NYC parents speak out on school overcrowding crisis

Two prominent parent leaders have written opeds in community papers about the crisis of overcrowding in our schools -- common across many parts of the city, though the DOE claims otherwise.

DOE officials consistently insist that there is only "pocket overcrowding," that their wholly inadequate capital plan is sufficient, and yet refuse to provide accurate overcrowding data or enrollment projections.

The DOE consultants, the Grier Partnership, predicted in 2008 that enrollment increases in elementary and middle schools would not occur until after 2016 -- yet this occurred already in 2009, and is expected to occur this year as well.

See Noah Gotbaum's piece in the West Side Spirit, and Tricia Joyce's column in the Downtown Express. Noah is the President of the Community Education Council in District 3 on the Upper West Side, and Tricia is a member of the Community Board 1 in Lower Manhattan. Both of their communities have seen massive development, without sufficient expansion of school seats.

And though the Upper West Side and Tribeca may be among the worst hit neighborhoods , this is a damaging trend that will soon visit many more communities, as the city's birth rate has risen, and nearly all districts have already experienced a sharp increase in the number of Kindergarten students.

While the DOE claims not to rely on its expensive consultants for enrollment projections, and says that it does its own projections that are more accurate, they refuse to make these public. Moreover, although CEC's are being asked by DOE to rezone school attendance lines, the DOE has so far failed to provide them with the data they need to do this job reliably.

The mayor's heedless support of overdevelopment and the chancellor's uncaring attitude about meeting our children's need for small classes and uncrowded facilities has led to this crisis; in fact, Klein suggested at a recent public meeting in District 2 that school overcrowding was something to be "happy" about since it showed that the city and our schools were so desirable; his new mantra was repeated to me a few days later with a straight face by a top DOE official.

Unfortunately, this crisis is likely to play into his hands and those of the charter operators, who are already advertising the lack of seats as an added inducement to apply to their schools, even though their placement in district school buildings contributes to even worse systemic overcrowding.

How the DOE missed the boat on enrollment growth, leading to inequitable budget cuts

See this article in today’s Daily News – showing that the DOE now is going to impose even bigger mid-year budget cuts than the maximum of 1 percent promised, to the 740 schools where enrollment increased – despite their supposed “fair student funding” formula. I have posted the memo here.

Here is an excerpt:

“For schools experiencing growth in enrollment, given the mandates related to special education, we will fund 100% of the increase in dollars related to an increase in special education enrollment. However, given the decline in the overall DOE discretionary budget and the decrease in the percentage of dollars returned by the schools with enrollment declines, we can only fund 55.5% of the increase in FSF attributed to the increase in general education enrollment.”

In other words, schools that have growing enrollments are getting screwed.

The even more critical issue is DOE’s explanation for this situation: that citywide, enrollment is growing this year for the first time since 2002 – not even counting charter school growth, which has been rapidly expanding.

“For the first time since 2002, enrollment has increased. During the current school year, NYC public schools saw an increase in total pupil enrollment of about 1%. This means that in addition to the annual redistribution of dollars from schools with register losses to those with register gains, we will need to add dollars to the FSF budgets.”

Overall, according to sources, there are about 10,000 more students than last year. Yet the DOE hadn’t budgeted for this, even though we’ve been warning them to expect this for years.

Actually, elementary and middle school enrollments started growing last year, according to our calculations -- if charter schools in DOE buildings are included.

Indeed, many public officials, parents and advocates, including the City Comptroller and the Manhattan Borough President, warned them of imminent enrollment growth, based on higher birth rates, more development, and families wanting to stay in the city, because of the lower crime rate. This, we warned, would likely lead to even worse overcrowding, given the inadequate capital plan, rather than the mere “pocket overcrowding” that DOE educrats love to describe.

We also told them that the enrollment projections provided by their consulting firms – Grier Partnership and Statistical Forecasting – should not be trusted. FYI, the latest Grier report predicts that enrollment would not increase in NYC schools until 2017, and SF until 2016 – at least seven years away.

Here is what we wrote in our report, A Better Capital Plan, in October 2008:

"Although a detailed demographic analysis is beyond the capability of this report, there are signs that especially in the early grades, increased enrollment and overcrowding may already be upon us, and this trend may worsen over the coming years."

And yet as usual, the DOE ignored what we were saying. The mismanagement, incompetence and unfairness of all this cannot be understated. And it prefigures even worse conditions in our schools for years to come.