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Sandwiched between exciting election news and distressing budget news, the mayor and chancellor today will release their proposal for the city schools’ next five-year capital plan, covering construction and renovation projects for the years 2010 to 2014.

DOE spokeswoman Marge Feinberg tells me the plan will go online shortly after the mayor’s noon budget announcement. Here are some things to look for in the proposal:

• How ambitious is the plan? Chancellor Klein recently touted the current capital plan as “the most robust” in the city’s history. But the capital plan being unveiled today was formulated during a period of intense anxiety about the economy. To what extent has the city scaled back its aspirations?
• Where will new school seats go? Parents in Manhattan’s District 2 and District 3 have been outspoken in the last year about overcrowding in their neighborhoods. But other areas of the city, such as Highbridge in the Bronx, where residents rallied last week for a new middle school, are also dealing with serious overcrowding. Will the new capital plan provide relief for them?
• How serious is the the city’s commitment to addressing neighborhoods with crowded schools that sit inside districts that overall are under capacity? City officials have said that the new capital plan will be the first to tackle “pocket overcrowding.” What will that change look like?
• Did city officials take new residential construction into account when figuring out how many classroom seats are needed? That was the suggestion of several elected officials and the Campaign for a Better Capital Plan in a report released last month with recommendations for how the city should plan for school construction. In the past, the city has based its projections primarily on past enrollment.
• Did city officials write class-size reductions into the plan? To have small classes, as some advocates urge is necessary and as is required by law in grades K-3, the city would have to add dramatically more seats than it has in the past.

The capital plan we will see today isn’t set in stone. In the coming months, School Construction Authority officials will meet with the Community Education Councils in each of the city’s 32 school districts to discuss the plan. The CECs, as well as the Panel for Educational Policy and the City Council, must vote to adopt the plan before it can go into effect.

In the opening salvo of what’s sure to be a pitched battle over the next capital plan, activists today released a report (pdf) concluding that the city added fewer school seats during the first six years of the Bloomberg administration than it did during the six years immediately before. They estimate that the system needs  167,000 extra seats and dramatically accelerated school construction in order to ease crowding and reduce class sizes.

The capital plan is a budget outlining all public school construction plans for the next five years. The current plan covered five years and will end in 2009. The School Construction Authority is due to present a first draft of the next capital plan, covering the years 2010 to 2014, in just a few weeks.

In the report, released by the Campaign for a Better Capital Plan and written primarily by Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters, backers of the campaign call for “a transparent, thorough, and open system of planning” that reflects the system’s real space needs. (more…)

In what may be the most anti-climactic City Council hearing ever, the council’s education and landmarks committees have just convened for an oversight hearing about how the Department of Education chooses sites for new schools. The hearing started nearly half an hour late. Robert Jackson, chair of the Education Committee, told the smattering of attendees waiting to hear from Garth Harries of the Department of Education’s Office of Portfolio Development that some council members were “still recovering, or trying to recover” from yesterday’s historic term limits vote.

Following recent protests against crowded schools in districts 2 and 3, the City Council’s education and public siting committees are holding a joint hearing on school overcrowding tomorrow. The committees will also consider a resolution, introduced at the request of Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, that asks the DOE and School Construction Authority to adopt planning strategies that address overcrowding.

Before the 10 a.m. council hearing, anti-overcrowding activists plan to crowd the City Hall steps in the first major activity of the recently formed Campaign for a Better Capital Plan. The campaign — which calls for lower class sizes, planning that anticipates new construction, and an end to school overcrowding —  is an outgrowth of the Manhattan Borough President’s Task Force on Overcrowding.

A push for proactive school planning that will allow for class size reduction and the maintenance of art and science rooms has to happen on a citywide basis, according to Patrick Sullivan, Stringer’s Panel for Educational Policy appointee who is chairing the campaign along with education advocate Leonie Haimson. “We didn’t want to have different boroughs pitted against each other,” he said.

There is “absolutely” time to improve the planning process before Nov. 3, when SCA is due to release the new capital plan, Sullivan said. But more important than the timing, he said, is that DOE and SCA officials “understand that parents and elected representatives are going to hold them accountable for conditions in the school system.”

The rally begins on the steps of City Hall at 9 a.m.

Distribution of New Seats by Borough

Eighteen new school buildings will open next week, providing 11,471 new seats in New York City classrooms, the mayor and chancellor announced today. The current five-year capital plan, available for your perusal on the DOE’s website, will create 63,000 new seats by 2012.

The graphic to the left shows the distribution of the new seats among boroughs. About half of the new school buildings are elementary schools.

Earlier this summer, we saw parent advocacy result in DOE action on increasing capacity in the West Village and Brooklyn Heights/DUMBO.

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn at yesterday's rally.

The atmosphere at the rally for a new middle school at 75 Morton St. yesterday was more like that of a festival than a protest. Supporters arrived on stilts, manned a lemonade and cookie stand, and tied balloons to their wrists as they celebrated the city’s announcement that it would seek to preserve 75 Morton St., a fully handicapped-accessible state-owned building, as a public middle school.

“I’m confident that … very soon, we will be standing outside of this building in a different way, welcoming students,” City Council Speaker Christine Quinn told the crowd of parents, community leaders, and elected officials who assembled on Morton Street in the late-afternoon sun. The building can undergo “renovation, not construction or major reconstruction,” said Deborah Glick, the State Assembly representative from the neighborhood, and open as a fully wired middle school in 2009.

But even though activism in District 2 appears to have been successful at the site of the rally, there is room for improvement elsewhere in the district and throughout the city, speakers emphasized. “It’s not just about 75 Morton,” said Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer. “It’s about your multi-million dollar capital plan.” The city’s next plan, due to go into effect next summer, must reflect coordination between education and city planning officials, he said. (more…)