Memo on how DOE is violating two laws meant to ease school overcrowding

Update: 10/26/2023:  The SCA has posted a spreadsheet that shows how many seats were lost in the 2021-2022 school year that includes the seats lost in 2019-2020, but has added no other information required by law.  The spreadsheet lists “0” for the number of seats lost in a D75 school on Staten Island, at 669 Castleton Avenue, as well as that at an Annex of PS 46 in the Bronx.

3/1/2021: The SCA has  posted a spreadsheet showing how many seats were lost in 2019-2020, but has provided no other information listed below that was required by law. 

Feb. 12, 2020

Two bills were passed last year by the City Council, with the goal of helping to alleviate school overcrowding: Local Law 167 which required the DOE to make more transparent its data sources and methodology for projecting the need for new school seats, and Local Law 168, which created a Task Force for School Siting to expedite the identification of locations where new schools could be built.

Both laws  resulted from recommendations made by the City Council Working Group report Planning to Learn, as well as problems we had previously identified in our reports, including, Space Crunch and  Seats Gained and Lost in NYC Schools: The Untold Story.

Local Law 167 came into force on December 1, 2019.  The SCA/DOE claims to have provided the data here:  http://www.nycsca.org/community/capital-plan-reports-data#Local-Law-167-Reports-352

But much of the data specifically required by this law is missing, and in fact the DOE is providing no more data than in years past:

• No data is posted on the number of seats lost over the last few years or projected into the future as the law specifies — either from lapsed leases, removed TCUs, or the elimination of mini-schools or annexes, that have a significant impact on the need for new seats.
• No projections are provided for the number of new school seats needs, disaggregated by grade span or type of school, i.e. Pre-K/elementary schools/middle schools, either citywide, or  by district or sub-district, as called for in the law.
• No seats need estimates are provided by sub-district at all, as the law specifies.
• The law also mandates that the DOE/SCA  provide the full data and any inputs that help determine their projections, including “any categories of non-quantitative criteria considered, which may include but need not be limited to, facility replacements, grade expansion and truncation, school rezonings, co-locating schools, and converting space in existing facilities.”  None of these inputs are reported on the webpage or elsewhere.
• Finally, the law requires not just the quantitative and qualitative inputs that the SCA/DOE relies upon to determine its projections, but also the  “the process … used to determine identified seat need”.  Yet nowhere has the SCA or DOE offered any description of the methodology used to incorporate and analyze all these various inputs and data sources they claim to rely upon in developing these projections, including current overcrowding, housing starts, annual seat loss and their consultant’s enrollment predictions, to arrive at the identified seats needs estimate published in the five-year capital plan.

The goals of Local Law 168 in creating the School Siting task force to facilitate finding appropriate school sites have not been fulfilled either.  See the memo below, sent to the co-sponsors of the law last week.  Feel free to send to your council member as well! Click here to find your city council member.