The municipal government of New York City is counting down to comply with the mandates of a state law passed in 2022, which requires reducing the number of students per classroom in the Big Apple’s public schools. Amid operational and budget discussions, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) did its own accounting, concluding that as early as next school year, 856 campuses already have enough space to reduce class sizes.
“Since this legislation was passed, the City has maintained that it cannot be done, usually citing lack of space. Our analysis of the Department of Education (DOE) documents itself demonstrates the opposite,” said Michael Mulgrew, president of this union organization.
The UFT leader argues that with a $38 billion budget approved for New York City’s public education system and a $10.7 billion surplus for fiscal years 2024 and 2025, funds are available to align class sizes with schools in the rest of the state.
“Excuses are no longer valid,” Mulgrew said.
UFT: There is space
The law passed by the state legislature requires that kindergarten through third grade classrooms have 20 or fewer students, fourth through eighth grade classes have no more than 23 students and high school classes have 25 or fewer.
This rule for the Big Apple public education system comes into effect in several phases. It requires 20% of the city’s classrooms to be in compliance by September of this year and 40% to be in compliance by fall 2025.
All schools must have fallen within the scope of this reduction by the start of the 2028 school year.
The Big Apple’s public school system is the largest in the country and is divided into 32 districts that house more than 1,700 schools.
The survey released this Tuesday by the UFT states that 856 Title 1 schools, that is, they enroll more than 300,000 students, at all school levels and in each district, will have the necessary space to reduce class sizes, to comply with the thresholds of the law.
These Title 1 schools have room for more than 207,000 additional seats, but will only need 31,318 seats.
All schools in this census are eligible to receive federal Title 1 funds, designed for schools with high-poverty populations. These schools, identified one by one in the five boroughs in the teachers union report, are a priority to eliminate overcrowding in classrooms in the Big Apple, which is usually higher in districts where communities of color study.
The UFT in a statement estimated that the DOE “will need to hire approximately 3,000 additional teachers to reduce class sizes to state limits in these 856 Title 1 schools, at a first-year salary cost of approximately $180 million, less than half of 1% of the municipal agency’s $38 billion annual budget.”
In conclusion, the report details that basically the City’s educational authority must redistribute students in existing school structures and continue the task of hiring more teachers to comply with this mandate.
For example, there are hundreds of specific references, such as Compass High School located in the Bronx, which currently has an enrollment of 401 students and the school campus is only 66% utilized. In this case, 32 seats are required to cover the required threshold. And there are 210 seats available.
The same thing happens with the Roberto Clemente Public School, in Manhattan, where derived from this report: there are 146 desks available and 45 positions are required to reach the standards of the law.
Comptroller shows another report
This week, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander also published an extensive report assessing that reducing class sizes has yielded higher achievement results for Hispanic and black students.
It is considered that the integrations of school facilities, existing in the same district, are one of the most convenient ways to achieve this objective.
“Declining school enrollment drives school consolidation, particularly in black and brown communities throughout New York City. The recent school mergers in East New York and Brownsville in Brooklyn and Upper Manhattan illustrate this trend,” the research states.
Lander’s analysis shows that class size reductions and school integration can be achieved through new construction, rezoning, admissions modifications and creative programming. Her report explores school mergers “as a cost-effective mechanism to meet this mandate,” to foster strong school communities.
According to the report from the University of California, Los Angeles, cited by the publication Gothamist, “90% of black students in New York attended schools predominantly where they do not share the classroom with white students, while the enrollment of Latino students in predominantly non-white schools, remained approximately stable at 84%.”
Almost 2 in 3 black students and more than half of Latino students attended intensely segregated schools, where less than 10% of student enrollment was white, the balance outlines.
For the comptroller, rules to restrict class sizes create an opportunity to eliminate these patterns of racial segregation.
DOE: “the task is not that easy”
For leaders of the New York City Department of Education (DOE), as the deadlines for compliance with this law approach, several challenges also grow.
Authorities have estimated in several public deliberations that their teaching force, currently around 77,000, will need to be increased by between 10,000 and 12,000 to fully comply with the law.
Based on officially published estimates, that will cost between $1.4 billion and $1.9 billion a year and will require a significant boost in hiring at a time when teacher numbers are shrinking.
The DOE recently estimated in a City Council session that there are about 500 schools that will need more classrooms than they currently have in their buildings to meet class size standards.
“We are fully committed to this task, but it is not as simple as it looks on some papers. We have advanced. “We have a very clear plan drawn up to comply with the law,” a municipal spokesperson told El Diario.
There are fewer students:
- 61% of classrooms are still not complying with the new class size mandate. At the same time, the growing lack of affordability, emigration, changes in birth rates and the pandemic have reduced overall enrollment in public schools.
- Public school enrollment fell 12% between 2012 and 2022, although this decline has reversed slightly in the current school year, due to the arrival of thousands of children from families seeking asylum.
- 2012 – 2022 were the years that schools with an enrollment of less than 200 students grew by 60 percent, while schools with an enrollment of more than 600 students decreased by 33 percent.
- 22% is the drop projected by municipal authorities between the current school year and 2032.
- (Source: NYC Comptroller’s Office)