Fixing the Numbers, Not The Schools

DOE Hides The True Extent Of High School Overcrowding

It does not take a statistician to know that New York City’s public high schools are seriously overcrowded. There are scores of schools on multiple sessions, or back-to-back sessions, where half of the school attends a morning session, while the other half attends an afternoon session. In many schools, halls are so crowded that it is a real challenge for teachers and students to make it to class before the late bell. In order to accommodate all of their students, many schools have been forced to schedule lunches as early as 9:30 a.m. and as late as 2:30 p.m. And the effects of overcrowding, such as the increase in violent incidents and the negative impact on academic performance, are all too present.

At the January forum on overcrowding organized by the UFT and the CSA, school after school recounted tales of the damage done to students and schools by overcrowding, from students who felt that they “had been cheated” out of the education they were promised and deserved, to staffs now struggling to keep once excellent schools viable in the face of overwhelming numbers.

The current overcrowding crisis was entirely foreseeable. In 1995, the chancellor commissioned a study on enrollment growth in the New York City public schools and it forecast that the Department of Education would need to create 180,000 additional seats by 2005. But as the numbers of students grew over the last decade, the DOE did precious little to meet that target. Instead, it aggravated the overcrowding crisis by embarking on a significant reform effort to redesign large high schools into campuses of four or five smaller high schools without providing the additional space needed to compensate for the loss of student seats. (Since each small school has its own separate administration and student support services, classroom space must be converted into office space.)

Evidence is now available that the Department of Education has been hiding the true extent of overcrowding in the high schools. HS went back over a number of years of “Blue Book” reports on school enrollment, capacity and utilization, in which the DOE calculates the extent of school overcrowding. (For the latest issue of the “Blue Book,” go to www.nycsca.org/html/bluebook.html.) Despite the fact that the DOE has used the same formula to determine a school building’s capacity for the entire period we examined, there are rather dramatic and inexplicable disparities in school capacity from year to year.

The pattern that emerges shows that the DOE dramatically increased the “on paper” capacity of many of the most overcrowded large school buildings over the course of the last decade, even though only a handful of those schools acquired new space. The chart below contrasts the capacity figures in the last published “Blue Book” with those provided a decade before, and shows that most large, overcrowded schools would appear even more overcrowded if the DOE had not arbitrarily increased the “capacity” of the school building.

A particularly dramatic example of this phenomenon is Richmond Hill HS in Queens, a school now on an 11-period four-session day with a backyard full of portable classrooms. Its reported student capacity almost doubled between 1993-94 and 2003-04 despite the fact that the school building remained the same. When calculated on the basis of the earlier capacity figure, Richmond Hill is operating on 260 percent utilization, rather than the DOE’s stated 140 percent. And Richmond Hill is no aberration. In school after school, we found that the DOE had increased the reported capacity without increasing actual classroom space in the school.

But this is only part of the story. When a large school building is transformed into a campus with a number of small schools, the capacity diminishes. But in almost all of the large high school buildings which recently began this transformation in the Bronx and Brooklyn, the DOE’s fictional capacity is increasing while the real capacity decreased.

The UFT has been waging a constant battle against the problem of overcrowding. The union’s Delegate Assembly has been insistent that the DOE make plans for the acquisition of additional classroom space when transforming large zone high schools into campuses of a number of small schools, and that the DOE acquire additional space to alleviate heavily overcrowded high schools. UFT Vice President for Academic High Schools Frank Volpicella has been tireless in raising the issue with the central DOE and the outside foundations financing the small schools transformation project. “There is a direct link,” Volpicella says, “between the horrendous overcrowding now afflicting high schools and the safety crisis large schools are experiencing. Students and teachers are not dry goods, and they can not be warehoused like an oversupply of desks or computers. The Department has failed to act with due diligence on this issue — and that must stop.”

A COMPARATIVE LOOK AT SELECTED NEW YORK CITY PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL OVERCROWDING
BOROUGH/SCHOOL	School Capacity		2003-04 register	Utilization Rate
BOROUGH/SCHOOL	1993-94	2003-04	2003-04 register	Using 03-04 figure	Using 93-94 figure
Bronx
Clinton Campus	2849	3410	4479	131%	157%
Kennedy Campus	3332	3785	4739	125%	142%
Morris Campus	1088	1616	1439	89%	132%
Walton Campus	1869	2249	3782	168%	202%
Brooklyn
Bushwick Campus	1138	1658	1702	103%	150%
Erasmus Campus	2066	2849	2343	82%	113%
FD Roosevelt	2406	2662	3574	134%	149%
Fort Hamilton	2413	2918	4721	162%	196%
Madison	2372	2763	3456	125%	146%
Midwood	1744	2191	3745	171%	215%
Manhattan
Washington Irving	2352	2772	3233	117%	137%
Queens
Cardozo	2372	3106	4017	129%	169%
Francis Lewis	1884	2461	4182	170%	222%
Forest Hills	1973	2519	3489	139%	177%
John Adams	2264	2784	3376	121%	149%
Newtown	2187	2662	4376	164%	200%
Richmond Hill	1286	2393	3343	140%	260%
Staten Island
Curtis	1623	1657	2629	159%	162%
Port Richmond	1787	2304	2709	118%	152%