The DOE's new school development process

Good afternoon Chairman Jackson and distinguished members of this committee. My name is Sterling Roberson and as Vice President of Career and Technical Education for the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), I want to thank you for this opportunity to testify on this critical issue.

There is no question that we need more new schools and more new classrooms. Students, parents and educators will tell you that overcrowding and large class sizes have become the norm in most school buildings around the five boroughs. But the process for creating new schools has been plagued by lack of transparency, proper planning and community engagement. What’s more, plans to build new seats and new schools have been scaled back, even as ill-advised co-locations have damaged school communities and harmed students.

Simply put, the city’s current approach to opening new schools has not been working for our kids or our communities. I do believe that, thanks to parents who have organized around some of these issues and our own legal actions, we will see some improvements this year. However, we’re only going to truly solve these problems with fundamental changes to the process itself.

The need for new schools

Just this week, we learned that over 7,000 classes around the city are larger than contractual limits, to say nothing of the science labs, music rooms, art studios and spaces for learning that have already been lost due to overcrowding and budget cuts. That has happened despite yearly class size reduction funding allocated by the state as part of its “Contracts for Excellence” initiative.

Research by our union this past spring revealed that class sizes had grown across every grade in each of the last three years, with one-third of kindergarteners and half of third graders now in classes of 25 or more. We’re even seeing kindergarteners being denied seats in their neighborhood schools. Many schools have also lost their outdoor play spaces to “temporary” trailers that, more often than not, have become permanent.

Just a few days ago, New York 1 News profiled a 2nd grade classroom with 36 students at PS 236 in Brooklyn. That's twice as many as there should be, and now in response to pressure, the school is being told it can cap its enrollment and move students to a different school -- But the DOE shouldn't have let this situation occur in the first place.

It’s also worth noting that the city’s five-year capital investment plan for schools will fall far short of alleviating the pressure on our current school buildings anytime soon. Plans to build thousands of new seats have been scaled back. We estimate that eliminating temporary trailers would require over 20,000 seats, and reducing schools to no more than 100% utilization would require at least another 21,000 seats.

The city's current approach

I think most people agree that alleviating overcrowding and lowering class sizes is in everyone’s best interest, no one more so than the students whose educations are being compromised. But the city’s approach has been fraught with problems, stemming in large part to the shortcuts that they have been making along the way.

There are two kinds of new school development projects that we are seeing around the city. The first are in neighborhoods desperate for new seats; where overcrowding is extreme and where communities are behind the initiatives. The second kind can be better categorized as being more subjective and political in nature, where the DOE has identified schools that it wants broken up or closed, often against the community’s wishes.

Public engagement and transparency has been severely lacking in both types of projects. In fact, decisions and planning are already well underway in most cases before any community outreach is done, which has led to widespread disenchantment as well as disenfranchisement.

Untenable co-location plans have been forced on buildings, creating poisonous atmospheres for everyone in those buildings. What’s more, the flawed formulas to assess space for the city’s “Blue Book” are exacerbating already tenuous situations, particularly when the DOE uses that information to make co-location decisions. Time and again, the DOE jams a new school into a building where there is no space. The result is a “have’s and have not’s” dynamic, where classrooms on one side of the hall are set up with brand new books and technology, while those across from them are left with insufficient resources. Just a few weeks ago, our President Michael Mulgrew visited the Franklin K. Lane campus, which has been broken up into a group of new schools. Nowhere in the DOE’s planning for these new schools did they take into account how to support or staff the beautiful library there, and so it sits there, closed and locked away. It’s heartbreaking.

I also want to mention how co-location has affected District 75, which serves children with the greatest challenges. Most of these programs are co-located with regular district schools, and out of 124 programs, we found that almost a quarter of them were overcrowded and housed in buildings with no space.

Improper planning has also led to overwhelming concentrations of high-needs students in certain buildings, which leads to dramatically lower test scores and graduation rates, a problem exacerbated when the DOE does not properly support these schools. The DOE explored this self-created “failing schools” dynamic in a study by the Parthenon Group — research that was validated by the Independent Budget Office — but has to date continued to pursue policies that create the problem.

Recommendations

It took uprisings by parents and legal action by the UFT, the NAACP and other community partners before the DOE finally began rethinking its processes. As a result of our advocacy, it appears that the DOE is now attempting to better follow the law when it comes to opening and closing schools, by engaging communities sooner and creating stronger, more thorough plans for equity within schools that are co-located. These are both important steps forward.

The State Education Department is also getting involved, having stated that it intends to make major changes to the school phase-out process before the new year. New requirements will mean that plans for new schools will have to demonstrate that other schools will not be harmed, nor can students’ needs simply be glossed over.

There are several additional changes to the new school process that we strongly support, perhaps no more important than reforming the school admission process — both middle and high schools — to ensure that we won’t continue to see high concentrations of high-need students in particular schools. New schools can and should cap their enrollments in the very early years of a school’s development, and policies on capping enrollment should be consistent across all schools. In addition, when existing schools are being replaced, there must be solid plans in place to make sure displaced students are properly accommodated in their new buildings. Newly created schools are exactly the place to start taking on these issues. The idea is to strengthen school choice and ensure that every child has options close to home.

Beyond that, it is critical that the data being used by the DOE to make decisions, especially the Blue Book, are accurate. Programming and student needs must be taken into account, and contingencies need to be in place in cases of unplanned growth. Expansions and co-locations should not be considered in facilities where overcrowding conditions already exist or where special student needs would no longer be met.

To that end, we support Intro #155-A, which would expand and enhance the DOE’s reporting on school capacity and utilization to include important detailed information about how rooms in each school are being used. The idea is to capture many of the different purposes that rooms serve, from simple classrooms and academic intervention services, to health clinics, physical fitness space and other specialized programming. In order to properly service our District 75 special education students, for example, we not only need to know about overcrowding but whether a school is equipped to provide the services the children needs. We need some way to tell whether a school’s therapy rooms can meet a child’s IEP requirements for small group therapy both for children with or without assistive devices.

What’s more, DOE personnel need to be on the ground at the beginning of the process and not after the decision has been made, in the schools and in the communities that they want to make changes to, so they truly understand the dynamics of a school day and can appreciate how their proposed changes will affect a building. The DOE should also be careful to only initiate new schools that it can properly support. Fourteen schools closed last year, half of which were small high schools that had only recently been opened. New schools desperately need support or we’ll continue to see a revolving door.

The DOE’s process to develop new schools fits into many of the larger issues that we deal with every day — class size, overcrowding, co-locations and so on. Moving forward, each and every one of us will need to be vigilant and make sure that students and school communities are being treated fairly and equitably. We have to continue raising our voices about overcrowding and class size, and ensure that class size reduction funding from the state is used for its intended purpose. We must also continue to demand transparency and voice when it comes to decisions that affect our schools. You can count on the UFT to continue its advocacy on behalf of students, parents and school communities on these important issues.