Comment on the Blue Book changes

The just announced change to the "Blue Book",  the annual school capacity and utilization report, to attribute the enrollment in trailers or TCUs to the main building is a good one – and was recommended in our report, Space Crunch.  

But we still need to know how many students are sitting in trailers – which DOE fails to report for thousands of high school students, and an unknown number of elementary, middle and District 75 students as well – especially if they plan to replace those seats.

Other reforms that will be necessary in order to achieve a more accurate picture of school overcrowding include:

·         Lowering the target class sizes in grades 4-12, which are far higher than they should be at 28-30, and even higher than current average class sizes in these grades, and thus would tend to push class sizes even larger than they are now;
·         Providing a more reasonable number of cluster and specialty rooms for each school, in order to provide a well-rounded education;
·         Ensuring that all students needing intervention or special education services can receive them in dedicated, appropriate spaces rather than in hallways or closets;
·         Improving the formula so that when a school is forced to convert a library, science room, cafeteria, or auditorium to a classroom because of overcrowding, this does not increase the school’s listed capacity and register it as less overcrowded than before;
·         Adjusting the formula so that a building with many co-located schools is allotted  more room, in order to adjust to the difficulty of scheduling different classes and organizations in the shared spaces.

Only through implementing these reforms can we begin to have a more accurate picture of school utilization and assess how overcrowded our schools have truly become.

-- Leonie Haimson, Class Size Matters 

Vote on eliminating reporting on class size and TCUs postponed

The mayor has established a Report & Advisory Board Review Commission through a charter amendment, which is supposed to decide which legally-mandated reporting requirements should be eliminated.  The Commission has a majority of mayoral appointees and has the authority to override city law.

DOE proposed the elimination of the  November class size report and the annual report on TCUs or school trailers, making claims about how the later class size report in February was more “accurate” (which registers lower class sizes esp. in HS, after thousands of students have dropped out or been discharged from school) and  how the TCU data is  replicated in the Blue Book, or that somehow this data was not “useful”.  I refuted these bogus claims in my comments to the Commission here and here.

Elizabeth Weinstein, the Mayor’s head of the Office of Operations and the Chair of the Commission, was supposed to announce today by 5 PM which reports and commissions she supports eliminating; with the vote of the entire Commission supposed to occur on Oct. 30.
Yet today, the Commission sent out an email, saying the vote would be postponed until November 19, and the chair will now announce her position no later than November 12 at 5 PM, to be posted on the Commission website at www.nyc.gov/ReportsandBoards


The latest public comments are posted here: If you’d like to send in your comments on whether the DOE should be allowed to eliminate these reporting requirements, you can email <ReportsAndBoards@cityhall.nyc.gov>.

Below is a letter sent yesterday to the Commission from the NYC Comptroller’s office. 

Letter Re Class Size and TCU Reporting