NYC’s updated school capital plan; lax timetable & no specifics for how they will meet the mandate for class size reduction

August 7, 2024

An updated version of the NYC School Capital plan for FY 2025-2029 was posted by the School Construction Authority on July 30, 2024.  It contains an additional $2 billion for new capacity, as required by the state budget, and an additional 10,382 school seats, for a total of 33,417 seats.

However, the plan doesn’t explain how these additional seats will allow Department of Education to meet the class size caps in the law, and the total number that are funded is only 39% of the seats that the School Construction Authority’s President has estimated would be needed to comply with the law (though we believe her estimated is inflated).

In addition, the updated plan’s schedule for completion reports that only 330 of the seats added in this plan will be finished by the end of the 2027-2028 school year, which is the ostensible deadline for full compliance with the law. All the other seats to be completed by then were carried over from the previous five-year plan. Finally, 80% of the seats funded are unspecified as to district, sub-district and grade level.

We sent a brief letter yesterday outlining these concerns to the NY Education Commissioner Rosa, as an addendum to our earlier letter, urging her to require DOE to revise their class size plan to be far more specific, and to show how they will meet the deadlines in the law, including an accelerated rate of school construction.

As I was quoted in Politico,  “The fact that there is no real plan is ultimately the responsibility of the chancellor and the mayor who are clearly dragging their feet as long as the state will let them get away with it. By the time that they are no longer compliant, they will say, ‘Well it’s too late to do anything about it.’”