed in TCUs at 47 elementary, middle, and high schools, and District 75 programs.

Finally, even as the proposed capital plan allocates nearly half a billion dollars to remove the trailers, it has not allocated a single cent to replace their seats.  For example, there are 70 TCUs in four districts where not a single new school seat is supposed to be built.

According to attorney Michael A. Rebell, co-counsel in CFE vs. State of New York, “This report provides important data that indicates substantial and continuing violations of children's constitutional rights as articulated by the state's highest court in the CFE litigation."

“This reports reveals just how shockingly overcrowded our public schools are,” said City Council Education Committee Chairperson Daniel Dromm. “Nearly half (48%) of students citywide are in school buildings at or above 100% utilization, according to the latest DOE data from the 2012-13 school year. While the Department of Education (DOE) has allocated over $500 million to remove trailers, they have not been clear about where they will place these students when the trailers are removed. I call on the DOE to craft a real plan to build or lease more schools to address the issue of overcrowding and to reduce class size.”

Said Wendy Lecker, CFE Project Attorney with the Education Law Center, “Overcrowding plays a major role in depriving New York City public school children of basic educational resources, such as reasonable class size, services for at-risk children, libraries, science labs, art, music and more.   This informative report represents an important step in addressing the critical need for adequate space in New York City public schools."

“There is a huge space squeeze in our schools.  Hundreds of thousands of children are sitting in overcrowded classrooms, without art rooms, science rooms or dedicated spaces for their mandated services.  Thousands more students are sitting in trailers or on waiting lists for Kindergarten.  Yet if this plan is adopted, students are likely to be crammed into even more overcrowded schools and classrooms five years from now – despite the promises of the Mayor to reduce class size and improve the quality of education.  NYC children deserve a real plan to improve these shameful conditions, and for this to happen, DOE must stop fudging the numbers,” said Leonie Haimson, Executive Director of Class Size Matters.

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Town Hall Tonight: New Tactics to Address Overcrowding in Greenwich Village

In 2008, as a wave of young children struck New York City and, apparently unpredicted by the DOE, swamped public elementary schools in Greenwich Village, a forward-thinking pair of Community Board politicians named Brad Hoylman and Keen Berger teamed up with local parents to hold a hearing to gauge community concern about overcrowding. On a rainy night in February, the auditorium of PS 3 was flooded with angry and worried parents. In the aftermath of this meeting, the Rudin organization, which was seeking zoning variances to build hundreds of luxury condos on the site of St. Vincent's Hospital, helped to broker a deal with the SCA to obtain the Foundling Hospital as a future elementary school. Three years later, with Foundling is still far from opening, Village schools more crowded than ever (with record class sizes and kids forced out of their zone for kindergarten), and St. Vincent's disastrously bankrupt and shuttered, the Rudins still seek zoning variances to double the space of allowed construction, even though there is now no hospital-rescue justifying their giant incursion on Village space.

50 years nearly to the day after the publication of Jane Jacobs's epochal Death and Life of Great Cities, inspired by Village fights against gargantuan development, another group of Village residents has banded together to defend the values of neighborhood, and this time they have included school space in their vision. The so-called Live and Learn Coalition is demanding that the Rudin proposal be amended to (1) reduce height and bulk of construction, (2) provide affordable housing, (3) ensure public park space, and (4) contribute substantially to the acquisition of state-owned property at 75 Morton Street for public school space.

This movement is significant not only for the desperately needed seats it may provide, but also for the example it offers of parents working with other community advocates on behalf of schools and including schools as part of a greater vision of neighborhood well being. Live & Learn members enthusiastically invite people to attend their Town Hall tonight (PS 41, 116 West 11th Street, between 6th and 7th, 6:30 PM), sign their petition, add other neighborhood groups to their coalition, and duplicate their efforts in land-use negotiations throughout the city.

What the real choices are for Cathie Black and NYC kids

With all the furor over Cathie Black's comments about “birth control” and “many Sophie’s choices” in relation to school overcrowding, I hope the larger issues are not ignored.

There is a huge school-age population explosion in downtown Manhattan, not because people are reproducing like rabbits, but because of the rampant development that Mayor Bloomberg and other city officials have encouraged.

(For information about the downtown population explosion, see this presentation, Why downtown's kids need to keep Tweed, by Eric Greenleaf, NYU professor and public school parent; it was in response to Eric's projections, which have been right on the mark that Cathie Black made her joke about birth control.)

The DOE has failed to build enough schools to accommodate these kids, as well as throughout the city, and has repeatedly underestimated the need for new seats. Yet instead of saving critical space within its headquarters for downtown Kindergarten students, the Department of Education has decided to donate space in Tweed to a charter school for middle school students, run by a for-profit company headquartered in Sweden.

This is no "Sophie's choice," but a deliberate decision to benefit a charter school over neighborhood children. The charter operation is run by Kunskapsskolan, or KED, which had revenue of more than $37 million in the third quarter of 2010, and could afford to build its own school, or lease space elsewhere. But instead, KED is not only getting free space, they are being given it right inside the DOE's headquarters, which represents tremendous advertising and promotional value to the company. (For some of the reasons this charter school should never have been authorized by SUNY in the first place, see our comments to the SUNY Charter Institute.)

So why would DOE prefer to give space to a Swedish charter school, rather than provide for the needs of the downtown community, and the wishes of their powerful Assemblymember, Speaker Shelly Silver? Because KED is an online charter school, and right now, DOE officials are hugely enamored with the potential of virtual instruction.

Here is how one of KED’s Swedish schools was described in the British paper, the Telegraph:

It’s 10 o’clock at Kunskapsskolan Nacka, a Swedish school for 12 to 16 year-olds, and no one seems to be working. One pupil plays Nirvana on a guitar. A second walks about barefoot eating an apple. Two more sit on desks, chatting. Suddenly the head enters. One might expect rebukes, or reprimands. None come. Instead, the head, Lotta Valentin, smiles and ruffles the hair of a nearby pupil. ''I really enjoy walking about the school and seeing the children at work,’’ she says.

One supposes that they also spend some time at computers.Get a Professional QualificationChoose from more than 40 courses from the UK’s leading home study college and start gaining new skills today!

As Elizabeth Rose of DOE's Portfolio planning explained at an earlier meeting, they intend to tear down walls within Tweed and install glass, so that all the educrats in the building can observe these students walking around and receiving virtual instruction online.

The population explosion is occurring not just downtown, but all over the city, as a result of Bloomberg's policies to encourage development, rezoning 76 neighborhoods, and in many cases, allowing more density and high rises to be built. Many other factors have also contributed to the citywide increase in the public school population, which the DOE’s “expert” consultants said would not occur until 2016 or 2017, but began as early as last year – and in most districts even earlier than that. These include a rise in the birth rate, the closing of many parochial schools, and the tendency of families to stay in the city longer, because of lower crime rates and the perception of an improved overall environment.

Yet city officials have carelessly failed to plan for the school population that would be generated. (For a good article on this, see the NY Magazine article from last year.) This, despite numerous warnings in reports detailing the population boom that was imminent, from Class Size Matters, the City Comptroller’s office, and the Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer.

So what can be done? Again, there are several decisions that should be made –not difficult ones for any rational policymaker, but so far for DOE.

First of all, the Chancellor should call a stop to all the co-locations, which not only cause intense conflicts within buildings and communities, but make overcrowding worse, since every new school that is inserted into an existing school subtracts valuable classrooms to make room for administrative and cluster spaces – with an estimated 10% loss of capacity each time.

Secondly, she should immediately re-align spending priorities. In November, the DOE added a billion dollars to the school capital plan, to be spent on technology, in addition to the $800 million that was already in the plan for that purpose. Why? So virtual learning and the “Izone” experiment can be inserted in 200 more schools over the next two years, and 400 schools thereafter. They want to proliferate these programs rapidly, supposedly to “personalize” instruction (ironically, by means of computers) without any independent evaluation of the success of the Izones that have already been implemented. (Here is a dizzying presentation of the theory behind this.) And they want to spend all this billion dollars in one year alone, over the next school year.

With all the millions that the city has misspent and wasted on high –tech projects in the last few years, from ARIS, the $80 million super-computer super-boondoggle that never lived up to expectations, to the bloated contracts of Future Technology Associates, to the ongoing scandal that is City Time, none of these can compare to the potential for waste involved in the DOE’s new proposal to spend one billion dollars in one year, amidst all the other budget cuts – on online learning.

These funds should instead be spent on leasing or building new schools, including some of the 27 parochial schools closing this year in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island, and the 19 closed last year in Brooklyn and Queens, to alleviate overcrowding, allow for smaller class size, and actual “personalized” instruction – with real teachers, in real classrooms, instead of subjecting kids to an an expanded online system, with unknown risks and benefits, and the potential of a billion or more dollars down the drain.

Do we all really serve the Chancellor, and do the buildings belong to him?

On June 23, 2010, the Office of Portfolio Planning (OPP) from the NYC Department of Education attended a Community Education Council meeting in District 1 on the Lower East Side. This was in response to an invitation from our CEC to hold an initial needs assessment, before deciding how space should be used in our neighborhood’s schools.

When a CEC member asked, “What happens if there is a conflict between what the community wants and what the Chancellor wants for our district?” Elizabeth Rose, the OPP representative, responded, “We all serve the Chancellor, the buildings belong to him.” You could see the entire room full of parents bristle.

As a parent from a local elementary school who went to the hearing in a furious panic because word had gotten around that new charter schools were opening up and they might be shoved (given space constraints this is the only verb that is appropriate) into some of our public schools, I had a deeply mixed reaction to this statement.

Not surprisingly, I think most of us, including myself, took deep offense at what could only be described as a despotic message that utterly disregarded any value that a genuine democratic process would afford. Yet, there was something so deeply honest and clear about that answer, and so different from all the other vague and evasive answers given when hard questions were posed, that I almost wanted the thank her for at least stating things as they are.

So there it is, if the Chancellor’s buddy wants to start a pet project in the form of a charter school, parents beware and children be damned. Your art classroom, your class sizes, and your principal’s office are all up for grabs.

I was told by CEC members that OPP had agreed to come because parents and the community as a whole had strongly opposed inserting a charter school at the expense of the high need schools in our district, without even a needs assessment being undertaken. Given this context, the community input required as a trade-off for mayoral control was practically a farce.

The underlying bone of contention at this meeting was the formula for how space in measured in our schools. In my son’s school, our principal isn't even quite sure whether the space where he sits is considered “underutilized” (which also demonstrates how confusing the formula is). Right now, he shares an open space with eight administrators, the PTA was relegated to a what feels like a dungeon in the basement because as enrollment increased from 250 to 320 we have had to give away the parents room to create a new art room (a good trade, as the kids come first).

When our principal needs to meet with anyone, he has to wander the halls looking for any empty room because he has no office, and some classes (physical education for example) are held in the back of the large lobby due to space constraints. I have no idea whether the DOE thinks our library even counts.

In light of all this, when I look at the DOE latest "blue book" (or annual utilization report) that claims to show how much capacity each school has in terms of space, it appears that our school has room for a hundred more children! I have images of classes being held in the bathroom and our principal, wandering the hallways with a push-cart carrying all the school files.

One parent who also attended the meeting described this as the “fire code” approach to defining how much space a school has. So long as it doesn’t violate the fire code, they will keep shoving children into increasingly crowded spaces. But clearly we need a learning approach to counting space, and until we have one, none of the conversations with the Office of Portfolio Planning or any other DOE official will be in any way constructive.

The foundation is rotten, and so conflict, disaffection, and deprived children are the result. Until we have a formula that is based on what kind of space a child needs to actually learn, a “learning-based formula,” we won’t be able to say that “we all serve the children, and the buildings belong to them.”

-- Cathy Albisa, public school parent