General News
Weingarten: City’s school building plan falls short
Jun 7, 2007 12:49 PM
With the Campaign for Fiscal Equity bringing greater funding to the schools, “the question is whether our school buildings can support the policy initiatives, including the requirement for smaller class sizes, that the new aid is slated to fund,” UFT President Randi Weingarten told the City Council on May 15 in written testimony.
“Are there enough classrooms and other educational spaces?” Weingarten asked. “Are our buildings safe and secure? Are schools meeting students’ career and technical needs as well as their academic needs? The $13.1 billion, five-year capital plan is meant to fund sufficient new seats to eliminate overcrowding, reduce class size to 20 in grades K through 3, and fund critical repairs to existing school building.”
Weingarten called the plan “fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough.”
Where it fell short was in its lack of funding to reduce class sizes in grades 4 through 12, its silence on addressing non-critical building needs, its lack of attention to school safety and its failure to fund infrastructural improvements in existing facilities that would allow career and technical education in more secondary schools.
Weingarten said the Department of Education should evaluate what would be needed to achieve smaller class sizes in all grades by not only fostering new construction but planning to better utilize present school properties through investing heavily in retrofitting existing structures.
She called East 96th Street’s Co-op Tech HS a career and technical education model worth copying in all the boroughs, but that “funding the program at just $11.4 million is woefully inadequate for building more Co-op Techs throughout the city. Multiples of this sum will be needed just to create one new voc ed facility at the level of Co-op Tech.”
She also reminded the Council that failure to maintain safe school buildings could doom any education advances, and that while the School Construction Authority does a fair job of monitoring and correcting problems today, the large number of older and aging school buildings means health and safety still are not assured. She recommended retrofitting older schools to make them genuinely barrier free for special education children, ending DOE plans to defer what it mislabels as “non-critical projects,” and making its capital spending planning more transparent and its decisions more accountable. “Few people can plow through [that] 640-page document,” Weingarten said.
She also slammed the existing plan for short-shrifting science labs in the elementary and middle schools, and she urged the city to “take advantage of the expertise the UFT brings to any effort to rebuild the schools.
“My members are in the schools every day, experiencing the difficulties of teaching and working with oversized classes in school buildings that are overcrowded and lack sufficient support spaces. They are first-hand experts on what the schools need, and we look forward to working together on making the built environment for education the best it can be,” Weingarten said.
