At the Boerum Hill School for International Studies in Brooklyn, teachers are nomads who use multiple classrooms regularly, theater class is in the lobby, and pull-out groups and IEP meetings often take place in noisy hallways or corners of crowded classrooms.

Digital Arts and Cinema Technology HS, one of two other co-located public schools at the Cobble Hill campus, faces similar space constraints. Teachers use carts to transport their materials from classroom to classroom and don’t have space to prep. Class sizes are increasing.

Meanwhile, Success Academy Cobble Hill Elementary School — which occupies the basement floor, a first-floor hallway and three second-floor rooms in the same three-story building — has at least five empty classrooms, according to UFT members.

“It’s been very frustrating for us. The charter school has all these empty rooms,” said Patricia McNamara, the Boerum Hill chapter leader. “They have rooms that are barely used that they have set up as classrooms, but there are no classes going on there.”

UFT members at Boerum Hill and Digital Tech have been organizing to reclaim space from the charter school. At a time when New York City public schools need every square foot of available space to reduce class sizes to the new state limits, the inequity is grating for them.

Members launched an online petition calling on school district officials to amend the campus building utilization. Twelve UFT members, seven students, the PTA president and several other parents all turned out at the Dec. 18 meeting of the citywide Panel for Educational Policy (PEP) to call on the city to reallocate the space. The UFT members have also asked local elected officials for help.

“It is inequitable, it is wasteful and it places an arbitrary, artificial ceiling on what our students can accomplish,” Boerum Hill English teacher Michael Langley told the PEP. “We cannot let these classrooms sit empty when children in the same building need them.”

The numbers tell the story. The Success Academy charter school’s enrollment peaked in 2020 at 430 and was 307 at the end of the 2023–24 school year, according to the DOE Office of District Planning, but its more recent, unaudited enrollment data shows only 273 students. Meanwhile, Boerum Hill received space in 2016 for a projected 600 to 670 students, but the student population is now about 750, UFT members said. Digital Tech’s projected enrollment was 160 to 200 students nine years ago, but it now serves about 330, Chapter Leader Caitlin Gibbons said.

McNamara said the situation on her campus reflects a citywide problem: The DOE has no regulation or process in place to reassess the space needs of co-located public schools and return space to those schools when their enrollment increases. By contrast, charter schools have been quick to gobble up more space in public schools when the situation is reversed.

Gibbons told the PEP that larger class sizes at Digital Tech limit the individual attention that teachers can provide their students. “The lack of space also means it’s hard to implement interactive, hands-on learning,” she said.

Boerum Hill special education teacher Emma Kukielski said the crowded conditions are particularly harmful to students with disabilities. Small-group explicit instruction for students with disabilities in general education classrooms takes place in hallways or other common areas, she said.

Isaac Selchaif, the head of the history department at Boerum Hill, told the PEP that he teaches in five classrooms on two different floors. He can’t set up the room, such as by posting anchor charts and student work, and pupils are at a disadvantage on multiple fronts. “Students do not know where to find me for questions, making up work or conferences,” he said.

In response to the school-level union organizing, the DOE Office of Space Planning visited the campus before winter break and scheduled a meeting in early February with representatives of all four schools in the building, including District 75’s P368 Star Academy.