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UFT launches effort to solve overcrowding woes

by Jim Callaghan

Sep 25, 2008 9:07 AM

Since the beginning of the school year, reports of overcrowding have come from all across the city — a Bronx principal said the Department of Education was sending “students to the school that they know we don’t have room for”; Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer released a report showing that residential development was far outpacing increases in school capacity; and Staten Island parents reported a kindergarten class “bursting at the seams” with 38 students in one room. On Sept. 15, the New York State Education Department said that New York City’s class-size reduction plan had fallen short of expectations.

In response, and as part of the union’s ongoing efforts to reduce class sizes, elected officials, parents and the UFT have launched a campaign to fight school overcrowding and pressure City Hall to address it in the next citywide five-year capital plan for schools that will be announced in November.

“Our members know all too well the toll overcrowding takes on their students and their ability to learn effectively,” said UFT Vice President Michael Mulgrew. “We launched this long-term campaign because we want the policymakers to know full well the ramifications of overcrowding on our schools.”

UFT Vice President Richard Farkas said that postcards asking Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein “to eliminate overcrowding and give students the small classes they need to learn and grow” were being sent to all chapter leaders and UFT parent liaisons for distribution to parents and staff. Members can send the same message to the mayor and the chancellor with an online fax sent from the UFT Web site [see box above].

Along with community and parent groups across the five boroughs, the union is backing the ABC program which stands for A Better Capital Plan. Farkas said the goal was to implement the city’s state-mandated class-size reduction plan which calls for 20 students per class in K-3 and 23 in all other grades.

“We’ve lost art and music rooms because too many schools are way over capacity,” Farkas said.

Part of the campaign calls for the Department of Education to be “proactive” by adding school seats as neighborhoods grow.

Under the state’s Contracts for Excellence, Farkas said, the city is required to reduce class size. “The DOE has no plan for when neighborhoods explode with new residents,” Farkas added. “We fought this battle in the 1990s in districts 24, 30, 6 and 10 among others. There was poor planning then, and the union made reducing overcrowding a priority. We got new schools built.”

Showing her support for the effort, UFT President Randi Weingarten attended a press conference at PS 191 on Sept. 5 organized by Borough President Stringer to release an updated report on school construction’s failure to keep up with Manhattan’s building boom.

“I’m saddened to have to fight this,” Weingarten said. “The borough president’s report shows the human toll of school overcrowding, but the upcoming five-year capital plan presents a huge opportunity for a public/private partnership to solve it, assuming that mayoral control of the school system is used to the extent it should be.

“We have to plan for growth,” she said. “This is the opportunity of a lifetime. If done right, Manhattan can be a beacon for the middle class and working-class families.”

Weingarten stressed that with mayoral control, Bloomberg oversees various city agencies involved in school construction and that he could ensure that the city’s capital plan is aligned with class-size reduction targets mandated by the Contract for Excellence.

At the Sept. 5 press conference, City Comptroller William Thompson said that kids can’t compete in an environment of “uneven education” and added that overcrowding “creates inequities.” He called the DOE “a broken system” and gave Klein an F. “Kids pay the price,” he said.

Manhattan Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney thanked Weingarten for the union’s involvement and said it was time to act because students “are the future of our nation.” She said that pre-K classes were being cut in her district. Citing city statistics, she said that 7,000 new units of housing were added in the Community Board 7 catchment area in the Upper West Side while schools there are already over capacity. Parents are unable to get their children in elementary and middle schools, she said.

One parent, Robyn Hatcher, who is also a member of Midtown’s Community Board 5, said, “City planning needs to come up with a comprehensive plan and you can’t do that without looking at the infrastructure.” She had high praise for the UFT for leading the fight.

Stringer’s report, called “Crowded Out,” documents the rapid pace of residential development in Manhattan. “Over the last eight years,” Stringer said, “there were 5,000 residential permits issued per year. In the first eight months of 2008, there were 6,600 permits issued.”

Stringer said he has an action plan to “fight back” against school overcrowding. “Enough is enough,” he said.

One solution offered to the overcrowding issue is to have the City Planning Commission, which is controlled by the mayor, impose a rule that developers must certify that there are enough school seats available in the neighborhood — not the entire school district — where a residential building is going up.

There already is such a rule on the books, but it only applies to the South Richmond Special District in Staten Island, created in the 1970s to deal with over-development and overcrowded schools.

For such a plan to be effective, a loophole in that zoning rule would have to be closed. The school seats are counted for the entire zoning district, not by neighborhood, and the rule allows builders to claim that a seat has been included in the city’s capital budget, which in reality is a book of promises, not necessarily guaranteeing that a school will ever be built.