GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Comptroller Bill Thompson released his overcrowding report outside of P.S. 290, a school that is over capacity.

One day before the Democratic primary, mayoral hopeful Bill Thompson is making Mayor Bloomberg’s oversight of the city’s public schools his campaign’s defining issue.

Thompson, the city’s comptroller, issued a report yesterday rehashing arguments made by the mayor’s critics throughout his time in office. It criticized the mayor for not spending enough money on school construction, despite evidence that the city’s school-age population had swelled in certain districts.

The report, called “Unprepared for Overcrowding,” looks at the 2010-2014 capital plan the City Council approved this summer and singles out roughly two dozen school districts, the majority of them in the Bronx and Queens, where it predicts schools will remain overcrowded after 2014.

State Senator Liz Krueger, who was part of a gaggle of local elected officials who stood next to Thompson during the announcement, thanked the comptroller “for stating the obvious.” (more…)

There’s something wrong if one school is severely overcrowded and another, just two miles away, is cutting services because of declining enrollment, writes teacher Arthur Goldstein in his latest entry in the community section. In “A Tale of Two Queens High Schools,” Goldstein suggests that the city promote a symbiotic relationship between the two schools, instead of a competitive one.

He writes:

I’m in one of the most overcrowded schools in the city, Francis Lewis High School. Our building is designed for 1,800 kids, and last year we were up to 4,450. This year we hit 4,700, and the sky’s the limit. Where the extra kids will go I have no idea. …

On the other hand, James Eterno, chapter leader at Jamaica High School, has a completely different problem. Not enough kids are enrolling in his school. Could we help one another?

Last year, the school day at packed-to-the-gills Francis Lewis High School in Queens lasted 12 periods to accommodate all 4,500 students. This year, the number of periods is rising to 13, writes Arthur Goldstein, the UFT chapter leader at Francis Lewis, in GothamSchools’s community section.

A 13-period day can only exacerbate the scheduling problems that already plague the school, Goldstein writes:

When you have 12 periods, when you have three sessions, you can never get the staff together, you can never get the department together, and every meeting becomes 3 meetings. Kids eat lunch at 9 in the morning. They come in for free breakfast and have five minutes to eat it and show up to my class. Kids come running into the trailer with styrofoam trays full of what appears to be styrofoam food. …

So how do you fix a school that has 12 periods? Well, this year, we’re gonna make it 13 periods.

Overcrowding comes to city schools for various reasons. In my school, our reputation makes kids want to come, we have magnet programs like JROTC that attract kids from near and far, and there’s never been a cap on enrollment. Neighborhood schools like PS 123 don’t get the opportunity to grow and expand because other schools are simply placed into whatever vacant spaces they may have. In fact, as Juan Gonzalez reported, space they’d actually been using was commandeered by a charter school chain. It now appears Eva Moskowitz’s Harlem Success Academy will be taking that space permanently.

PS 123 has gone from an F-rated school to a B-rated school, and you’d think that would merit some encouragement from the Department of Education. You’d be mistaken. Rather than expand upon the progress they’ve made, the building that houses PS 123 has become a civics lesson for all who teach and study there—a newly designed two-tier education system. 55 years ago, Brown v. Board of Education stated, “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” At PS 123, separate educational facilities can be found within the same school building.

In fact, some families have one kid in 123, and another in HSA. But it’s pretty clear to all that the schools are different. For one thing, all HSA classrooms are painted and renovated before kids even attend. A few weeks ago, protesters questioned why the whole school couldn’t be painted, rather than just the HSA section. You have to wonder why an administration that prides itself on placing “children first” would allow so many children to be second priority. (more…)

School overcrowding isn’t just a comfort issue. It’s an academic one, writes Arthur Goldstein in the GothamSchools community section. Goldstein is a teacher (and newly elected union chapter leader) at Francis Lewis High School in Queens, which has more than 4,400 students this year, up from about 3,800 in the 2001-2002 school year.

He writes:

Our school is one of the very best regular high schools in the city, quite possibly the best. It’s a miracle we’ve held up as well as we have. But if we are to survive, we can’t count on miracles. We need a break and we need a cap. I was heartened to hear projections we’d have 200 fewer students next year. I was disappointed when that projection was reduced to 100, and then, considering over-the-counter admissions, zero.

Now they’re talking additional students.

We cannot sustain unlimited overcrowding. No one can. It will reach the point, as it has in many schools, where our quality declines and our students suffer.

Read Goldstein’s entire commentary here. And e-mail us if you have a perspective to share.

Overcrowding in Manhattan schools seems to be more acute than usual this year. But in the rest of the city, Manhattan’s overcrowding story isn’t news: For years, many schools in the outer boroughs haven’t been able to accommodate all of the children who live near them for years.

So writes Jeff Coplon in next week’s New York Magazine: 

The DOE perennially “caps” the enrollments of dozens of schools in the Bronx and Queens and Brooklyn, busing hundreds of kindergartners out of places like Elmhurst or Norwood. In the northwest corner of the Bronx, the poorest urban county in the nation, District 10 leads the city in capped schools-seven by the count of the DOE, nine by that of Marvin Shelton, the president of the district’s Community Education Council. (The crush can only worsen this fall, given the closure of kindergartens at city-run day-care centers: more than 3,000 of the city’s least-advantaged 5-year-olds, thrown into the DOE’s Mixmaster.) The children are bused miles east to west in rush-hour traffic and arrive home so exhausted they take two-hour naps. More than a dozen other schools dodge formal caps by shunting students to annexes blocks away or hauling makeshift “mini-schools” or double-wides onto their properties.

Coplon’s report jives with data made available online last week by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, which show that Manhattan is far from having the most crowded schools.

With the Bloomberg administration’s proposed capital-spending budget for schools up for the City Council’s consideration, lawmakers are taking a novel approach: Rather than vote yes or no, they are asking for a change in state law that would give them more power to revise it.

The change could not actually be marshaled through Albany in time for this year’s capital budget, but it does send a signal that city lawmakers are interested in conducting more oversight over the public schools.

Council Speaker Christine Quinn said that the council aims to have the same kind of input into the city’s school capital budget as it has in the Department of Education’s operating budget. Each spring, the council negotiates changes in that budget. Sometimes, those changes are substantial, such as last year, when the council won the restoration of $129 million in school funds.

But on school construction, the council must vote simply yes or no on a plan that contains hundreds of individual projects. The plan has been a popular target for advocates who have said it doesn’t come close to meeting the city’s need for more school buildings. It has also made an attractive target for elected officials, especially in Manhattan, where parents have been strenuously protesting school crowding. (more…)

Anyone who stayed until the bitter end of a three-hour meeting last night about kindergarten waitlists in Manhattan got a surprise: an uncharacteristic apology from a top DOE official.

Hundreds of parents turned out for a meeting of the parent council for District 2 to vent about having been shut out, at least for now, of their neighborhood schools. Last week, Manhattan parents protested at City Hall after 273 children were put on waiting lists at many elementary schools.

Deputy Chancellor Kathleen Grimm arrived late to the meeting after spending her afternoon dealing with the swine flu outbreak in Queens. She sat quietly in the audience and listened to a tense back and forth between school officials and angry parents. The auditorium had mostly emptied and council members were preparing to adjourn when Grimm approached the microphone to make a surprise statement, which I captured on video above. Here’s a key part of what she said:

I also want to say something that I thought I heard people from the DOE say tonight, but just in case you didn’t, I want to say, I’m sorry. We’re sorry. We have stumbled on some of this planning.

The two officials leading the meeting told parents during the meeting that most schools should be able to eliminate their wait lists by the middle of June, after families find out where they’ve been offered seats in gifted and talented programs. John White, who heads the Department of Education’s efforts to manage school space, said that more children in each area qualified for gifted admissions than there are children on the waiting list. (more…)

Parents and elected officials gathered at City Hall today to protest crowding in Manhattan that has led to long waiting lists for public school kindergartens. (GothamSchools Flickr)

A crowd of shell-shocked parents gathered outside City Hall this afternoon, angry that the Department of Education hasn’t found seats for the hundreds of rising kindergarten students who have been placed on waiting lists for next year at their local public schools.

The waiting lists, which include 273 names in just two Manhattan districts, mean that families in baby- and building-boom areas like the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side, and Greenwich Village could find themselves unable to secure a spot at their neighborhood school’s kindergarten.

The lists attracted extra attention yesterday after news leaked that the city was considering closing or relocating prekindergarten classes at two Greenwich Village elementary schools, PS 3 and PS 41, in order to make room for kindergartners.

Parents at the rally said they felt confused and powerless. “As far as I can tell, I don’t have a Plan B — other than home school or moving to Jersey,” said Jay Douglas, whose 4-year-old son is number 42 on a waiting list for PS 187 in Washington Heights.

Elected officials joined the parents at City Hall today to criticize city officials for not planning ahead to meet the demand for spots in public schools. Scott Stringer, Manhattan’s borough president, said the DOE is “closing its eyes” to a widespread capacity problem, warning that taxpaying parents will pack up and move, taking their kids and tax dollars somewhere else if they can’t enroll in their local public school. (more…)

75 Morton Street, the subject of a rally last summer, could still become a school. (GothamSchools)

A meeting about overcrowding in Manhattan schools last night ended in surprising fashion: with the Department of Education being lauded for listening to parents.

Parents from one local school, the Clinton School for Writers and Artists, showed up to the meeting of the Community Education Council for District 2 in red, as planned, to protest the idea of their school moving. Hundreds of other parents arrived armed with protest signs and talking points about the need for more school seats in the district, which covers most of Manhattan below 59th Street and the Upper East Side. Advocates have criticized the DOE for understating the extent of crowding in the area.

But the mood relaxed after John White, the DOE official on hand, dispatched with the idea that Clinton would be asked to move. White said the DOE instead would try to ease crowding by finding a new space for Greenwich Village Middle School. That school is eager to move out of its current location on the top floor of the already overcrowded PS 3 building.

One potential site for the school, according to White: part of the state-owned office building at 75 Morton Street that parents and elected officials lobbied mightily last summer for the DOE to obtain. (more…)