GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

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…)

A stitched-together panorama of the Mott Haven Educational Campus, which will house five schools this year and is the largest school building project completed by the School Construction Authority.

The city’s largest new school building since the founding of the School Construction Authority will open for classes next week, creating room for more than 2,000 students in the Bronx.

The seats at the Mott Haven Educational Complex are among more than 17,000 new classroom seats that will become available when school starts next week, city officials announced today.

Of the 26 new school sites opening this year, 15 are completely new school buildings. Three projects add annexes to existing buildings, and eight sites are opening in newly-leased space. Nearly 700 of the new seats will be set aside for students in the city’s District 75 program for special education students.

Not all of the new seats will be filled with students when schools open next week. I’ve asked the DOE for estimates about how many of the seats they expect will be filled this year, and will update when I hear back. A map showing where the new seats added this year are located is below the jump. (more…)

With billions of dollars in federal support for school construction projects on the horizon, New York City is shortsighted to undersell its need for new schools, teachers union president Randi Weingarten said at yesterday’s City Council hearing about the city’s proposed capital plan.

President-elect Obama’s top aide confirmed yesterday that school construction projects will be part of the new administration’s stimulus package to create jobs and encourage spending by states, according to Alyson Klein of Education Week. Governors, who are staring at massive budget shortfalls, this week asked Obama for $130 billion to support infrastructure projects, including schools.

What’s so special about school construction? In contrast with some other infrastructure projects, states are always planning to build or enhance schools, so they can get to work on those projects in a relatively short amount of time. Plus, many believe that capital investments in schools can pay off in improved educational quality.

But the city doesn’t have a robust school building agenda right now. This is “absolutely the wrong way to go in this situation” because it could result in the city’s schools being shut out of a federal stimulus package, Weingarten said yesterday.

“If this [federal] money is out there, and we don’t have a plan, we won’t be in the queue,” she said. (more…)

Sharon Greenberger

When several families arrived at a Park Slope middle school for an evening basketball practice recently, they were surprised to find themselves locked out. The gym, they learned, had been closed without warning so that construction workers could make repairs. The basketball team couldn’t practice, kids were disappointed, and parents were frustrated.

Most parents would chalk the experience up as just one of the many small injustices of family life in the city. But for Sharon Greenberger, a Park Slope resident and mother of two, it was a professional learning experience.

Greenberger leads the city’s School Construction Authority, the agency that oversees the building of new buildings and the repairs work for the old ones. In recent years, that has become a daunting job. More and more children are being brought up in the city, leaving parents distraught that public school buildings might not have enough room to fit them. At the same time, the city’s aging stock of school buildings — most are at least 90 years old — has required extensive repairs. Greenberger is the woman charged with balancing demand for new schools against the need to maintain old ones, an acrobatic challenge that has only gotten harder as grim fiscal realities set in. (more…)

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…)

Here’s something interesting from this morning’s City Council hearing on school siting: Lorraine Grillo, chief of staff at the School Construction Authority, said the Department of Education has leased 17 parochial school buildings citywide in recent years. That makes sense: Catholic schools are closing every year due to declining enrollment, as a Fordham Institute report recently concluded.

But apparently, leases aren’t possible in some parts of the city where parish authorities restrict DOE rentals to schools serving 3rd grade and below. The reason, according to Grillo: the DOE’s “family living curriculum,” or health curriculum, which introduces the discussion of sexuality in grade 4.

I spent part of this afternoon calling various offices in the Archdiocese of New York, but I haven’t yet found out for sure whether Grillo’s understanding of the situation is correct. I’ll post when I know.