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.

Joel Klein came to District 2 and told lies

Chancellor Joel Klein came to PS 33 in District 2 on Wednesday night. He told a number of outright lies to the assembled parents, assuming (I suppose) that we didn't know better. This is on top of all the misrepresentations and obfuscations.

- Klein said there are no for-profit charters in New York City. This is patently untrue. There are currently nine for-profit charters in operation in the city and more being considered.

- Klein said Contract for Excellence money is "fungible" in school budgets and this is why class sizes rose, despite billions more in state C4E funding. This is untrue. Contract for Excellence money is supposed to be targeted to specified purposes by state law and it is illegal to use it otherwise.

- Klein said he "wished we had more resources" for meeting the needs of special education students. Special ed services are also mandated by state law, and it has been well documented, by the Public Advocate's office among others, that under this administration, students with IEPs have not received the services and funds to which they are legally entitled.

- Klein also said that 5000 seats had been added to District 2. Where? The 2004-2009 and 2010-2014 capital plans funded about 7,000 seats, but most of these seats have not yet been built, and many are replacements. By my count there are under a thousand new D2 K-8 seats now in operation, and Manhattan has lost 1,000 high school seats in the last year alone to lapsed leases, but I would welcome a more detailed reckoning by the DOE.

- Klein said that enrollment projections are available on-line. The DOE has never made its full enrollment projection analysis available to the public or the CECs responsible for zoning. Only partial data and the discredited reports of a few expensive contractors are available on-line.

- Furthermore, Klein said repeatedly that charter schools would add seats to District 2. There is no way this is possible. School real estate in D2 is a zero-sum game, as he pointed out himself several times. Every new school that is added within an existing building removes seats to make space for additional administration and duplication of cluster rooms, and every new program that draws students from outside the district (as charters do) bumps out district students.

Unless charters can obtain their own space--which doesn't happen much in NYC--they can only subtract from the number of seats available to district students.

He also kept saying no sites are available in D2 and it is hard to find more, without commenting on the large number of sites put forward by parents (including most of those that have been developed under the last two capital plans). Parents have been pushing hard on various sites and the DOE refuses to put its weight behind these efforts.

---Ann Kjellberg, Public School Action Committee

Community District Education Council 3 on the potential co-location of a new Success Charter Network School

See also Class Size Matters' Comments to SUNY board on the application of Success Academy charter in District 3 (pdf) and Comments to SUNY board on the application of the Bronx Success Academy charter in District 7 (pdf)

Firstly, elementary school overcrowding has become endemic to District 3 and there is no room for the co-location of Success Charter school without increasing this already dire situation. Overcrowding predominates in the Southern portion of the district and given the level of new development in Harlem, such overcrowding is moving uptown. Unfortunately, SCA and DOE projections have continually underestimated this enrollment growth - and overestimated existing capacity - leading to increased overcrowding.

Yet even if we use the SCA's own projections for 2012 showing a capacity of 4,043 middle school and elementary school seats and projected enrollment of 3,745 students in Harlem, the 298 available seats the DOE show will not suffice for the proposed new school planned by Harlem Success. And these numbers assume that all the students in the new HSA school would come from District 3, which - unlike the strict in-district policy being imposed by the DOE on all of our D3 elementary and middle schools - is not even the case for Harlem Success who will be drawing students from a number of districts.

Additionally, a fair percentage of these students will in no event be able to matriculate at Success Charter since they likely will require self-contained and other Special Ed services which none of the Success Charter schools cares to or is able to provide. Which begs the question why the favoritism toward Success Charter and why have they been promised a place within our district if instead of meeting the explicit needs of our children then are exacerbating existing problems?

Additionally, the New York State Legislature has made it clear that any impact of co-locations must be assessed in advance and reviewed with the community including the CEC, as well as with the affected schools. Yet SUNY and Harlem Success's application provides no specific information for location of the proposed new school. Without a specific proposed location for Harlem Success, how are we supposed to assess its impact on the community and the schools with which it is co-locating? Where is the transparency and accountability that the legislature demands, and that SUNY repeatedly has promised?

If, however, Success Charter indeed will be co-located within PS 145 as we understand has been planned, once again the issue of capacity and realism is at question. Specifically how will a school slated to grow to 689 students within 5 years fit within a building that by most optimistic estimates only contains 320 additional spaces? Surely SUNY and the DOE should be required to answer this critical question prior to approving a school of this size?

District 3 recently has been awarded an $11 million federal magnet grant to improve racial integration within the district by supporting increased enrollment at the district’s very few under enrolled schools. Unfortunately, the Success Charter application puts this entire grant at very real risk since all 8 magnet schools must have adequate space in which to grow their programs as per the grant application. Currently, however, there is not a single building with the spare capacity to accommodate Success Charter at steady state. Thus the likelihood is great that Success Charter’s co-location will lead to non-compliance for one and thus all of the 8 magnet schools.

Sadly, even without the ability to measure the probable impact of the new Harlem Success co-location, we in District 3 would likely reject a new HSA branch out of hand based on our previous negative experiences with Harlem Success co-locations within our District schools, PS 149 and PS 241. In fact, unlike our experience with other charter schools co-located within District 3 buildings, relations between Harlem Success and their District 3 host schools are uniformly terrible with our District school children being made to feel as second class citizens within the own buildings. This comes down to a lack of cooperation by Harlem Success's management team, who fail to share resources, segregate their classrooms and hallways from their District school neighbors, and routinely and falsely demonize those co-located district schools as "failures." It is also due to the DOE favoring Harlem Success's growth at the expense of our District Schools - as they once again are proposing to do.

Witness PS 241 where Harlem Success IV - which originally was authorized to grow by 125 students next year - now is slated to expand by 175 without any public discussion or review. And to make room for this unauthorized expansion of HSA IV in an already overcrowded building, PS 241 students are being moved out of their three ground floor classrooms into the school’s basement, including an as yet to be converted food service room. Additionally, Harlem Success is being authorized to provide Pre-K services in the new school, whereas over the past 24 months the DOE has summarily cut fully enrolled pre-k sections at District 3 schools PS 185 and PS 241.

The sad message of Harlem Success's proposed expansion at the expense of District 3 schools is and has been that our D3 public school kids are less worthy than their charter counterparts. It says that it's ok to cut district school programs and shove more and more of our kids - many of whom are English Language learners or have significant special needs which Harlem Success and most other charters don't even pretend to address - into our increasingly overcrowded public school buildings.

Overcrowding, favoritism toward a small minority of kids, poor relations among schools, a risk to a critical magnet grant program designated to improve education across the district, and a lack of responsibility to educate all of our District 3 students are only a few of the reasons why District 3's CEC urges you to reject the Harlem Success application.

Yours sincerely,

Noah E Gotbaum, President, for and on behalf of Community District Education Council 3

Helen Marshall says there's no more school overcrowding in Queens!

Check out what Queens Borough President Helen Marshall said on WNYC radio on Tuesday about school overcrowding by clicking here.

Meanwhile, according to official DOE data (which most experts think underestimates the problem), 67 percent of elementary school children in Queens attended overcrowded schools; and 77 percent of high school students. And this does not count thousands of students in trailers.

Class sizes are still increasing rapidly throughout the borough, and as of this March, nearly 800 Queens children were on waiting lists for their zoned Kindergartens.

If you are a Queens parent or teacher, and you think school overcrowding is still a serious problem, send her an email at info@queensbp.org, with a copy to her education adviser, RoseAnne Darche, at rdarche@queensbp.org and her PEP appointee, Dmytro Fedkowskyj at pepofqueens@yahoo.com

Meeting in the Bronx on school overcrowding: what can be done?

On Dec. 14, Bronx borough president Ruben Diaz Jr. is hosting a meeting about the school overcrowding crisis , rising class sizes, and what can be done about this.

It's at 6 PM at the Bronx Borough Hall. The flyer is to the right; just click on it to enlarge.

Please come! We will all have to work together to solve this critical problem.

School overcrowding and rising class sizes: who is to blame?

In response to questions and complaints about increased class sizes and overcrowding at schools all over the city, DOE officials commonly have blamed parents, for insisting on sending their kids to popular schools.

Yet their refusal to take responsibility for the problem, though typical, belies the reality: that the vast majority of K-8 students attend their local zoned neighborhood schools, and DOE completely controls how many students are assigned each high school through through OSEPO (the Office of School Enrollment, Planning and Operations).

So what are some of the real sources of the increased overcrowding?

1- The administration's disinterest and disinvestment in keeping class sizes low. Despite a state law requiring NYC to reduce class size in all grades, there are now 1600 fewer classroom teachers, and 10,000 more out-of-classroom staff since the Mayor took control of our schools, including many more highly paid administrators, and 2,000 additional school secretaries. Moreover, numerous audits and reports from the State Comptroller, the City Comptroller, and the State Education Department have found fault with the city's failure to spend state funds specifically targeted to class size reduction according to the intent of the law.

2-As described in numerous reports, their failure to adequately plan and build new schools for communities that have seen increased enrollment, especially in the younger grades. (For the latest reports from the City Comptroller and the Manhattan Borough President, see here and here.) This has also led to a significant increase in the percentage of students attending overcrowded schools, as well as more Kindergarten students being forced to attend schools outside their neighborhood schools.

3. At the high school level, the growing number of new small schools have caused our large comprehensive high schools to be increasingly flooded by students excluded from the small schools, which have capped enrollment and class sizes at lower levels. The reality is that different high school (and sometimes middle school) principals have different deals with the Department of Education, with many selective smaller schools (and charter schools housed in DOE buildings) allowed to cap enrollment at lower levels so that they can keep class sizes under 25, while other principals are inundated with so many students it is difficult for them to keep to the union contractual limits of 34.

The increased number of small schools jammed into existing school buildings has also directly contributed to more overcrowding overall, as each new small school and charter school eats up classroom space with more administrative and cluster rooms. More than one fourth of all NYC principals report that the insertion of new schools or programs into their buildings have led to more overcrowding in their schools.

4. Large budget cuts imposed at the school level by the city in recent years, including this fall, have made it harder for principals to keep sufficient teachers on staff , while the salaries of Tweed bureaucrats and consultants continues to grow apace.

All of these phenomena result directly from the flawed priorities, policies and budgetary decisions made by this administration. The DOE's attempt to blame parents for the resulting overcrowding is yet another way in which the accountability promised by mayoral control has failed to materialize.