GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Chart showing trends in K-3 class size. From Class Size Matters PowerPoint presentation. (Click to enlarge.)

Preliminary class size data that the city released today confirms what the teachers union has tallied: Class sizes are on the rise.

Classes grew most this year in kindergarten through third grade, where the average size increased by just under one student since last year to 23.1. On average, classes in those grades are now three students larger than they were in the 2006-2007 school year. They are largest in Queens and Staten Island and smallest in Manhattan.

Classes in those grades are now the largest they have been since 1998, according to a PowerPoint presentation prepared by parent activist Leonie Haimson for Class Size Matters, a group that she runs to advocate for smaller classes.

Class sizes have also inched up in upper elementary, middle, and high school grades, but not by as much, according to the city’s new numbers.

In all grades, average class sizes exceed the goals set forth in the 2007 Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit settlement, which required the state to earmark extra funds for New York City schools to use for six different purposes, including reducing class size. (more…)

It’s becoming a New York City spring ritual: thousands of parents sign up their children for kindergarten only to find that the school they’re zoned for is all out of room. This year, the early enrollment period ended with about 2,000 soon-to-be kindergartners on waiting lists, city officials said today.

Those students and their families represent less than five percent of all the city’s entering kindergartners, but they’re not easy to ignore. Last year, parents of wait listed kindergartners staged a protest in front of City Hall, drawing press coverage and a new name for their predicament: the kindergarten crisis. This year, despite the introduction of new schools in some neighborhoods and rezonings, 104 public elementary schools have wait lists, and many of them are more than fifty names deep.

DOE spokesman David Cantor said this year, the department was tracking the problem earlier than in the past in hopes of easing parents’ anxiety. (more…)

As dust settles on a months-long school rezoning battle in Tribeca, State Senator Daniel Squadron said he would introduce a new bill today that would force the Department of Education to give community leaders more information before they sit down to draw new zoning lines.

Standing outside the epicenter of that zoning battle, P.S. 234, Squadron said members of the parent council for District 2 had been asked to chose a rezoning plan — but hadn’t been given any information about how many kindergarten students to expect. As a result, P.S. 234 still has too many new students zoned for it, leaving families to take their chances in a lottery.

Shino Tanikawa, a member of the Community Education Council for District 2, said DOE officials gave the council numbers for how many kindergarten and first-grade students are enrolled in Tribeca schools, but not projections for how many were coming down the pipeline.

“We kept asking for enrollment projections and the number they had was an aggregate number based on historical trends,” she said. “For the actual zoning we had to do, there was nothing.” (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.

This screenshot from the Campaign for Fiscal Equity's overcrowding Web site shows the distribution of city schools that are over 150% capacity.

A long-awaited report about the extent of overcrowding in the city schools was released today, showing that more than half a million city children attend school in buildings that crowded beyond capacity.

The group that put together the report, The Campaign for Fiscal Equity, also launched an interactive Web site aimed at spurring action to reduce the overcrowding. The Web site, OvercrowdedNYCschools.org, includes a searchable map of overcrowded school buildings, instructions for how to urge the city to improve its school building plan, and links to the report, titled “Maxed Out,” and the data used to compile it.

I used the site’s map tool to plot school buildings that are at 150 percent capacity or higher and found 117 schools that fell into that category. As the picture to the right shows, the most overcrowded school buildings are located on Staten Island and in Queens. (more…)

Harlem is gearing up for round two this evening in a showdown between charter school backers and those who oppose a Department of Education plan to close a traditional public school.

The hearing last week drew supporters of PS 194, a low-performing school that the DOE has said it would like to close to make way for a charter school to expand, and members of Harlem Parents United, a group of parents organized by Eva Moskowitz, the ambitious leader of the Harlem Success network of charter schools. But the DOE scheduled another hearing for tonight after getting complaints that it had not announced last week’s hearing, or the plan, far enough in advance.

As skirmishes like this one take place across the city, few have been criticized more loudly or more often than John White, the DOE official who is in charge of finding space for schools — and delivering the bad news to schools that are being closed or relocated. Others acknowledge that White has been given a tall order, to find homes for a constantly increasing number of schools when the amount of space the DOE controls is not growing at nearly the same rate. At a recent hearing in Greenwich Village, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer said White has “the worst job — ever.” Here’s video of Stringer defending White:

Yesterday, I wrote about parents who are protesting what they fear is a Department of Education plan to move their school, the Clinton School for Writers and Artists. This morning, I spoke to a mom who wouldn’t mind seeing the move happen.

Greenwich Village Middle School is on the top floor of PS 3.

The mother is a parent at Greenwich Village Middle School, where parents and school officials have been hoping for a larger space. They might have gotten just that had Clinton vacated its space in Chelsea. Instead, the Greenwich Village school will open this fall in the same space it now occupies. Parents say the space, on the top floor of PS 3, is overcrowded and stressful.

According to the DOE, Greenwich Village Middle is only at about 93 percent capacity. But school leaders say the tight quarters have left the school without a library, up-to-snuff science lab, or dedicated gym. (It shares a gym with PS 3.)

Plus, parents say the crowding causes stress, especially for teachers, who can’t have their own classrooms because every space must be used every period of the day. When one teacher is almost finished with a class, another teacher has to “sneak in at the last minute” to start preparing for the next period, PTA President Marianna Mott Newirth told me.

On top of that, there are no dedicated classrooms where students can receive special education or English as a Second Language services. Those services happen in a broom closet or in the hallways, Mott Newirth told me.

“There’s no breathing space between classes,” she said. “It’s like traffic: When there’s gridlock, it’s stressful.”

Some not-quite-mayoral control news from the mayoral control hearing: Overcrowding in the city’s schools might be worse than anyone has estimated, according to the organization responsible for the promise of billions of new dollars for the city’s schools.

Helaine Doran, deputy director of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, just said that CFE would release a report next week saying that 501,632 students in the city attend school in an overcrowded building.

CFE’s numbers would mean that about 46 percent of the city’s approximately 1.1 million students attend overcrowded schools — far more than the 38 percent that the advocacy organization Class Size Matters calculated last year. Class Size Matters used the Department of Education’s school capacity and enrollment data to come up with its figure; Doran didn’t say today how CFE arrived at its calculation.

Doran said the overcrowding developed over a long period of time. “I’ve been in this school system a long time and the number even startled me,” Doran said. “We just didn’t get there.”

This flier, which disparages Center School Principal Elaine Schwartz, appeared on the building's fence and around the neighborhood.

A tiny middle school on the Upper West Side that has flown under the radar for much of its 26-year history has become the object of intense scrutiny in recent weeks as its principal and parents threaten to derail the neighborhood’s plans to alleviate overcrowding.

A plan proposed last week by the Community Education Council for District 3 would require the school to move from its longtime home to a larger space several blocks away. That plan, and the Department of Education’s response to it, will be the topic of a CEC 3 meeting tonight.

But Center School Principal Elaine Schwartz has opposed relocating since the DOE originally suggested the idea in September, and the school’s loyal parents have lined up behind her.

“We are totally unified,” parent Alan Madison told me. “When it comes to the education of our children, we listen to [Schwartz].”

Schwartz, the 26-year-old school’s founding principal, told the New York Times last week that she opposed a move under any circumstances.

As Schwartz and her school have dug their feet in, tension has wracked the PS 199 building on West 70 Street, where the Center School is the sole occupant of the top floor. (more…)