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The Department of Education’s annual assessments of how much space is available in each school building are not always correct.

That’s according to an audit being released today by Comptroller John Liu, who is in the midst of scrutinizing DOE data in a series of reports. Liu, who is weighing a 2013 mayoral run, launched the audits this spring after holding town hall meetings in which New Yorkers suggested topics for investigation. Last week, he critiqued the DOE’s handling of the Absent Teacher Reserve, and he has at least three other schools audits in the works.

The newest audit examines the city’s “Blue Book,” which contains space estimates for each school building. The DOE and the School Construction Authority use the Blue Book to guide how many students can be placed in a school, and how many schools can fit into a building. Critics, including members of the City Council, say Blue Book numbers don’t always reflect reality — for example, suggesting that an additional class could fit into an art room — and that decisions based on them can leave schools crunched for space.

To evaluate the city’s success at ensuring accurate Blue Book data, Liu’s office analyzed entries for 23 schools and found that space assessments for 10 percent of all rooms were incorrect in a way that affected the school’s overall capacity.

“Proper space is essential for fostering a good learning environment, yet all too often the DOE is basing critical building decisions on its unreliable Blue Book, which bears too much resemblance to a house of cards,” Liu said in a statement. (more…)

New legislation introduced in the City Council aims to change the way the city decides when a school is filled to capacity.

Many of the city’s most heated education battles, from how to solve overcrowding to the charter school space wars, boil down to one question: whether the city has adequately planned how many students fit in each school building.

The bill, sponsored by 23 of the Council’s 51 members, would require the Department of Education to break down its space capacity estimates into much more detail than the city currently reports. Instead of offering a single figure for how many students a school building can accommodate, generated by an abstruse formula, the city would have to reveal specific data points about each building, such as whether rooms such as gymnasiums, libraries or science labs have been converted to general classroom space. (more…)