Top News Stories
25,000 postcards protesting overcrowded schools delivered to mayor
Oct 9, 2008 11:59 AM
Ask the mayor for "A Better Capital Plan"
UFT Vice President Richard Farkas (left), with (from second left) City Councilman Daniel Garodnick, Assemblyman Jonathan Bing, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, City Councilwoman Jessica Lappin, Helen Rosenthal, parent and chair of Community Board 7, and Micah Lasher, aide to Rep. Jerrold Nadler, with the mailbags of postcards protesting school overcrowding.
Children join the protest on the City Hall steps.
The UFT, as part of a coalition of parents, community organizations and elected officials, delivered mail bags stuffed with postcards from parents and educators protesting overcrowding to Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Oct.3 at a City Hall rally.
Richard Farkas, the UFT middle school vice president, estimated that more than 25,000 postcards and fax messages were delivered to the mayor during the course of the “ABC” (A Better Capital plan) campaign.
Farkas told the coalition members that “our kids deserve better” than having to attend school with overcrowded classes. He said New York City students are being “cheated out of the education that kids in the suburbs take for granted.” Students in New York City, Farkas added, are missing art and music rooms and science labs, which are needed to provide a well-rounded education.
Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, community activists, public officials and UFT President Randi Weingarten have signed a letter to Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, copies of which were distributed at the rally. It demands that the new capital plan, due to be released in November, should “specifically aim to relieve existing overcrowding and reduce class sizes to the city’s target levels.”
The letter also said that the city should be ready for growth and should plan at the neighborhood level. It called on the mayor to correct the city’s faulty capacity estimates for schools.
Later Farkas, testifying at a City Council hearing, implored the Council members not to repeat the mistakes of the 1975 fiscal crisis, “when we lost a generation of school children” after “facilities deteriorated and middle-class families abandoned the public school system.”
He reminded the Council members that the city and the state had agreed on a framework for reducing average class sizes to no more than 20 students in grades K to 3 and no more than 23 students in grades 4 to 12.
But, he pointed out, citywide averages, as required by the state, “hide what’s really going on in schools.”
He said the UFT is calling on the State Education Department to “tighten class-size regulations and to require the city to develop a plan that makes class-size reduction a priority.”
Farkas asked the Council to “take the lead on this issue.” He said the Council “can help drive accountability on aligning the upcoming city capital plan to reduce overcrowding.”
Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott earlier testified that the mayor is not in favor of “mandating” developers to help build schools in return for zoning changes.
City Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. told Walcott of a meeting he had with developers who wanted the city to rezone part of the Queens waterfront for residential housing. Vallone said he asked the developers to name the schools where they were going to put all the new kids who would move into the development.
“They looked at me like I had an arm growing out of my head,” he said. “No one had ever asked them that question.”
Vallone said he told the developers to come back when they had a plan for new school seats.
That same day, Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters released a startling report that showed that nearly half of the principals in the school system disagree with the Department of Education’s numbers on how their schools are utilized.
The survey, which was answered by 550 principals, found:
- for principals of schools whose official utilization rates are reported as under 100 percent, slightly more than half said the DOE’s utilization rate was inaccurate.
- 51 percent of principals said overcrowding sometimes leads to unsafe conditions for students or staff while 43 percent said overcrowding makes it difficult for students and/or staff to get to class on time.
- 43 percent of principals also said that their schools were too overcrowded to provide important after-school programs or services such as tutoring, sports and clubs.
- 86 percent said that their class sizes were too large to provide a quality education.
Other principals reported the loss of cluster rooms to regular academic classrooms as well as the lack of access to necessary facilities such as a library, gym or science labs. The survey also found inadequate space for special education and intervention services.
